A female driver was hospitalized Tuesday night after crashing into the entrance of a strip mall under construction near Northwest 44th Street and Pine Island Road in Sunrise, leaving shattered glass scattered across the ground and a dented storefront in her wake. Officials say she hit the gas instead of the brake, sending her vehicle into the building. The strip mall was not occupied at the time of the crash.
Sunrise Police and Fire Rescue responded to the scene Tuesday, according to WSVN 7News. The driver was hospitalized following the crash, but paramedics say she is expected to be okay. The outlet's report, credited to Kevin Boulandier, did not identify the driver or specify what led up to the pedal mix-up.
Because the building was still under construction, no one was inside when the car struck the entrance, and the station's report did not indicate any other injuries. The crash left the storefront dented and scattered broken glass across the pavement, a scene consistent with the kind of low-speed impact that typically accompanies pedal confusion crashes.
A Familiar Pattern at Strip Malls Nationwide
Pedal misapplication — mistaking the gas pedal for the brake — causes roughly 16,000 preventable crashes across the country every year, according to research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cited by Hardy Wolf & Downing. Between 57% and 77% of these pedal confusion incidents happen at low speeds in parking lots or driveways, per NHTSA research, precisely the kind of tight maneuvering common outside a strip mall entrance still being built out.
Storefront safety data audited by Lloyd's of London and reported by The Crash Report shows vehicles crash into U.S. commercial storefronts and public buildings roughly 100 times a day nationwide, causing an estimated 16,000 injuries and up to 2,600 deaths annually. Separately, the Storefront Safety Council has found that pedal error accounts for 34% to 41% of all vehicle-into-building strikes, with retail businesses and strip centers among the most common targets — a pattern researchers link to head-in parking layouts that face glass storefronts without any structural buffer.
Open Questions Around Safety Measures and Citations
Whether the new strip mall's entrance was designed with crash-rated protections remains unclear. Bollards certified under the ASTM F3016 standard can stop a 5,000-pound vehicle traveling up to 30 mph within 12 inches of impact, according to Gibraltar Perimeter Security, but most commercial storefronts lack such barriers unless local building codes require them. It's also not yet known whether the driver will face any traffic citations once investigators wrap up their review.
The crash adds to a run of vehicle-into-building incidents around Sunrise in recent months. Just weeks earlier, in July, a speeding Mercedes-Benz tore through a home on the 6200 block of Northwest 12th Street, an earlier Hoodline crash report found, an incident that required emergency support beams after slicing through interior walls. Nearby residents later petitioned the city for traffic-calming measures in response.
Broward County itself sees heavy traffic volume that makes such crashes statistically common. The county logged 36,871 total motor vehicle crashes in 2025 — an average of more than 101 per day — including 141 fatal crashes and over 10,000 injury-causing collisions, according to preliminary state data reported by Steinger, Greene & Feiner. Pine Island Road through Northwest 44th Street is itself a major arterial corridor that has undergone extensive widening and utility work in recent years to handle that traffic load.
Similar low-speed, pedal-error storefront crashes have played out elsewhere in South Florida and beyond in recent weeks, including a car that plowed into a Coral Way nail salon in Miami without injuries. No timeline has been given for when Sunrise officials expect to conclude their investigation into Tuesday's crash.
