If it is any consolation she has become the owner of the first open top RRS

At the end of the day, when all is said and done I'd rather know I was being cared
for with the least risk of ending up paralysed for life, than worry about the roof being cut
off a "replacable" car, no matter how new it is  2013 Discovery HSE Luxury - 3.0 SDV6 - Santorini Black
2013 Evoque 5 Door Pure Tech SD4 - Orkney Grey with Panoramic Roof (Mrs E's new baby)

GONE - RRS - 3.0 TDV6 HSE - Santorini (2010)
GONE - RRS - 2.7 TDV6 HSE - Java Black (2007)
GONE - Porsche Boxster S - 3.2 - Black

muddywheels wrote:

Note to self - get all passengers out of vehicle before calling 999

Or, if unable, shoot them  '08 RRS TDV8
I converted my diesel RRS to run on an environmentally friendly mixture of caribou fat and baby seals oil

Well, you make your bed and lie in it. The injuries turned out to be minor but this woman's immediate reaction was to claim back pain, probably sensing a nice juicy insurance claim.

Her reluctance to have the roof off was probably more to do with what hubby would say, especially when he finds out the wait for a replacement. The insurance company will hardly be jumping for joy either. Can't imagine there's much in the way of salvage value and, presumably, re-shelling the thing is a non-starter?

Still LR will be happy, they won't have to honour any warranty claims... Mark

SVR in Estoril Blue

Wow, I read this thread before viewing the article and was shocked at how little damage there actually was.

No way that roof needed to come off.

Unfortunately RRSTDV8 is totally correct and therefore the services will always "suspect" a possible serious injury, regardless of common sense suggesting otherwise.

DBA wrote:

RRS not tested by EuroNCAP yet, but the FFRR whiplash test is marginal.
Shame they don't safety so "religiously" like Mercedes or Volvo.
This might explain her neck/back injury....

Quote:

in the UK if the occupant has a suspected back injury, they take the roof off to get the back boards in to protect them from any further damage

The salutary lesson and rider to mse's post above is that because the woman who allowed to injured person to sit in her car voluntarily her insurance didn't pay out !!

I think the media interest may have helped her case! still a right pain though Mike

2014 Facelift Discovery

The firefighters introduced more risk than they mitigated by cutting the roof off... It would have been much safer for both the emergency responders and the patient to immobilise the patient, use the electrics in the car to move the seat and extract the patient out using the same techniques you would if the top was off (in fact extracting a patient out the top of a cut car is much more difficult than out a door if you know what you're doing...) Crazy... we avoid cutting as much as we can as it introduces risk... It is sad if your Emergency Services are at the point they have to do illogical things to protect themselves...

its the reverse over here and they are very safe at removing people through the roof, for the UK fire service it is the lower risk option...but then fire and rescue techniques are different the world over...moving the seat seems very risky. Mike

2014 Facelift Discovery

A simple test is all that is required to check for genuine spinal injury. Unfortunately not all ambulance services use it (even though they should as it's part of ambulance service guidance). The fire service are not medically trained to check for illness or injury to the extent that paramedics are, so will always look for the dramatic 'roof off' in order to protect themselves (& the driver) in RTCs.

The incidence of a genuine spinal cord injury even from a severe impact is very low in modern cars, so the risk of paralysis is very low (something like 1% IIRC)

Having looked at the very minor damage to the RRS & with it being confined to the front of the car, I'd say the driver saw an opportunity for a compensation claim. I wouldn't expect to get a neck/back injury from a frontal impact either as the actual injury to the neck muscles occurs when the head is thrown forwards after being thrown backwards & not the other way around. Also whiplash usually takes a few hours to come on as the adrenaline released following the impact masks the pain for a good while.

The greater risk of neck muscle injury (whiplash) now comes from side impacts as your neck muscles are not as strong sideways as they are front to back.
Even worse is the axial/rotational injury (think Richard Hammond) where the car spins at high rotational speed. This can sever nerves in the brain as the skull spins faster than the brain inside.

Just my opinion, for what it's worth.  I'm in the shed, I'll be back in the real world in a minute.

They couldn't move the seats there was no electric

Nick, not hard to get electrics, the damage to the car would suggest the only way they couldn't get electrics is because they shut them down (which they would have to do before they cut to deactivate the airbags in the pillars)... As Russben rightly pointed out the chances of a serious spinal injury are very low, regardless spinal management would be the same using either method of extraction (roof off, roof on) and whether or not the roof came off I would want the option of using the electrics in the seat to control the movement of the patient from the sitting to lying position (the riskiest part of moving any spinal patient by far). Yes there would be risk of fire (extremely low and also very easy to control considering you have a big red shiney thing that's designed to put out fires) and air bag activation (again extremely low risk unless you start cutting pillars) but control these risks and it is much safer for the patient to use the seat to get them flat in a more controlled manner.

Sadly we are slowly turning into a society where lawyers/litigation and fear lead to skewed risk assessment. Way too much weight is placed on legal risk and this tends to mean other (more real risks) are not controlled as well as they should be.