Slice and dice roadkill- tell me your stories!

One of the more exciting things about the height of the full-size van is that I no longer fear having a deer hoof come thru the windshield and hit me in my forehead (saw it once). 

Im just curious - is there any commonly accepted best style of cow catcher for passenger vehicles? With those reinforced bumpers aren’t you losing safety by bypassing crumple zones?

Along with that, I had a friend recommend that I not hit the brakes before hitting one in a car because it will lower the front end. Besides an impossibility — there’s no way I CANNOT hit the brakes when something appears in front of me, this seems like something addressed by MythBusters. I am SURE that any decrease in speed will more than make up for losing a couple inches on height. Presumably that won’t matter in a van that’s 5’ at the top of the hood, but what about everything else?

The slice and dice lead in suggests you may be looking for recipes too.

Personal experience suggests there is a very good chance, when Bambi decides to jump in front of your van, you won't have an opportunity to get anywhere near the brake pedal before it's way too late.

Doesn't need to be as big as a deer. I had an owl come straight through the windshield of my truck. It was a Freightliner with two windshields and he took out the passenger side and blew it right into the cab. Blood glass and feathers everywhere. That wakes you up at 2 AM.

P3PPY said:

One of the more exciting things about the height of the full-size van is that I no longer fear having a deer hoof come thru the windshield and hit me in my forehead (saw it once). 

Have you seen how high a deer can jump?  Unless your van is 20 feet tall there's still the possibility of one coming through your windshield.

Back in 1988, I had a deer come out of the woods and the impact was right in the middle of the A pillar on my 1987 E-350 van.

If he was a fraction of a second sooner, he would have gone through my windshield.

bearmtnmartin said:

Doesn't need to be as big as a deer. I had an owl come straight through the windshield of my truck. It was a Freightliner with two windshields and he took out the passenger side and blew it right into the cab. Blood glass and feathers everywhere. That wakes you up at 2 AM.

Makes me kind of appreciate the complex-curve windshields cars have.  I forget now which car it was, but I was driving along on the Interestate one day and a bird flew at me.  They tend to do that to catch the pressure wave coming off the car so they can soar higher without needing to flap their wings, I guess, but this one misjudged the angle and CLONK!  Bounced off the windshield.  No damage to the car, not sure about the bird.

I was always amazed at how a deer seemed to be put together better than a car.  I hit one with mom’s ‘87 Buick.  Took the whole front off the car and nonchalantly got up and walked off.  

Then, while out jogging one day, I witnessed a coal truck hit a full size deer at speed.  It knocked the deer so high up that it contacted and shook the telephone line.  The deer did not get up.  Ever.  There was not one hint of damage to the front of the Mack.  

This put things into perspective.

I wouldn't worry too much about crumple zones in a full size van. Having hit a few deer, and having been around many many many more, the big thing you want to protect is the radiator. Headlights and sheet metal cost money, but the radiator is what means you're stranded at 2:00 am in the middle of nowhere. If I'm going to put one on something, it's going to be something like this. 

My 1125CR has a ram air snorkel thing just below the headlight.  A couple of years ago I was riding along and a robin-sized bird flew in front of me and seemingly disappeared without a trace.

A few months later when I went to clean the air filter, I discovered a little chunk of featers and bones crammed into the back corner of the airbox.  Sorry little guy. 

It wasn’t until I started driving a van a few years back that I started killing birds on the road. They would hit the side with wild abandon. One even allowed itself to be run over. I wasn’t going very fast and it looked at me then looked at the dead worm on the road, looked at me, then went for the worm.

btw that coal truck story gave me a chuckle. I always wondered what happened when big trucks hit deer. I saw a steer tire play plinko with a raccoon carcass once

The only thing I have ever sliced and diced is a possum. The leading edge of the rear sub-frame on the G35 is almost knife sharp. It you run over a possum, the sub-frame will slice the top off of it and spray the resulting pieces all over the muffler. Cooked possum really doesn't smell appetizing. Doubly true when you don't remove the hair first. It took 40-50 miles for the stench to go away. 

Hitting deer is the luck of the draw. I drive about 60k miles a year. I've hit one in my lifetime. $8k in damages to the E-Series van I was driving. It took out the hood, front fender, grill, radiator, condenser, oil coolers, bumper, radiator support. Pretty much everything in front of the engine. 

My son drives about the same. He's hit 5 or 6. One of those he almost hit twice. It bounced off the front of his Explorer and hit a tree which sent it back into the road. I keep telling him bullets are cheaper than cars. You know kids, they don't listen. Most of his did minimal damage so it really is the luck of the draw. 

Sorry, that's all I got beyond don't worry about it. 

In 1980 I was driving around out west camping in a few National Parks - we were trying to get across Wyoming at night and when it was my turn to drive my buddy told me to be extra careful watching for deer and elk and not to hit any.

It kept me awake better than coffee.

Coming home from a race at Gimli Manitoba, I came across a flock of gulls in the middle of the highway.  The dimwit brother flew the wrong way, and stuck his head into the grille of my truck.  I drove for several hundred miles with the wings above the hood, just like a 30's era hood ornament.  We stopped and pulled it out before we got near civilization, but the head was there until pulled the grille out several years later.

I took a Canadian Goose to the windshield while driving my '88 S-15 Jimmy at 65mph. The glass bowed in, blew the rear view mirror into the back seat, but the bird did not come through. Made me a believer in OE glass vs the cheap stuff.

