But I'm not dead so don't worry.
Today, I was leaving home on my way to work. It was raining pretty hard and had been doing so all day long. I reached the end of my street and pulled onto the highway behind a white Ram. About 1/8 mile later, he turned on his signal to turn left and stopped in the middle of the highway, but he couldn't because there was a lot of traffic and no gaps to get through. I slowly rolled to a stop behind him.
I noticed a semi (full size 18 wheeler) approaching behind me but thought nothing of him, since I was focusing on the truck in front of me so that I could continue. Suddenly, there was a loud rush as more than a dozen tons of machinery shot past my passenger side. My car jostled back and forth and water crashed against the windows. I saw that the semi had blasted around me using the shoulder that was at most about 18 inches wide (and at more than 50mph (80ish km/h) compared to my dead 0mph). He had to use someone's front yard for the rest of his truck's width clearance. Once everything settled and I gathered my senses, I noticed a couple mailboxes right next to me. I wanted to get out and see just how close they were because I could see no way that a full size rig managed to rush through that gap without wrecking my car and/or the mailboxes.
Once the Ram managed to slip through a gap in traffic, I skittered and slid my way back up to speed (I have bad tires and the road was like wet glass). Of course, when I caught up with the semi, he had drastically slowed down to 15mph under the limit. I edged my bumper up to his trailer intentionally tailgating him and driving on the center line looking for an opportunity to get around him, but I had to keep retreating due to too much traffic. Eventually, the road widened to a divided highway so I shot around his truck, slowed at his window, and honked at him before taking off.
Had he been just one foot over to the left when he shot past me (quite a small amount of space for driving a truck at 50mph in heavy rain), he would've pancaked my car against the Ram in front of me and sent us sprawling into head-on traffic on a 55mph road. I really don't think my chances would've been too great if that had happened.
