OH DEER: While you’re driving, a deer has just jumped out of nowhere. What now!?

Dur­ing driver’s ed defen­sive dri­ving, the police offi­cer talked to us about how to deal with deer in the road– and every­one I know was shocked by the answer. So, I thought this would be inter­est­ing to write a post about!

Oh Deer… Did I just make a really bad pun?
Yes, I did, but it was a rele­phant one. :)

Quick Quiz: (Kind of like the ones you’d get in school, but with answers that may actu­ally prove directly use­ful in life one day, as opposed to expo­nen­tial– log­a­rith­mic con­ver­sions). While you’re dri­ving, a deer has just jumped out of nowhere (or at least, out of the trees on the side of the road) and is now right in the mid­dle of your lane and approach­ing fast.

What do you do?

1. swerve to the side to try and avoid it
2. slam on the breaks
3. ease off the gas and coast right through

If you chose choice a, you’ve now put your­self at risk of crash­ing into the trees or any other obsta­cles to the right, or into oncom­ing cars in the next lane. Not pretty.

If you chose choice b, you’re prob­a­bly going off of what would be your instinc­tive reac­tion. While you may try to brake as quickly as pos­si­ble so as to avoid a col­li­sion, if the deer’s within your stop­ping dis­tance (usu­ally around 100 feet, depend­ing on the rate of travel and the weight of the car), you’re still going to slam into it.

Accord­ing to a cou­ple laws of physics and some­thing called momen­tum, such sud­den force on the breaks will cause your car to tilt for­ward slightly, hit­ting the deer in its legs. In real– life sit­u­a­tions, the deer will not mirac­u­lously stay still or fling clear of the car; rather, it will then pro­ceed to crash straight through your wind­shield and may pos­si­bly, as in one true story, land in the back seat still some­what alive after hav­ing taken out the dri­ver and the pas­sen­ger rid­ing shot­gun. Not fun.

So, as heart­less as it might sound, choice c is in fact the best choice to make if you see a deer within the length of your stop­ping dis­tance. If you ease off the gas, the car will slow down to min­i­mize the force of impact and you’ll hit the deer in its torso, fling­ing it back onto the road rather than through the wind­shield. Since you’ll be hit­ting the deer at such a dis­tance whether you hit the brakes or cruise through, it’s bet­ter to make sure that you’re not hurt as well as the poor deer.
:(

–
Jenni K.