From trucks taking unusual turns on the motorway, to drivers packing a year’s worth of delivery work onto one overloaded run, sometimes even the most practised road users get caught breaking the rules – or even breaking their vehicles.

Everyone who has ever driven a car will have an anecdote describing the idiocy of a fellow road user. It doesn’t take much for the minority of drivers who behave poorly – or dangerously – to draw attention to themselves. Some of them are even caught on camera, and the Internet has now become a resource for people to show off the incidents that they have captured on camera. YouTube is full of car caper clips, from racing calamities to vans on a delivery working hard not to spill their loads at a sharp corner.

There are some kinds of YouTube clips that are so prevalent as to be almost unavoidable. It seems no matter what you type in you’ll get clips of teenagers filming ill-advised stunts such as ruining the family car while their parents are away. There are all sorts of crashes and smashes where the cars suffer damage while some kid tries to do something spectacular the camera, showing off with their friends. One of the funniest I’ve seen is where a lad in a huge 4x4 boasts about the off-road capabilities of ‘his ride,’ only to flip it over backwards onto its roof going up a steep hillock.

Peer Review

What is surprising is that you can also find footage online of lorry drivers driving inappropriately. What’s frightening (and dangerous) is that many of the clips are filmed by other trucker drivers on the road; it seems that to pass the time during their delivery work truckers will film ‘name and shame’ their fellow road users.

Apart from the odd clip where someone in an open top van spills their cargo onto the road, the lorry-related YouTube clips – which mostly come from America – aren’t as dangerous as the teenage car calamities, amounting to a few trucks speeding or overtaking where they shouldn’t. What’s interesting is that it appears drivers are policing themselves to some degree, and you can hear them haranguing each other over the CB radio. It’s usually done in good humour, and you can pick up on the banter, too, if you can decode the regional accents, that is; after all, long-distance delivery work is an international and multicultural business.

Delivery Work Simulator

There are a number of driving schools out there that specialise in lorry driving skills. In America, the newest tool for teaching trucking skills is a simulator similar to the ones used for schooling airplane pilots. In cabins equipped with the same controls as a lorry cab (wheel, pedals, buttons, shifts and levers) trainees can try and fail tests created by their instructors without endangering other vehicles or their own.

The simulator can recreate a huge number of scenarios and hazards, and can even teach skills like shifting gears uphill and driving in the mountains at night. The machine reproduces all the environments a serious lorry driver might encounter while performing his delivery work: different weather and different roads. You can also try driving a variety of vehicles, from a municipal dump truck to a snow plough, something you may not get the opportunity to do in real life.