Karl gets first-hand experience of the perils of texting while driving. From the bottom of his heart and the top of his aching spine, he urges you to ignore that text till you’ve removed the keys from the ignition.
A young girl in a Suzuki Swift learned a very valuable lesson about driving recently. She wasn’t hurt, but the potential for harm was far greater than she gave the situation credit for. I witnessed the incident first-hand – let me explain.
I was on my way to visit a colleague. I pulled into his driveway and was informed that he wasn’t there. Someone quipped that he had probably gone out to grab a coffee quickly before I arrived. Early in the morning and deprived of breakfast, I decided to fill the void with a naughty visit to McDonalds. I know, cholesterol city, but it’s not a habit thankfully.
So, there I was, trundling down the road in my test car for that week – a Renault Captur. I slowed to turn left into the driveway, and as I was driving in, time suddenly slowed. The first indication that something was wrong was when the car shifted sideways to the right. Inertia wanted to keep my body where it was, but that wasn’t possible with the car sliding underneath me. It meant my head slammed left instantly. The hit was big enough to take out both passenger doors and my spine felt the impact – my back is still a bit sore, a couple of weeks later.
The sound is what really gets you. A meld of plastic snapping, metal creaking and tyres squealing all at once, the noise is extraordinarily loud. The silence afterward, though, is deafening.
Once the movement of the crash was over and I was sure there was nothing else to come, I looked over to my left to see if everyone involved was okay. The young girl in the Suzuki Swift mouthed “sorry” through the windscreen.
She had mounted a kerb and hit me virtually square on, and the force was enough to buckle her front left wheel. There was no hiding the fact that she simply wasn’t paying attention to the road. What’s more concerning, though, was that I was in front of her for enough time for her to register I was there. And she still didn’t watch the road enough to realise I was slowing down. As she pulled her phone off her lap, it dawned on me exactly why she wasn’t concentrating. She was concentrating on the wrong thing.
Texting and driving is now in plague proportions all over the world. The reason SMS messaging was invented was so that people could respond at a time convenient for them. But it seems like it’s now a race to see who can answer the quickest. Years ago, you could almost text without looking, just by feeling the keypad. But with the advent of touchscreen phones, virtual keyboards need to be watched to ensure that you don’t send gobbledygook. But here’s the thing – they should only be watched when it’s appropriate. And driving is as far from an appropriate time as you can get.
The Captur is now off the road and getting repaired, and I have to fill out a tonne of paperwork. Renault have been very good about the whole ordeal, but the young lady involved will be getting some interesting phone calls from the insurance company. Being hounded to pay for significant damage isn’t a great way to start your driving life. And the decision to text instead of drive shows not only a lack of forethought, but also a lack of responsibility.
When we’re in charge of a tonne or more of metal, hurtling down the road, we need to pay attention. No-one was seriously hurt this time, but if we continue to text and drive, there may not be a next time.
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