Most cars just don't flip, all the traction their tires have is simply not enough to do it on flat ground. Yeah anything could flip over once you go off the road but the SUV in this looks like a rolling death machine.

This is one of the reasons I ride bicycles and motorcycles. I take on more personal risk, but the overall effect is a reduction in accident, injury, and mortality rates for road use.

1. Hatchback hits on tangent producing torque and spinning SUV by 90-degree.

2. SUV collides with barrier which produces force vector that is normal to collision surfaces and slightly off forward direction.

3. The driver now seems to have pressed on breaks really hard which produces another force vector. But this vector is now quite off original forward direction because car had been rotating.

So the moral of the story is that if SUV is rotating and you press on breaks really hard, you will get roll. This is purely because SUV has higher clearance and so even small force can produce enough torque that will cause roll. It looks to me if driver hadn't pressed on breaks really hard, the rolls could possibly been avoided or reduced.

Is it purely because it hit it at the corner, so all the force went into the "spinning axis"? (did I say I feel dumb?)

Physics would have you start with a spherical, uniformly dense car, but cars aren't that. Crumple zones engineered for passenger safety requirement mean that intuition falls short unless you really dig into it and add stuff like center of gravity to the model.

Also think about why you believe that - looks can be deceiving, and marketing, especially for rare expensive purchases like cars, very much plays on emotional appeal rather than actual science. ("Ultimate driving machine"? Pft, really?). The original SUVs were designed off truck platforms and did quite poorly in safety tests, and their higher center of gravity doesn't help at all. (Though it looks like a minivan in the video.) Just like two objects falling will fall at different speed in the real world due to air resistance, bigger != better with cars. You can't see crumple zones just by looking at how pretty the car is; vehicle safety is one area where government regulation has made cars safer by requiring all new cars sold in the US to meet a very high safety bar, and that's improved over the years, evident in this video of an intentional crash between a 1962 Cadillac vs a 2002 model. https://youtu.be/O-WYKYrq5FI

Both cars braking, center of mass shifting toward their front and lowering. Meaning the small car momentum was peak at the collision point, while the SUV rear end was already lifted thus lighter.

Direction of the collision helped transfer the energy into torque. The barrier provided the final help to start the car tumbles.

A) main that SUV happened (just before starting sommersaults) to position itself orthogonal to its previous way of moving. In this position all wheels of SUV created massive 'resistance' to continue move forward

B) it happened partialy because of the middle barrier. WOuld it be missing, SUV would probably move (on the arc) without sommersaults.

Change of orientation was caused by small car, but look that up to moment A) SUV more less was moving fine.

r X F

meaning that small force applied over a long length can produce huge torque! You can move a huge rock if you use a long enough metal stick for leverage. This is why Archimedes said,

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Large angular acceleration due to large torque is then directly result of Euler's equations.

We did a lot of safety research before buying our current round of cars, and you need to not generalize about cars based on classifications like "SUV". Look at actual data from actual cars on actual roads, e.g.

http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/driver-death-rates

Note that you can find vehicles like the Honda Pilot that are enormously popular and have in effect ZERO fatalities. What's horribly unsafe to everyone is passenger cars built on truck frames.

Have any examples? The vast majority of new SUVs (which the one in this incident appears to be) are unibody rather than body-on-frame ("truck frame" style).

Apparently there are 18 models of Body-On-Frame SUVs that are being sold in the US in 2016:

  Cadillac Escalade
  Cadillac Escalade ESV
  Chevrolet Suburban
  Chevrolet Tahoe
  Ford Expedition
  GMC Yukon
  GMC Yukon XL
  Infiniti QX80
  Jeep Wrangler
  Land Rover LR4 *
  Lexus GX460
  Lexus LX570
  Lincoln Navigator
  Mercedes-Benz G-Class
  Nissan Armada
  Toyota 4Runner
  Toyota Land Cruiser
  Toyota Sequoia

If you're referring to the pink hatchback that ultimately rear-ended the SUV - the pink hatchback seems to be making a lane change to the right after passing. The driver seems to have signaled and looked to the right to clear his/her blindspot at the same moment the SUV ahead slams on the brakes. It really seems like bad luck, that traffic would suddenly stop at the exact moment the driver of the pink hatchback looks to the right to change lanes.

-Pet peeve of mine: "Bad luck" is incredibly rare in traffic. This accident occurred because the hatchback was too close to the car in front of it; not because of bad luck.

You're just missing the signal. Look at the upper-right of the hatchback at 4 seconds.

Back in the day when I got my driver's license we were told to have 3 seconds of distance. One second to react one second to brake and one second for safety, if I remember correctly.

Watch the video again; the little red car turns on their blinker and does a very slow shift to the right before clipping that stopped SUV. You're right that he wasn't paying attention, but his reaction time is incredibly slow - it looks like that car had just enough time to slam on their brakes or swerve to the right, yet they did neither.

aren't you supposed to have a wide enough space between you and the car in front of you? to compensate for any slowness in reaction.

I think the situation is not entirely unclear, it seemed that there was a problem ahead of the SUV, that made a bunch of cars slow down altogether. I still don't understand the smaller red car driver decisions.. maybe he didn't know what to do and hesitated and tried to swerve as a last resort. Or maybe he was just not watching. The SUV break lights were on quite a long time..

Living in India, I have seen a fair share of accidents where the car is upside down. I always used to wonder how that happens, now I know.