I was about a second away from being T-boned today. I was stopped at an intersection in Culver City when the light turned green. It took me a full second to start moving, and I accelerated quite slowly mainly because my wife was in the car and she's not generally a fan of fast launches (I leave the Insane launches for when I'm driving alone).
About one second in I caught in the corner of my eye an Audi Q5 coming pretty fast on the closest lane that I was about to cross. I was going only like 5 mph so I was able to stop very quickly and when the Q5 totally ran his red he missed us by a couple of feet, but had I decided to go straight on to the freeway ramp instead of turning left (which made me look that way and see the car sooner), or had I started moving the second the light turned green, or had I accelerated faster than I did I think it's likely that we would have been T-boned at significant speed. Really not keen on testing Elon's claims on the safety of the Model S if I can avoid it.
I caught this on camera (yay dashcams). Here's the short 20 second video:
Too bad the resolution isn't good enough to see his plates, although it looks like he had temporary plates (or it was a dealer car, I don't know).
It wasn't super close but my wife was quite shaken for a bit. I have no idea how the driver could have been so distracted as to not see his light had been red for probably over 3 seconds already.
About one second in I caught in the corner of my eye an Audi Q5 coming pretty fast on the closest lane that I was about to cross. I was going only like 5 mph so I was able to stop very quickly and when the Q5 totally ran his red he missed us by a couple of feet, but had I decided to go straight on to the freeway ramp instead of turning left (which made me look that way and see the car sooner), or had I started moving the second the light turned green, or had I accelerated faster than I did I think it's likely that we would have been T-boned at significant speed. Really not keen on testing Elon's claims on the safety of the Model S if I can avoid it.
I caught this on camera (yay dashcams). Here's the short 20 second video:
Too bad the resolution isn't good enough to see his plates, although it looks like he had temporary plates (or it was a dealer car, I don't know).
It wasn't super close but my wife was quite shaken for a bit. I have no idea how the driver could have been so distracted as to not see his light had been red for probably over 3 seconds already.
