On 27/07/2018 09:23, Martin Brown wrote:
On 26/07/2018 18:43, ARW wrote:

You know that you are going to get arse ended.

It is a rather annoying situation to find yourself in. Our driver was
able to give a countdown of time to impact as the driver behind
continued his animated conversation with his passenger until it was too
late. He did brake at the very last minute dipping his bonnet which got
neatly peeled back to the windscreen. Cars vital fluids all dropped out.

It is really annoying to be a sitting duck at the tail end of a motorway
contraflow queue with nowhere to go. We were conveniently in front of
the place where the recovery vehicles were parked up!

Do you keep your foot on the brakes so that you don't get pushed into
the car in front or do keep your foot off the brake and have two bumps
but of less severity?

If you are already stationary then both handbrake and footbrake on to
maximum and head back against the headrest. You want to offer as much
resistance to forward acceleration as you can muster. It may well
destroy the car that impacts behind you but that isn't your problem ;-)

Think of Newton's cradle. In the extreme case of offering no resistance
and perfectly elastic collisions you get pummelled again and again as
you hit the vehicles on either side of you repeatedly and bounce off.

The other thing to remember is that damage scales as the square of the
mass ratio which is why you should never pick a fight with an HGV. A car
was made airborne in a recent A19 crash which closed it for half a day.

The car I saw on the M62 some years ago consisted of an intact car from
the front of the car to the B-pillar ... and a tipper truck from the
B-pillar backwards! I really hope that there was no-one in the back -
most likely not, as it was rush-hour.

SteveW