A family of seven’s tragedy after collecting a new car exposes the hidden danger of microsleep on Malaysian roads.
I DO it too – we all do. I drive from Seremban to Petaling Jaya for work. I usually leave home around noon and return late at night. By then, the highways are quieter, the day’s adrenaline has worn off and the exhaustion I ignored all afternoon starts demanding attention.
There have been days – I will admit this now in print because honesty is the whole point of this column – when I have felt it. That pull – the eyes growing heavy for just a second and the lane drifting slightly before I catch myself. Once, I was frightened enough to pull into an R&R, recline my seat and sleep in the car like a sensible person. I was late but I did not care – I was scared.
We have normalised exhaustion the way we have normalised traffic jams, long commutes and two-minute noodles for dinner. It is simply part of the texture of Malaysian life: push through, keep moving, get there first, sleep when you are dead. Except sometimes, terribly, that last part stops being a figure of speech.
Last Sunday afternoon, a family of seven climbed into a brand-new Proton X50 in Juru, Penang. They had just collected the vehicle. They took photographs beside it – the kind of photographs you would take when something good has finally happened, when you want to remember a milestone, when life feels generous for a moment.
Then they drove towards Sungai Petani, heading to Merbok to visit the grave of their late father – a family errand. A Sunday afternoon. The most ordinary thing in the world. The dashcam footage shows the car drifting smoothly, without braking, across the centre line and into the path of an oncoming lorry.
Six of them died – a two-month-old baby, a seven-year-old boy on his first ride in his uncle’s new car, the driver, 27, his younger brother, 21, his wife and his mother-in-law. The only survivor was his three-year-old daughter.
One moment, a family posing beside a new car and the next, five seconds of footage that left an entire nation staring at their screens in disbelief.
The investigation is ongoing and the authorities will determine exactly what happened. But many of us watched that footage and recognised something familiar. The car does not swerve, it does not brake, it simply drifts – gently. The way a vehicle might move when the person behind the wheel has, for a few seconds, stopped being fully conscious.
Microsleep. It sounds harmless, almost insignificant. A technical term. Something that happens to other people. But microsleep is frightening precisely because it is so ordinary. Experts describe it as a brief episode, lasting anywhere from two to 30 seconds, in which the brain temporarily shuts down while the body continues functioning. Your eyes may be open, your hands may still be on the wheel but you may not even realise it happened.
At highway speeds, however, a few seconds is all it takes. A vehicle travelling at 110km/h covers more than 30m every second. That means a driver who loses awareness for just three seconds has travelled the length of a football field without truly seeing the road.
We do not talk about fatigue the way we talk about drunk driving. There are no campaigns with the same intensity. No equivalent social shame.
Tell someone you drove four hours on three hours of sleep and they will probably nod sympathetically. They may even admire your commitment. You are not reckless; you are hardworking. You are busy; you are doing what everyone else does. You are Malaysian.
But the science is unambiguous. Severe sleep deprivation can impair driving ability in ways comparable to alcohol. Reaction times slow, judgement suffers and hazard perception weakens.
The frightening part is that fatigue rarely feels dangerous from the inside. Most people know when they are drunk but many people do not realise how tired they really are.
The most terrifying thing about microsleep is that you do not know you have had one. You close your eyes for two seconds, then you open them again. Nothing seems wrong, except everything is.
I am not writing this to assign blame to a young man who is no longer here to speak for himself. I am writing this because I have driven tired and you have probably driven tired. Almost everyone reading this has, at some point, convinced themselves they could push through another half hour, another 20km, another exit because we live in a country where the answer to “Are you okay to drive?” is almost always the same. “Yeah-lah. Nearly there already.”
Nearly there. Somewhere tonight, a three-year-old girl is in a hospital bed. One day, she will grow up knowing she was the one who came home. She may never fully understand why. Neither will the people who loved the six who did not. The photographs taken beside that new car were meant to mark a beginning. Instead, they became the last family photographs.
That thought has stayed with me all week because none of us knows when we are taking our last photo. We only know that some risks are not worth taking. Pull over, call someone, sleep in the car for 20 minutes, arrive late but be embarrassingly, inconveniently and stubbornly alive. The new car can wait, the grave visit can wait, the meeting can wait, everything can wait. Because when it comes to driving tired, it really is a matter of life and death.
Hashini Kavishtri Kannan is the assistant news editor at theSun. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
The Sun Malaysia