Safety Experiment You Never Want

When my husband and I bought our first Honda Accord, one of the big factors was Honda's superior safety rating.  It was a fundamental thing that I was taught as a child--that you want to be safe. When I was a kid--in the days before airbags and booster seats--my parents still insisted that we wear seat belts, even if we were in a friend's car and we had to dig the seat belts out of the crack all covered in crumbs. So caring about safety has always been a big thing and a big part of why we bought a Honda.

One day, home with our two young kids, I got the phone call no one wants.  It was from my husband's cell phone but I couldn't hear what he was saying. There was something strange in his tone and I frantically tried to call him back over and over with no answer.

When he finally got ahold of me--on someone else's phone--he told me that he'd been in head-on collision.  As my husband approached a green light, a guy, thinking he had a green arrow, turned suddenly into my husband's lane.  Only he didn't get very far before the two vehicles--both Honda's--met head on.

Our 1994 Honda Accord was totaled in 2001

Both drivers made a trip to the hospital for a precautionary check-up, but both men walked away from the accident with nothing more serious than whiplash and seat belt bruises.  My husband's cell phone didn't survive the accident and the car was totaled, but that night we went to bed really grateful.

See, we'd been driving a loaned beater (obviously, not a Honda) as our second vehicle.  It was the one my husband usually drove, but that day, knowing I didn't have anywhere special to go, he took the Accord on his errand.  It was a little miracle for our family, but to Honda engineers it wasn't a miracle at all.  It was exactly the way they'd planned it--with everybody going home after the accident safe and sound.