Adrian Lund is the former President of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). He was involved in a head-on car crash while traveling at over 60 mph (97 kph) on Interstate 95 (I-95) last year. Now he’s sharing the experience with others hoping people will understand safety matters a lot more than just performance or looks. He even says the BMW he drove saved his life.
Adrian Lund led the IIHS from 2006 to 2017 after starting there as a behavioral scientist in 1981. During his 36-year career, he was an advocate for a more rigorous car testing program but also worked closely with manufacturers and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as a leader to implement changes that, in the end, guaranteed lives would be better protected on the road. Lund is the reason why the federal mandate for electronic stability control (ESC) exists and why autonomous braking is now found on almost all new vehicles, including trucks.
In a recent video published by the IIHS, the former official recalls a head-on collision with another motorist that was traveling the wrong way on I-95. The 303-mile Interstate 95 connects the East Coast of the United States from Maine to Florida (north-south), and, surprising many, it was finished in 2018.
He says the driver of the other car was coming towards him in the left lane but only had the chance to see the vehicle before it was too late. He was driving at over 60 mph, while the other person was later proven to have had a speed of approximately 50 mph. This was a high-speed crash, one that, unfortunately, led to the perishing of the driver coming on the wrong way of the I-95. She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, even though she was also driving a BMW, more precisely a 2 Series.
Lund says his 2020 BMW 540i saved his life, which proves IIHS made a good choice when it awarded the German carmaker with the 2020 IIHS Top Safety Pick prize thanks to good ratings in all crashworthiness tests.
He was left with a couple of bruises, cuts, and head pains but underlines that if this were to happen ten years ago, he wouldn’t have the chance to sit with the current IIHS team and talk about what happened.
As an interesting sidenote, Adrian Lund received the “BMW Vehicle Safety Lifetime Achievement Award” in 2016. Just five years later, he would end up in a situation where all the changes he asked for and worked together with companies to deliver them saved his life.
Car shows on TV and his father's Fiat Tempra may have been Florin's early influences, but nowadays he favors different things, like the power of an F-150 Raptor. He'll never be able to ignore the shape of a Ferrari though, especially a yellow one. Full profile
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