Bad Reflexes
by Giovanni Resta
(Italy)
It was night, say around 9 PM, but it was dark since it was January. A light rain was falling. I was traveling with my wife and we both were wearing our seat belts, as we usually did especially since the birth of our first son.
We were crossing a quite large deserted parking lot and we were perfectly visible and driving relatively slow. Suddenly a car coming from left accelerated and hit our car near my door.
We were the only two cars in the parking lot… Luckily the impact was not too strong and all the windows remained intact. What followed was almost surreal: the elder man which was driving the other car was convinced he was right, despite he was coming from my left, because he "almost" succeed in putting himself in front of my car...
Only the police, that we had to wait for about an hour under the rain, was able to convince him. My wife, a neurobiologist, explained me that in conditions of scarce visibility elder people can fail to estimate precisely the relative speed of vehicles: indeed the man was sure he was fast enough to avoid collision.
