November 6, 2015 – I was driving Northbound on I-5 in San Diego this morning when I captured this motorcycle crash on my G1W-C dashcam. It’s amazing this rider walked away from the accident; his helmet definitely saved his life! Thanks to the great people who took the few seconds out of their day to stop and help this guy.
Comments:
It looks like he misjudged the cars speed and coming to a stop in front of him, and used too much of his rear break instead of his front tire breaks. A bike should be able to stop or slow down much easier than a car. But without experience or simply having a groggy morning can cause a misjudgment for even 1 sec and ends up in these kind of accidents.
ABS and traction control would be nice but sadly those are considered features and you have to pay more for them so people end up getting a bike without them. I have heard that ABS can screw a rider up too. I don’t know what having ABS on a bike feels like because I’ve never had one with it. I think it would definitely help a new rider though.
It could have been that the rider is new, he panicked, he fixated on the car, he didn’t apply 80/20 pressure to the brakes (80% Front / 20% Rear), he didn’t react properly when he noticed the rear locking up (should have immediately release pressure to the rear brake), on top of that he wasn’t vigilant enough to look past the car in front of him to determine traffic was slowing / stopped. The thing he did do right was wear proper gear or else his bike would have given him a splitting headache.
Seems relatively new to riding and he might not have been paying attention and thought he was going to rear end the car in front of him. He had two ways out. Take the shoulder or lane split. He panicked and locked up his rear brake and lost control. I did something similar when I was still new to riding but it was because someone slammed their brakes on in front of the person in front of me with no turn signal to make a left turn at night. The person in front of me managed to stop but I wasn’t going to be able to so I decided to brake a little then swerve to the left. I reapplied the brakes but didn’t realize how easily I could lock up the rear brake and ended up sliding to the right and gaining traction back to the rear which slammed me into the side of the car I was trying to avoid. I didn’t drop the bike and the only damage was a scratch to a decal on the bike. As a new rider or even if you just got a new bike you really need to head to an empty parking lot and practice emergency braking. It will save your ass.
