Shelby's Life and Whatnot

The Poor Prius, She Is Dead

We have a long and glorious history in this family of having catastrophes while one is away. However, this past weekend, Kevin took the cake.

The short story is that everyone's okay. The long story is that the Prius is absolutely, completely, and utterly totaled. Kevin got in a huge wreck and then had a heckuva time trying to track me down. I was up with Wendy at her camp which is out of reach of cell phones. We had been out and about all day and so had not gotten the 1) cell phone message Kevin left for me, 2) email my dad sent to me and Wendy, and 3) voice mail from Wendy's office saying that "your friend's husband called and I didn't want to give him your home number." It wasn't until Kevin looked up our old phone bills that he found Wendy's home number.

I guess we really should make a list of emergency phone numbers, hunh?

At any rate, Kevin got rear-ended on the freeway, although he was going with the flow of traffic, around 60-65 mph, and there was no stop-and-go or slowing down. Some guy slammed into him from behind, which pushed him over to the carpool lane where he was again slammed into by a mid-size truck (kind of that gray area between pickup and big rig). Unbelievably (you'll understand what I mean when you see the pictures), Kevin, his dad (front passenger seat) and his brother (rear right-hand seat) were completely uninjured. Kevin sustained a large, ugly bruise and a contusion from the airbag (we presume)--Ken, my father-in-law, walked away completely unscathed, and Zach, my brother-in-law, hit his head and was evaluated at the hospital with no major injury.

You won't believe the car. Seriously. Looking at the pictures, it's amazing that anyone walked away from that accident. The thing that I found most striking about the pictures is that once you get past the damage, the pictures of the passenger cabin are almost completely intact. Aside from the deployed air bags, you can hardly tell there was an accident at all. If anyone says that the Prius isn't a safe car, they're wrong. I put a teaser picture in the extended entry, but for the whole shebang and the link to more pictures, you'll have to visit Kevin's blog post on the subject.

Our poor car!