My best friend of almost 30 years in L.A. lives on a small ranch about 60 miles away on the edge of the Angeles National Forrest. It's where I store my Airstream trailer and a few cars, I drive up there frequently when time allows to work on stuff. The drive is awesome up the famous ACH and Angeles Forrest highway, Big Tujunga, etc. These are some of the most legendary roads in the land, hundreds of miles of mountain twisties.
My buddy was driving home early Weds am from his job managing a nightclub in LA, (maybe 2am), when someone coming the opposite direction crossed the double yellow center line to pass someone and hit him head-on. This is basically the nightmare scenario on those roads, everyone is really cooking in both directions w sports cars and MCs sometimes barely staying on their side of the road. He had almost no time to react but tried to go off the road to the right shoulder, the per car caught him right in the left side of grille and headlight, basically.
Closing speed would have been 100 mph easily, I think it was a less than perfectly direct hit or there would have been zero chance of survival. This is how people die up on these roads a lot. He was driving his 2001 BMW e46 sport wagon that he bought new and had well over 200k miles on. He has a couple other vehicles, thank god he was driving this one. It gave its life for him, did its job.
He has a broken foot and lots of sprains, it's simply unbelievable that he's not hurt worse or dead. I've already told him to buy another of the same car w low miles in mint condition, he's particularly fond of this model.
Check the photos of the car, I could not accurately capture the deformation of the driver's cockpit:
