Originally published at: Video: A truck loses its brakes and barely misses a school bus full of kids, caught on four cameras | Boing Boing
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That’s going to be an interesting insurance claim for the pickup truck driver. Good thing the video evidence is online. I wonder if they would still be considered at fault for the fender bender even though it likely saved lives and vastly more damage to their own vehicle and the one they hit.
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Seriously. That driver’s 3 ft back up made the whole escape possible!
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Holy shit balls, that was close.
Reminds me of the time my ex-wife was with the kiddo and cresting a hill saw traffic stopped on both sides of a 2 lane road and managed to thread the two rows of cars with out hitting anyone. Whew.
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Which means your ex-wife was driving way too fast for the conditions of the road. In all cases you should be able to stop for anything stopped in the road at any point. The text of the traffic laws differ from state to state but they all have something similar. Here’s the text of the the appropriate law in my state:
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Not going to disagree with you at all. 
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My experience with insurance companies says that the pickup truck driver’s claim will be denied since they could have driven forward and right into the ditch instead of reverse.
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Where is young Clark Kent when you need him?
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Yikes, that kid walking to the back of the bus 
Reorder the clips and it could even be scarier.
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Why can’t truck drivers downshift to slow down? Pardon my ignorance, I’ve never driven a big rig, but it seems like that guy was hauling ass. Wouldn’t continually downshifting have helped him get things to a more manageable speed? Same thing with trucks that lose their brakes on the freeway and end up using one of those emergency ramps. Is there no way to slow down via shifting?
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Transmissions are much more expensive than brake pads?
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I’m not sure there was time for engine braking. Those trucks can have up to 18 gears, which is a lot of shifting, plus each downshift takes a few seconds to take effect, so even if you skipped over gears it might not have been enough. The weight of his load may have had something to do with it too. Plus it seemed like the dude was straight up freaking out.
But don’t listen to me. All I know about trucks is what I learned from the song “Convoy.”
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10-4 Rubber Duck.
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Kinell! That’s one scary ass pink truck!
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This is correct. He just learned he didn’t have brakes so there wasn’t time. He wasn’t “hauling ass” either. He was doing the limit. It’s just that a situation like that makes you realize how fast 45mph actually is.
Truck transmissions are not synchromesh so you have to double clutch every gear change. If you’ve never driven that way, it’s clutch out, shift to neutral, clutch in, rev match input shaft, clutch out, shift to new gear, rev match input shaft again, clutch in. Many race cars are also driven this way on downshifts into corners because some racing transmissions also do not have synchros.
On top of that, as said, trucks can have 18 gears or more plus multiple final drive gears. It’s a lot of time to work through all that. Far far more time than he had in this situation. This is why runaway truck ramps are a thing.
He may have had time for the Jake Brake, which is a more advanced form of engine braking that some trucks have whereby the exhaust valves open during normal engine compression, providing greatly increased engine braking (and making a hell of a racket, which is why many municipalities ban them). Not all trucks have them though, and this one may not. You’d hear it in the video for sure if he had pulled it.
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Thanks for that explanation!
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It’s a good thing they didn’t collide. Even heavily engineered chassis with ample crumple zones and such won’t necessarily save you from vehicle-collision levels of energy; and, unless something has changed drastically since I last rode one, school bus bodies are about one step above tinfoil.
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Funny thing about school busses– against all intuition they are the safest things on the road by a huge margin. Seemingly cheaply made, no seatbelts, metal tooth-cruncher seat backs, etc. Yet the data on them is clear. They are eight times safer than anything else:
Not that it would be okay to be rear ended at 45 mph by a tractor trailer of course, but school busses are still fascinating things safety-wise.
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