This is going to be more likely to happen with Shapps making it easier to get an HGV licence.
The only news articles about this I could find were the Daily Mail and the Sun, so I went for the least-worst option. No idea why the headline is in feet.
Unlikely on a motorway.
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When I drive our RV, especially when I have the motorcycle on the carrier, I pay attention to drivers passing me just in case they are trying to tell me something about my rig that I can’t see.
I learned a long long time ago when I started riding a motorcycle if you can’t see the driver in their mirror they can’t see you.
What I’ve learned since we got the RV, truck drivers are more likely to let you merge or change lanes than passenger vehicles. I learned a lot about driving the RV by watching trucks.
Driving that RV gives you quite a perspective about what the big rigs go through.
But… I can’t imagine not knowing you’re pushing a car.
Not sure either, but the number of feet suggests that the truck driver wasn’t oblivious. At least, not for very long. Decelerating one of those things safely takes some time.
I think they get “65 feet” from the “20m” that the owner of courier firm quoted (“He said ‘I had an incident,’ but he didn’t explain that he was pushing this car for about 20 metres - maybe even more.”), but if you watch the video the lorry covers at least 200m without slowing down.
I’m pretty sure it’s the southbound section of junction 10 on the M1 here, and it’s about 250m between the bridge that the lorry is under at the start of the clip, to the gantry where it finally stops.
(While trying to work out which bit of the M1 it was on, I found this delightfully wonky bit of Streetview imagery, it seems like the camera came unmounted from the top of the car)
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I’ll grant you that big rigs are difficult to drive, which is all the more reason for more strict standards for the drivers. My perspective, though is as the driver of a car that is a tiny fraction of the truck’s mass I drive at the 70 MPH that is the speed limit on I-5 and yet have the big rigs come shooting up behind me and hang on my bumper even though the speed limit for large trucks is 60. Don’t ask me to feel sorry for their drivers.
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