Rolling a car on the motorway

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How on earth does this happen? On the M5 this morning I got stuck in a jam for about half an hour because a car was on its roof up ahead. No other vehicles involved and all the damage to the road seemed to be in the middle lane, so how on earth did it end up on its roof? I'm not slagging off the driver but I'm genuinely interested in how this could happen?

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So its actually quite easy then judging by those youtube clips, I always thought you'd have to be really trying to get a car on to its roof but it seems not that hard at all to make them fall over!

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bristolracer said:

Rebew said:

On the M5 this morning I got stuck in a jam for about half an hour

Somebody had a far worse morning than you did

You are traveling at 32 m second in a ton plus weight. That's a lot of energy,and when it goes off track it won't end well.

Just hope the occupants are ok, it's not a nice way to crash

I wasn't complaining about having to wait, I just put that in for context. From the look of the car and how quickly it took them to clear it i assumed that the occupants were relatively okay, however I am aware that it would never be much fun to be tumbling down the motorway at 70 mph on your roof. Luckily the A pillar and bonnet seemed to take the brunt of the impact. I was more interested in the physics behind getting a car onto its roof in the first place.

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Ransoman said:

I put it as a combination of the following:

Poor quality or defective tyres.
Mechanical fault or poorly maintained vehicle
Road surface contamination
Poor awareness of road condition and other users.
Rubbish car.

I can confirm that the road was pretty grimy and the car was a peugeot 206 so two of those are definitely right and the rest are highly likely.