Gollnick
Musical Director
- Joined
- Mar 22, 1999
- Messages
- 29,258
I would not bet on that. F=MA. Force = Mass x Acceleration. And the magnitude of Force = M x |Acceleration|. In a car accident, the magnitude of acceleration can be huge. You can go from 65MPH to zero in a very small fraction of a second resulting in huge |acceleration|. And that results in huge force, forces that twist heavy metal car frames like pipe cleaners. If your duffel bag truly is so heavy that you're not worried about it moving under normal circumstances, then mass will be quite high leading to even higher force.
And in a roll-over accident -- like mine -- your bag will certainly become airborne and, in fact, the whole bag may clobber you.
If you don't want to be hit in the head with it, then either bolt it down (seriously) or put it in the trunk.
If you have no trunk, then get a roof box or some such thing. If you have a pickup truck, then get a locking, water-tight bed tool box and have that bolted in.
I speak from experience on this. I survived a roll-over accident in which the car rolled over three times. My seatbelt and the automatic belt tensioner that fired automatically held me safely in my seat. But I found a Benchmade 970 which had been in my glove box locked open and impaled into the back seat. It could very easily have been impaled into me. My brieface which had been on the floor in the back seat behind the driver's seat opened and spilled its contents including an ASP collapable batton into the air around me. Every compartment, the glove box, the arm rest, the map pockets, the ashtray, opened and spilled its contents into the air around me. And this led me to confect my simple rule which I have preached ever since: If you don't want to be hit in the head with it, then either bolt it down (seriously) or put it in the trunk.
Again, a lot of people will say, "I don't have to worry about this. I'm a good driver. I've never had an accident." Well, I hit ice and there was just nothing I could do about it. But, even if you're the world's best driver, think about all the other crazy drivers out there like the man driving the giant SUV who tried to side-swipe me while changing lanes the other day. Fortunately, when I laid on my horn, he finally saw me and swerved back into his own lane. He was talking on his cell phone, of course. If you're not worried about your own driving, worry about everyone else.
How pedantic am I about this? This evening, as I left a church pot luck dinnner carrying the empty generic-tupperware-equivalent plastic container that I had brought my contribution in, I put that container into the trunk since, upon consideration, I decided that I wouldn't want to get hit in the head with it.
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