This is a post about safety for your body, (and your Bugeye’s body too)!
For years, I’ve been inviting our customers to take responsibility their rear end (and for the car following behind). That sounds like an audacious presumption, since there are lots of idiots on the road and we can’t be responsible for what’s in the rear view mirror, but that is exactly my point. They are out there and (potentially) aiming at you– so please pay attention, and you have a fighting chance of staying out of harm’s way. If this sounds like an annoying and unreasonable task, stay with me on this, it doesn’t have to be… it has become second nature for me to “watch my six,” and hopefully it will also become easy and second nature for you too!
The energy relationship between a Bugeye and an F150, for example, is always going to be more impactful than if you’re driving late model car. That is to say, the crash protection on the back of a Bugeye is nonexistent, and modern SUVs and trucks can significantly damage the back end of a Sprite, sometimes to the point of totaling the car, even in a low speed crash. So it’s really critical to be mindful of your rear view mirror any time you step on the brake pedal in a Sprite (or in any car, for that matter).
Motorists are not paying attention like they used to, and so it is up to us to be more vigilant than ever. This is standard motorcyclist practice because obviously you have greater vulnerability on a bike than you do in a car. Therefore, I really encourage all of you to make sure that any time you step on the brake pedal, you are ready to take evasive action if you get a sense that the vehicle behind you isn’t going to stop.
This week, I watched someone start-out into our main thoroughfare and then change their mind (perhaps because of traffic that they hadn’t previously seen) so they stopped abruptly after initially accelerating to merge, and when they did so, the truck behind plowed into the back of their Jetta and crumpled the entire back half of the car.
Fault is almost irrelevant… the priority has to be to avoid contact at all costs. The Jetta is going to need thousands of dollars of bodywork (and may even be totaled); it would’ve been even more catastrophic had the truck smashed into the back of a Bugeye.
I know of an onramp for the Merritt Parkway that requires inching forward to see what’s coming around the bend at highway speed, and this merge is a prime example of the type of on ramp that might result in a false-start rear-end collision, if the next person in line “jumps the gun.”
How can you defend against this? Commit! Go! Or stop! Pull over and let that person on your tail go ahead of you. Or wave your arms and get their attention… please don’t be the person who says, “He hit me from behind, what could I do?” Even though we can’t be responsible for the bad driving of others behind, we often have more evasive driving opportunities than we realize.