Datsun310Guy said:

In 1980 I was driving around out west camping in a few National Parks - we were trying to get across Wyoming at night and when it was my turn to drive my buddy told me to be extra careful watching for deer and elk and not to hit any.

It kept me awake better than coffee.

 

I only ever het a deer once.  It was about 2-3am, in the middle of nowhere Missouri, and I'm driving along in the right lane at probably 65mph because the Durango I was borrowing was sketchy at higher speeds.  I see a pair of eyes relfected for a split second as a buck charged at me from the center divider.  The deer looked pissed off as all hell that I was invading its space.  It missed the truck but hit the trailer.

I didn't feel anything unusual, and there was really nothing I could do anyway, so I just kept truckin'.  A semi passed me a few minutes later and I looked in the mirror as he came up on me to see if the fender was mangled into the tires or something.  Finally had to stop for fuel a few hours later.

I can't find the pictures anymore, but the trailer had a box on the front, and there was a couple of standoffs made of thick angle iron, with a cross bar just behind it that you'd thread through your wheels and tires, that I had a whole row of tires and stuff mounted to.  To keep that from rattling around too much, the car was strapped down such that it was compressing the tires against the box.  The deer hit the driver's side standoff and broke it, bending the remaining leg of the angle iron back about 30 degrees.  The cross bar was bent like a shepherd's crook, apparently this is what the mass of the deer had hit.  The car was pushed back about a foot and the rear tie down straps were loose.  And, of course, the deer mangled the driver's door that I'd just had installed a few months earlier after it finally came back from the paint shop.

See, I'd bought the car after it had been sideswiped, and it took me a few years to get a non-mangled driver's door that was clean enough to be worthy of being stripped and painted.  And then a deer goes and wrecks the door again.  This is why I never bothered to fix the damage, if I did then I'd probably get hit by something else.

My wife ran over a coyote at interstate speed with her Rav4, broke the hell out of the plastic bumper and bent the lower radiator support on the way under. Built her a bumper in case she hits something like that again. Not as heavy as it looks, and has the radiator protection in case she hits a deer.

She takes no joy in killing small animals, but has hit a big coon since then and said it made a satisfying gong noise.

I’ve never hit a deer yet but I took out a family of skunks on a country road one night. 80mph and they all looked up at me as I topped the ridge, in my mind’s eye they all had sad looks on their faces. THAT smell lasted a while.

my weirdest thing with a deer was along an empty stretch of highway thru the woods around KC and there’s this explorer parked across the lanes with the driver’s door open, no one in sight. Barf pile by the door reeked like alcohol. Looked up and saw a shattered deer. Sheriff’s deputy pulls up and we’re looking along the woods with his flashlight for the driver. He aims his light down on the ground in front of us and there’s just this disembodied deer heart. Bam. No trailing wires no nothing just a heart. Crazy hit it took

never found the driver. Deputy had the car towed and that was that. 

p.s. I want a bumper gong! That looks good, too

I've only hit one deer so far - a fawn with my TDI on my way to work through central NJ.  Saw momma cross the road in front of me - started to hit the brakes. Baby #1 crosses in front of me as I'm slowing. Baby #2 didn't make it. Punted it as I was coming to a stop, which created this eerie image of the fawn totally rigid, spinning horizontally in front of me before it hit the road and slid into a sign post.  Fortunately, minor damage to the front grill and hood release mechanism, but otherwise the car was fine.  Saw the fawn still next to the sign post during my drive home.  I always called commuting through central NJ, "deer dodging" - it's not a matter of "when" you will hit one, but a matter of "if" and how bad it will be.  It's just a combination of so many wooded areas and farmland combined with a lot of residential areas and thus very few natural predators or hunting.  

I've never witnessed a OTR truck hitting a deer, but I'm pretty sure I've seen recent aftermath on the highway a number of times.  It basically looks like red spray across the road, sometimes with bits of carcass scattered about.  It ain't pretty.

Years ago when I was in oilfield a guy somehow hit a cow with a Kenworth and totaled out the truck, was not a pretty sight. 
 

My first car in high school was a 80s sunbird. One night me and buddy were cruising back roads and I hit a deer going around 50. Deer flew off into ditch and I kept going. Was amusing when we finally stopped an hour later to see hair stuck in paint cracks in front bumper 

Try hitting two cows at once whil doing 112mph in a trophy truck. Driver was okay, the truck and cows, not so much. 

I lived Sparwood, in the Elk Valley in eastern British Columbia for a winter.  Elk are the stupidest animals in the world.  They like to congregate in herds in the middle of the highway, just over the crest of a hill,  at dawn, to lick up the road salt.  They do not notice cars, it seems, and if they do, they don't care at all.

In reply to NickD :

In motorcycle basics courses, they tell you to get over debris you cant avoid by goosing the throttle right before your front tire hits the object to lighten the front end and give you some extra suspension compression room. Knowing how much trophy trucks squat/dive with speed acceleration/braking, wonder if that would have gone better for the driver and truck if he'd punched the gas...

In reply to JohnInKansas :

Probably would have helped, but I'm sure instinct kicks in and makes you mash the brakes when a couple thousand pounds of beef run in front of you while you're moving at triple digit speeds.

One of my proudest car-related moments was when I ran over a flying bird! In my '71 Chevelle, doing about 60mph, a bird was flying across the road just as I was driving by. BUMP BUMP and I looked in the rearview mirror and feathers were going everywhere. Somehow the bird flew into my left front and both left tires ran over it.