DeMayo Truck Accident Hypothetical: The Carnage of a Truck versus Motorcycle Crash
You don’t need to be told that North Carolina truck accidents can be dangerous – even devastating.
If you’ve been seriously injured in a truck crash – or you someone who needs help after an accident – you can personally attest to the fundamentally “unfair” advantage trucks have over other vehicles on the road. As we’ve talked about before, this advantage is due to the fact that trucks are more massive. They are thus able to bully lighter vehicles on the road, since they can impart far more force. If a 20-ton truck crashes head-on into a 2-ton car, and both vehicles are going the same speed (in opposite directions), the truck will be able to exert 10 times as much force on the car as the car will be able to exert on the truck.
This isn’t to say that the trucker can’t get hurt — or that the truck is somehow impervious to damage. But understand that this difference is like tossing a pebble into a pond versus tossing a large rock. Which act makes the bigger splash?
We can take this metaphor further.
Imagine if a 20-ton truck crashes into a 200-pound motorcycle. Same situation. This gives the truck a roughly 200 to 1 advantage, force wise, over the motorcycle. It would be kind of like what happens when your car smashes into a bee on the freeway. The bee doesn’t stand a chance.
Here is a good analogy to help really clarify this mental picture. Imagine that 20-ton truck slamming into a brick wall at 20 miles per hour. There obviously would be a crash – presumably a lot of damage. But how would the truck’s impact against the wall compare to the force generated if you drove your 200-pound motorcycle into the same wall and took just as long to stop?
To make the motorcycle exert as much force as the truck, you would have to pile drive it into the wall at 4,000 miles an hour! That’s faster than any non-military jet plane (and probably most military planes) in existence. At 4,000 miles per hour, you could fly practically from Charlotte to Hawaii in an hour.
That’s a lot of force – that’s a huge velocity – many times the speed of sound.
And that’s just for a truck traveling at 20 miles per hour crashing into a brick wall.
Imagine a truck traveling 60 miles, crashing into that same brick wall. A motorcycle 1/200th of its mass would need to travel at 200 times that speed to exert the same amount of force, assuming that both vehicles take identical times to stop. That means the bike would have to travel at 12,000 miles per hour.
That’s basically rocket speed!
If you or someone you care has been hurt in a motorcycle or trucking accident in Charlotte or elsewhere in North Carolina, the DeMayo Law team would love to provide a free and confidential case evaluation for you.
