I was on a 3 lane highway, one of the first in Los Angeles, as well as one of the most dangerous due to its twist and turns (110, East of Los Angeles, between Downtown and Pasadena).
Anyways, so its been raining a bit today and I was taking it easy and going at a safe speed (50mph) in the middle lane, when this one car starting riding up my tail, she then changed into the inside lane, right when a tighter corner appears. So she steers too much and crosses outside of the lane, into some dirt, gravel, trash and near the guardrail. This happened just as she passed me and I knew something bad was going to happen, but i couldn't explain it. This has actually happened to me another time, I also came out of it unscathed. So I backed off a lot and then saw her spin out right in front of me, her rear got tossed to the side and soon she became perpendicular and then FACING oncoming traffic, and eventually hit the guardrail. The car to my right didn't see this happen and swerved into my lane right ahead of me to avoid a head on collision. He didnt have enough time so he hit the other car headlight to headlight. I had luckily slowed down enough so that when he swerved into my lane I could fully stop, which I did. Everyone was a bit shaken up but fine.
So heres my question. When something like this happens, what can be done? In terms of the car losing traction in the rear and getting tossed perpendicular to the road and spinning out. Do you just brace for impact?
This is not a straightforward question with a single simple answer that will give you a road-map for accident avoidance in the future. Vehicle dynamics are complex, and depending on your goals when trying to deal with a loss of control, you may do very different things. It also depends on your confidence level behind the wheel (hopefully a realistic level of convidence and faith in your abilities, knowing both your limits and your strengths, and not some unwarranted and egotistical level of convidence that you are Vin Diesel from The Fast and the Furious).
One person has said that a race prep course taught him to clutch in and hammer the brakes, but the goal there is to induce a predictable slide off of the track so the other drivers don't have to play guessing games on how the car ahead of them is going to react. It doesn't exactly allow you to steer much, or avoid obstacles, but in a race you are going fast and the track is generally clear so all you're going to do is drift off the course into runoff areas or kitty litter. Plus all the various safety equipment that is mandatory for racing (helmet, for example) makes drifting off in one direction is
safe under these conditions. This is much less true in traffic.
The easiest answer to give you would be to not get into the situation in the first place. She was driving at speed and put herself into a situations of compromised traction, possibly one half of the vehicle on good pavement, and one half in slicker, wet, oil and grime covered shoulder. This in and of itself shouldn't present a problem to a driver, even in a corner, because your outside wheels in a corner do most of the gripping in a corner. More specifically, your outside front tire bears the majority of the load. In a case where only half her cars grip is compromised, she could easily have handled the situation simply by easing off throttle or going into neutral and driving out of the situation carefully with gentle steering inputs until she was back in traffic. If she got both front tires into the slick stuff on the side of the road and washed out her front end, it's likely she'd have understeered/pushed through the corner back up into her lane and also been fine. Given the description of the situation and the speeds we're talking about, her spinning out seems to indicate she lost traction somewhere and overreacted, responded to it too quickly. Maybe she felt her back end walk out on her as she went into the slippery stuff on the side of the road, and she came off throttle or hit the brakes, unweighting the rear and causing herself to spin (this seems most likely to me). I think it likely that she put herself in an unnecessarily dangerous situation and then reacted to it poorly. It generally takes a lot of little factors to cause the loss of control of a vehicle, a chain of events that leads to the eventual tipping point between tenuous control and a loss of control.
Most modern cars are incredibly forgiving when you start reaching the limits of lateral grip. You can often lose control and then regain it a moment later quite easily, and in fact this is one advantage of FWD vehicles and their tendency to understeer. It's not like a Porsche or a race car where when you exceed grip and lose control, it is gone forever, especially not when you are at ~50 mph. That said, smaller, gentler, smooth vehicle inputs (steering, brake, gas) all do a better job of redirecting the vehicle in the way that you want without completely upsetting the balance of your vehicle, which helps prevent you from exceeding the grip you have available while still allowing you to get out of most sticky situations. Once the spin was induced, there is no gauruntee that you could ever get control back, as vehicle balance and grip have been so seriously compromised that getting it back is hard,
especially at highway speeds. Deciding how to get out of it is something that depends on driver skill, the vehicle you're in, how fast you are going, how bad the spin is, how heavy traffic is, how much space and time you have to try and engineer a recovery. You may be able to steer into the skid (ass-end going right, you steer right) and hold it. You may try that and have the front end grip suddenly, causing the rear to snap back the other way, spinning you even harder. You may get completely sideways and start steering with the skid to try and bring yourself fully around, use momentum and turn against the skid once you are facing the wrong way to complete the 360 and get back to the proper orientation. It may even be best to just drift sideways into the barrier and avoid hurting other people or hitting something head on rather than with the passenger side or rear end of the vehicle. It's hard to say, not being behind the wheel and not having seen the situation play out.
There are a few things you can do to make it more likely that you can regain control in situations like this. Neutral/clutching in is your friend as it removes engine load from the front wheels, giving them 100% of available grip to brake or steer as needed, and allowing the front end to roll will generally prevent your front wheels from sliding on slippery surfaces (this is very important for winter driving on ice and snow). You can drive to conditions so that if you do lose control you are not having to try and regain it at high speeds, as speed makes the lateral forces involved in a spin much, much greater and therefor much less likely that you can ever deal with them. You can remember to try and be smooth and gentle in your vehicle inputs, learn how and why braking or accelerating can "unbalance" (or in some cases, rebalance) your vehicle, learn how and why steering inputs can unbalance or rebalance your vehicle, and remember that drastic changes in vehicle attitude will only make the situation worse. You can do things like go to empty parking lots and practice dealing with slides (but you are in California, and I don't recommend doing things like that on dry pavement. Up here in Canuckistan we get 4 months out of the year where we can play around in parking lots, and it really does help to just know how your car will react in various situations, and to try and figure out how to best correct for it). And most importantly, you can gain the experience you need by taking courses.
As for what
you did as the observer? Full marks. You recognized the situation before it happened (the hardest thing to do, and also the most important step in dealing with these sorts of situations). You slowed down to give yourself more space. I don't get the impression that you slammed on the brakes, which is good because that will probably get you rear-ended on a freeway. Vision, time, space, anticipation and driving to conditions will save you from 99% of all situations you'll ever face on the road, so that you never need to try to recover from a spin at 50mph on a multi-lane freeway in traffic.
