According to the Storefront Safety Council, vehicles crash into buildings such as restaurants, grocery stores and convenience stores an average of 60 times a day. Each year, up to 500 people are killed and more than 4,000 are injured.
Many of those accidents happen even when crash barriers are installed out front. Typically such barriers are yellow, consisting basically of a steel pipe filled in the middle with concrete.
TODAY national investigative correspondent Jeff Rossen visited the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, where various crash tests are conducted. When a crash test car was flung at a concrete-filled barrier at about 20 miles per hour — parking lot speed — the car knocked it down like a bowling pin.