A car plowed into a nail salon on Shermer Road Thursday morning after the driver hit the gas pedal instead of the brake, sending three employees to the hospital and rattling a strip mall that straddles the Glenview-Northbrook border. Police said no one was injured in the crash, though the shock of the impact left workers shaken enough to need medical attention.
The vehicle struck MB Spa Nails at 2699 Shermer Road, according to CBS News Chicago, which reported that the driver pressed the accelerator rather than the brake before the car crashed through the storefront. The salon sits in a strip mall where Glenview meets Northbrook, and while its street address places it in Glenview, the business itself carries a Northbrook, IL 60062 mailing address, according to its listing on Fresha.
Police reported that no injuries resulted from the crash itself, but three nail salon employees were taken to the hospital for stress-related symptoms, per police accounts relayed in the CBS News report. A Glenview building and zoning inspector who examined the property afterward found no structural damage to the building, allowing the salon's underlying structure to be cleared without major repair concerns.
Why Inspectors Got Involved
The village dispatched a building and zoning inspector because Glenview requires structural safety clearance before a damaged commercial building can resume normal operations. Under Ordinance No. 6589, the village adopted the 2021 International Building Code with local amendments, a framework that governs exactly this kind of post-collision inspection, according to Village of Glenview municipal code. That process explains why a municipal official, rather than just the property owner, had to sign off before business could carry on as usual.
No criminal charges or citations were announced in connection with Thursday's crash, and the incident's cause was described simply as a pedal error. That kind of mistake is common enough to have its own body of federal research: a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration advisory estimates pedal error causes roughly 16,000 crashes annually nationwide, most of them at low speeds in parking lots and driveways, according to Claims Journal.
A Familiar Hazard for Strip Malls
Storefronts like MB Spa Nails face this risk more than most businesses. Storefront Safety Council research shows pedal errors and other operator mistakes account for 41% to 56% of all vehicle-into-building collisions, and retail centers and strip malls represent over 35% of all impacted site types nationwide, according to research summarized by McCue Corporation. Nationally, vehicles crash into storefronts more than 100 times a day, resulting in an estimated 16,000 injuries and 2,600 deaths each year, per data compiled by the Storefront Safety Council.
Illinois courts have grappled with the underlying design issue before. In the 2013 case Hougan v. Ulta Salon, Cosmetics and Fragrance, Inc., an Illinois appellate court noted that shopping center operators have long recognized the hazards of head-in storefront parking caused by driver pedal errors, a precedent that shapes premises liability questions around foreseeable parking lot risks, according to FindLaw.
State figures underscore just how routine crashes like Thursday's are across Illinois. The Illinois Department of Transportation's 2024 crash statistics summary counted 303,913 motor vehicle crashes statewide that year, with property-damage-only collisions making up nearly 79% of all incidents. Suburban Cook County alone recorded 283,612 crashes between 2018 and 2022, with property-damage-only incidents comprising 80.8% of that total, according to a safety report from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.
The strip mall at 2657-2701 Shermer Road sits within 1.6 miles of both the North Glenview and Northbrook Metra stations along the Milwaukee District North line, placing it along a busy North Shore commercial corridor. The crash comes just days after a separate vehicle-into-building incident in Chicago, where a car got stuck in a West Town home and also required a municipal structural inspection before repairs could proceed.
