07-02-2016, 03:47 AM
Ombligo wrote:
I have a hard time believing that the driver could not have avoided the collision if he was watching the road. Alternate 27 is a straight shot divided roadway that runs for miles outside Williston (I live about 40 minutes away and have driven that roadway). There is nothing alongside the roadsides (except a gas station at that intersection). A driver could have braked, or run off the roadway into the wide shoulder or median.
He struck the trailer; tractor trailers are slow moving vehicles when turning. The Tesla had to have been a decent distance away when the truck started the turn, plenty of time for an alert driver to slow down or otherwise avoid the collision.
I brought it up on satellite view. What the drawing doesn't show is the massive median. It also doesn't show that the intersection is not perpendicular. There's no possible way a semi truck could have made a left turn that sharp, so fast that the Tesla couldn't have stopped. Any decent driver would have seen the semi starting the turn and then been ready to pounce on the brake if the cab of the truck went into the oncoming lanes. There's no way for the cab of the semi to have cleared the intersection without a competent driver having seen it begin to turn, enter the median area and enter the lanes of traffic - all opportunities to slow down. Measuring it out, the semi's intentions were clear for about 150' (if not more). If the semi managed to make that corner at 35mph (most likely impossible) the Tesla still had three seconds to respond. At 20mph, 5 seconds.
At 60mph, the Tesla was covering 88 feet per second. So in the 3-5 seconds the truck was turning (if not much longer) the Tesla covered 260-440 feet. From what I can tell, it needs less than 150' to come to a complete stop. Obviously the experts will research all this and be using something better than Google Earth to figure out the distances, but it sure seems like that Tesla had more than enough time to come to a complete stop.