Nissan 370Z Forum - I ran over a deer.

Happened in my sister's Nissan Versa (not my Z), thankfully.

This happened on a drive from Montreal to Canada to Los Angeles area and happened in Ohio. I flew out to Montreal to help my sister with the drive back to California as she was moving back home from Montreal. I was the one driving when we hit the deer.

What is amazing is that literally 30 min before this happened I ran into the exact same situation. Suddenly I see chunks of a deer before I see its near whole carcass so I swerve (pretty hard) into the other lane. The left over carcass was about 70-80% of a full deer in the middle of the lane. Luckily the chunks of the deer gave enough warning (they were 15-20 feet ahead of the deer carcass) to dodge that one.

So then I decide to put on my brights on (even if it annoyed people in the lane going the other way which was a bit away) and drive in the fast lane (left lane) instead as this happened in Ohio and almost everyone keeps to the right there (unlike cali).

Fast-forward to 30 min later... Boom; yet another deer. This time the chunks/pieces of the deer were not much before the actual deer came up (3-4 feet) and it was near the center line. Just not enough time to avoid it in that car going 70 mph especially since i would have to go completely in the other lane as it was hitting the center line. Instincts kicked in and I simply changed the course slightly to try to get it to go right down the middle of the car. Again it was 70-80% of a deer carcass (and pieces laying around)

I *might* have been able to avoid it in my 370z but even that is iffy. I might have tried which could have ended up worse. Unfortunately the problem I think comes down to a lot with the fact there was basically no moon out (Nov. 2nd the day before the newmoon) and of course no street lights or anything (so pitch black) and that the road was one of those darker color'd ones (giving less light pickup IMHO) and the fact that it was slightly wet giving back quite a bit of glare from the high-beams as well.

My sister was asleep both times. The first one she got woken up by the sudden lane change and I told her I narrowly missed hitting a deer. By the time she gets back to sleep she gets to wake up to me Yelling "F*CK" and then a big boom about 500ms later.

Amazingly little damage to the car. The only thing it did was it stretched out/messed up the cable for popping the hood (which was annoying as I wanted to check out the engine compartment) and it bent back a metal plate that was helping the exhaust pipe keep in place. We were in the middle of nowhere and it was like 5 AM (still dark out). We noticed a problem soon with the exhaust pipe as there was a very loud rumbling (kind of sounded like something hitting on a fan so I initially thought it was radiator fans hitting on deer material but soon figured out the tail pipe was no longer secured and the vibrations hitting against the metal was causing it.

Because if it was the middle of nowhere we decided to drive on to the nearest Denny's to eat and wait for the nearest Nissan Dealership to open which was about 90 miles away. The RPM seemed to have some resonance frequency with the tail-pipe when it was about 3k RPM it wasn't all that loud so I tried to keep the rpm's right there pretty much the rest of the trip, it was really bad during acceleration or when turning the car on/off. Luckily the dealer was able to bend the plate back (as they didn't have a new one in stock) which was able to tide us over until we got to California (we arrived yesterday).

For anyone interested (there is some blood/gore) here is what the bottom of the Versa looked like from the aftermath:

And sorry I was distracted by the guy so video isn't great.

Of course this is all after we basically got stuck at the U.S. border for basically 6 hours (plus another 2-3 hours of wasted driving because of it) as well. Also later in the trip my sister's eyeglasses randomly lost a lense while being put in the cd-holder above the radio. Just was a shitty trip (as far as things happening) in general.