A Vehicular Physics Lesson

I was walking out of my gym in Farmington at about 5:50 PM this evening.  I heard a horn blasting steadily.  I didn't notice anything right off the bat.  I got in my car, started it up and backed out and headed south out of this large parking lot.  I still heard the horn.  I rolled down the window and immediately looked to my left and noticed a young woman walking away from me and away from a vehicle.  As I pulled closer I noticed the entire front end of the car was smashed and the vehicle was stopped behind a cement pillar that at one time was the support for a large light that lit up that section of the parking lot.

I stopped and addressed her.  She was shaking uncontrollably.  I asked her age.  17.  She was trying to call her mother and wasn't getting an answer.  I asked her if I could use her phone and call the police which I did.  As she continued to shake she kept saying how much trouble she was going to be in and how her mother and step father were going to be so upset with her.  I noticed an abrasion on her right forearm from the airbags going off.  She wasn't bleeding much but it needed to be cleaned and bandaged.  I keep asking if she was alright and I could tell she was shellshocked.  So I hugged her and held her for 10 or 15 seconds.

She calmed down a little big and I had her sit in my car.  She contacted her mother finally and she showed up about 5 minutes later.

What happened was apparently, as she described it to me, she left the gym, started up her car and started driving in a westerly direction.  The sun was low and it was blinding and glaring in the windshield.  She didn't see the cement pillar in front of her.  It was less than 3 feet tall and she rammed right into it, denting the front end, through the radiator, setting off the airbags and the horn alarm.  I raised the hood and pulled the negative battery cable off of the battery and the horn stopped.  Needless to say, I felt bad for this young girl.  Her mom hugged her and told her the car can be fixed and a real tragedy would have been if she would have been hurt or killed.  You never know what you'll see coming out of the gym so be ready, I guess.  Of course the physics lesson is Newton's first law which suggests an object that is in motion will not change it's velocity unless an external force acts upon it.  So   a car increasing velocity gets stopped by the cement pillar, an external force on the object.  That's all for today.