[tialaramex]

"Smash into a large animal, dying is good" ?

No. You should brake. The intended and authorised safety regime for automobiles assumes you will maintain a situation where you can reasonably brake before foreseeable impacts.

This is quite different from say, an airliner or a railway train which couldn't possibly brake, and so those need completely different safety environments. "Absolute block" is an example for railways, there is intended to be no possible way for two trains to be in the same section of track, so, you always have at least an entire section (it will often be more on fast trains) to brake even if you can't see far at all.

In a car you don't have that environment, you should always be prepared to stop in the distance you can see. If you're thinking, "But nobody drives like that" then you're part way to understanding why so remarkably many people die on roads.

[smoyer]

In fact, the law requires those behind you to be able to brake to avoid you regardless of what you do in front of them. If the car in front of you skids to avoid a family of ducklings, you're going to be the responsible individual if you rear-end them.

With large farm animals such as horses and cows, or with larger wildlife like moose and elk, your life is at stake - there are plenty of drivers killed just hitting moose (look at the size of the mother in the embedded video and you can easily imagine her sliding up the hood and through the windshield: https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=livewith.drivingm.... This video also shows something that's true of elk and deer as well - they have very little traction on pavement.

[jacquesm]

Small correction: you should brake until just before impact if it is going to happen because you want your car's nose to be up as high as you can in this case because otherwise you might get a double helping of windshield+deer into your car.

[falcolas]

1) Deer can and do jump.

2) The difference between the nose of a car while braking and while coasting is an inch or two. Won’t make a lick of difference.

Source for 1) Having a deer jump over my car, leaving only fur in the windshield wiper blades. 2) Mythbusters, measuring for a “Wanted” car jump myth.

[jacquesm]

Thanks. This was advice dispensed by multiple locals in Canada where the deer were so thick on the road that these encounters would happen at least once every week, I didn't actually set up a scientific side-by-side test to see what the difference would be. Braking hard transfers a few hundred pounds of load (depending on the weight of the vehicle, typically about 25% or so) to the front axis, and how far it dips depends on how stiff your suspension is. A typical family car (say, a Caravan or Windstar) will drop quite a bit more than an inch or two but even then I agree it may not make much of a difference because of the way the nose of the vehicle is shaped.

[InTheArena]

Its worth noting that when I was taught, they also said not to break.

Ironically I did actually end up having a encounter with a deer. I did break, and swerve, but at the time I had a car without anti-lock breaks. I lost control of the vehicle and flipped it (which is also why they tell you not to swerve, unless you have good awareness).