BMW: The Ultimate Lesson-Learning Machine

By Arison Knapp - November 18, 2015

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Raw car crash videos are some of the most fascinating footage people are uploading today. Whilst action videos are entertaining indeed, there should be a lesson involved, especially when lives are at stake. As intelligent beings we must seek to learn from other people’s successes and failures. This video, shot in the canyons around Los Angeles on the lively Mulholland Highway, shows a BMW driver who seems to be unprepared, unplanned, and inexperienced.

After watching the video below, over and over again, I’m still not sure what the driver’s plan was for the corner. The first lesson of this video is to have a plan when making moves in your vehicle. Imagine the line through a corner, see the openings in traffic not the cars, and always be thinking about avoidance of objects immediately around you. Be always action ready.

It looks to me as if the BMW driver has no plans for taking this corner. Even the way he handles the car in the first five seconds I can tell he is unsure what to do. He wanted to take the corner fast and hold the line, yet he approached the (corner’s) apex all wrong. It looks like as he exits the corner, he attempts to do a late drift. While oversteering too much out of the corner to promote a drift instead of pure speed, he hits the throttle too late to try to save his ego. This leads him trying to correct in another sloppy oversteer attempt. He then goes into emergency mode, freaks out and looks only at where he doesn’t want the car to go: into the mountain.

If he wanted to have a beautifully smooth drift then he should have entered the corner faster and manned up to have enough momentum to actually get sideways. This would’ve helped slide through the apex in mid-drift to have enough room where his extreme countersteering would have been proper. Watch as he enters the corner slowly then hits the throttle hard as the road bottlenecks, leaving him no room for error. This is a bad line for speed and a bad line for drifting.

After the BMW driver’s steering correction crashes his ride into the mountainside, the 3 Series ends up on its side, only to have the guy crawl out of the top of the moonroof. Look at his clothing. Even his clothing says “I am not prepared for emergencies.” Smart prepared drivers and racecar drivers always wear long sleeves and long pants for minimalist protection. The grand lesson here is when you want to experiment and play with your vehicle, create a safe playground for your baby. Make sure the roads you use to go fast have a lot of runoff room.