A Kerala State Road Transport bus rammed into a Mercedes Benz C Class luxury sedan at high speed. The entire episode was captured on a CCTV which was installed at a nearby fuel station. The accident occurred near Kottayam earlier this week.
The accident took place when the Mercedes C220 driver decided to enter the fuel station from the opposite side, and that too without showing any indicator. Visibility was low, as it was raining heavily. The Mercedes driver fail to notice the bus coming at full speed in the opposite lane. Before the driver could get out of the way, the bus hit the Mercedes C Class on the side at full speed.
At such speed, if a bus collides with a car, and that too from the side, one would usually think that the car will be smashed and the occupants would be killed. But not when it is a Mercedes C Class. Mercedes had famously shown an elephant standing on the car’s roof when the car was first launched (see image below). Thereby showing its build quality.
Time and again, readers have asked – Why is a Mercedes expensive? Well, the video above and the images below, answers that question very well. The occupants of the Mercedes survived, only because they were in a Mercedes. In addition to a solid structure, Mercedes cars are fitted with all the latest of safety features and technology.
The video shows smoke emerging from the car due to airbags deploying. The superior build quality of this car body with state of the art German engineering ensured that there is much less impact than one could expect from a crash of this enormity. The occupants were safe and escaped with only minor injuries. This kind on impact on another weaker car would have resulted in severe injuries to occupants or possibly even death.
After throwing the Mercedes out of its way, the bus went on to collide with the cars which were parked on the side of the road. The first car it hit was a Tata Nano. Now as the bus was at high speed, the momentum resulted in Tata Nano damaging the car in front, a Maruti Swift, which damaged the car in front, a Toyota Etios, which again damaged a car in front. So a total of four cars were damaged in order to bring the bus to a halt.
The accident draws attention to certain safety precautions that were flouted both by the Mercedes C Class driver and by the driver of the KSRTC bus. On the car driver’s part, it was shear negligence that made him cross over at a spot on the road where there was no divider, and that too without giving any indicator.
He should have made sure that there was no oncoming traffic before taking this step. The bus driver also should have slowed down when he knew he was approaching a fuel station as this is where there is bound to be traffic either on their way into the fuel station or on their way out.
