A Truck Driver’s Nightmare

This video shows a truck driver’s nightmare, one of many nightmares which can cross the mind of a truck driver out on the road.

In this situation and the driver has started descending a grade with a fully loaded truck and has clearly selected the wrong gear with which to descend. Unable to get into a lower gear, the driver is now, therefore, dependent on the service brakes to get to the foot of the grade safely, as the brake fade gets worse.

This is one of the many nightmares, which truck drivers will have in the back of their mind, travelling along Australian highways. One of the others is the scenario where the truck is heading along a major roads at 100 km/h and a car decides to pull out in front of the truck well within that truck’s safe braking distance.

Then there’s the oncoming traffic veering into the truck’s lane to overtake something and the driver expecting the truck to pull up instantly or drive off the road. There are many of these small nightmares, which pop into driver’s brain on a long shift.

This particular nightmare, on the descent from Mt Victoria, was certainly a stressful experience for the driver, and the fact that the cars involved realised exactly what was going on and moved out of the lane in order to let the truck through showed good sense and awareness.

However our friend in the caravan clearly had no idea what was going on and never looks behind even though he’s pulling a very large van behind him. He was forced to move the truck in between the wall to the left and the caravan to the right and this gave the driver just enough room to be able to get into the arrester bed/safety ramp without colliding full on with the caravan and its towing vehicle.

This is not an everyday occurrence for a truck handling descent and Australia, but every time a truck driver goes down a grade like this, the possibility that this may happen is always going to be in the back of the driver’s mind.