Our society's worsening atomization means fewer and fewer of us have the privilege of understanding the effect we have on our world. Sometimes, though, something reverberates loud and clear from out of the blue, and the impact we've made hits us in the face. It can even do so literally, as it did in the case of former Insurance Institute for Highway Safety President Adrian Lund, who survived a high-speed head-on crash he thinks would've been fatal just a decade ago.Lund, who served as the IIHS's president from 2006 to 2017, recalled in a video on the crash that he left his home in Virginia one Saturday morning last August in his 2020 BMW 540i, bound for Savannah, Georgia. He had only driven 15 miles when his memory became a blur of "thunk" noises and a spinning sensation. What had happened was he had collided head-on with a 2016 BMW 228i, whose driver had apparently made a U-turn on the highway before driving the wrong way at around 50 mph. The result was an offset frontal collision where the vehicles' speeds combined to nearly 115 mph—the kind of crash not survivable for most of automotive history.
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