Accident Liability

vikingaero

vaio wrote: »

Doesn’t matter what his car weighs, if it’s aquaplaning then it takes very very little force to change the direction of it and the driver is just a passenger IYSWIM



You might see the puddle but, unless you have x-ray specs on, you not be able to judge whether is 10mm deep (so tyres will cope) or 50mm deep (so you aquaplane off into the scenery).

I think you have a right to expect the authorities to maintain the roads in such a way that dangerously deep puddles don’t form, particularly on motorways.

It isn’t rocket science, water flows down hill, all they have to do is make sure the road slopes towards the drains, like the romans did when they were building roads

There's a limit to how much water a road surface can channel away, especially if you consider some of the deluges we've had this year. Couple this with slopes and dips which force water to accumulate and there's nothing you can do except drive slowly.

On natural dips on motorways I avoid the outer lane because water is likely to accumulate in bad weather.

neilmcl

vaio wrote: »

You might see the puddle but, unless you have x-ray specs on, you not be able to judge whether is 10mm deep (so tyres will cope) or 50mm deep (so you aquaplane off into the scenery).

Which is why you should always anticipate for the worse case and drop your speed.

Pew_Pew_Pew_Lasers!

vaio wrote: »

Doesn’t matter what his car weighs, if it’s aquaplaning then it takes very very little force to change the direction of it and the driver is just a passenger IYSWIM



You might see the puddle but, unless you have x-ray specs on, you not be able to judge whether is 10mm deep (so tyres will cope) or 50mm deep (so you aquaplane off into the scenery).

I think you have a right to expect the authorities to maintain the roads in such a way that dangerously deep puddles don’t form, particularly on motorways.

It isn’t rocket science, water flows down hill, all they have to do is make sure the road slopes towards the drains, like the romans did when they were building roads

I tell you what - imagine the force of water from a lorry against your body. Now imagine the force required to push two-tonnes of car sideways, even if it was floating on a star trek anti-gravity platform. The two don't even begin to compare.

I can take a very good guess as to what happened. The front and rear aquaplaned. The front wheels then get pointed in the wrong direction as the driver panics. The rears spin up as its a RWD car, traction is regained, and bang, straight into the armco.

No matter how good the design of a road, certain conditions can overwhelm them. If it's raining heavily enough, you'll get rivers and puddles on roads.

vaio

Pew_Pew_Pew_Lasers! wrote: »

I tell you what - imagine the force of water from a lorry against your body. Now imagine the force required to push two-tonnes of car sideways, even if it was floating on a star trek anti-gravity platform. The two don't even begin to compare…...

I don’t know about you but I’ve had my car move sideways from just the wind when passing lorries and that’s with four good tyres firmly in contact with dry tarmac.

I’d assume it would be much worse if you are floating on a film of water and couldn’t correct via the steering

Pew_Pew_Pew_Lasers! wrote: »

…..No matter how good the design of a road, certain conditions can overwhelm them. If it's raining heavily enough, you'll get rivers and puddles on roads.

Yep, any road can be overwhelmed by exceptional conditions but more and more I’m seeing large puddles caused by normal rain. That’s down to poor building/maintenance.

Super heavy rain that could be expected to overwhelm well designed roads tends to be self limiting because if it’s that heavy wipers struggle so people automatically slow down.

EcoR1

vaio wrote: »

I don’t know about you but I’ve had my car move sideways from just the wind when passing lorries and that’s with four good tyres firmly in contact with dry tarmac.

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

No you haven't.

thescouselander

vaio wrote: »

I don’t know about you but I’ve had my car move sideways from just the wind when passing lorries and that’s with four good tyres firmly in contact with dry tarmac.

I agree with Vaio on this. The aerodynamic forces on a car can be considerable when passing a lorry - some cars are worse than others. I remember driving a Nissan X trail once that would want to steer as you got near the front of a lorry when over taking, you had to steer quite a bit to keep it straight.

Its not inconceivable something like this could have contributed to the OPs accident but ultimately I still think it was driver error on their part.

Happychappy

I think Alonso is suing the F1 circuit owners in Malaysia as he spun off on the wet track in practice, surely the owners should have built a new track to ensure water from the monsoon didn't actually land on the track? sounds like the same problem you had!

jack_of_all

Sounds a little unfortunate but lot more driver error. The spray from the lorry only had to change your direction a little and you were not going to recover, if the lorry wasn't there you might have made it through the aqua plane, if the lorry wasn't there you might have noticed the puddle sooner, If you didn't notice the puddle cos of the rain then you were driving to fast for the conditions, you will learn a lesson from this hope its not such an expensive one and if no one was hurt Id'e conceder that a result.