(I just stumbled across this thread.)

Woah. This is really bad. I hope the best for your cousin and his friend, although it seems to be a bit late for that now.

I don't want to sound like a broken record, someone with a hidden agenda, or even somebody who would be any sort of authority on defending against vehicular attack... and everything I'm talking about is theoretical, since it was stated that they opened fire even before your cousin responded...

Assuming an attacker traveling in a parallel lane next to you on a boulevard at 45mph...

Wouldn't it be a better idea to slam on the brakes then corner rather than accelerate in a straight line when you notice a gun in the motion of being trained on you?

Slamming on the brakes will always put you behind the attacker since the time it takes for them to react will always put them ahead of you. This will make shooting at you at any accuracy nearly impossible. Sit in your car, roll down the window, pretend you're the attacker and you'll see why. Then lean forward and try to aim behind the car. But consider that the attacking driver would probably be braking violently in response to the defending driver, which just might throw your aim a little off.

In contrast, acceleration doesn't immediately take you out of their range of attack (you actually move dead-center into their range) nor does it really move you relative to the attacker nearly quickly enough as hard braking.

In addition, if this is occurring at freeway speeds, putting yourself behind the attacker puts you in an opportunity to counterattack should you be practiced at, desperate enough, and have the presence-of-mind to pull it off.

I figure I'd have the first two covered, but not the last one.

(Oh, and the front-biased mass distribution of the CL would theoretically be better at pulling that counterattack off. Back in the old days of automobiledom the early FWD cars [Citroen Traction Avant comes to mind] were the vehicles of choice for French gangsters for their foolproofness in the chaos of vehicular assaults. Also note that the movie "Ronin" faithfully reflected the same philosophy in the choice of an Audi S4 over, say, a BMW M5, which is probably much faster on road & track, but too unstable for attack/pursuit work. The same thing goes in Australia for the Subaru WRX, which is the choice of bandits for heists.)