Most of the time we travel down the road and don’t realize that there are built in ways for safety to help us on the highway. We’ve done an impressive job of cutting through the landscape with roads that travel up and down mountains, cut through the valleys and offer some interesting inclines and declines for us to use on our way to and from many areas. Most of our vehicles are small and light by the standards of driving, but for those who drive the large eighteen-wheelers to haul whatever cargo needs to get from the distribution center to the store there is an added safety measure along the roads for them to use.

Hopefully you never have to use a runaway truck ramp or see a truck that does need to use one, but the nice thing to know about these ramps is the are effective and can help truckers avoid more costly accidents than what could happen. When you consider a truckload of normal product traveling to your typical store has a value of that product which comes in over $100,000 saving as much of the product as possible is important to the company that owns the merchandise.

Of course the safety of the driver is also important and a rig that jackknifes and flips can be deadly and many truckers don’t survive such accidents. Because these massive machines have so much more weight than your personally owned vehicle it’s important to make sure these truckers have a way to save themselves and their truck when the vehicle starts to careen out of control. That’s what the slow down ramps are for and when they can be used to make sure truckers can be safe on the road and have a place they can escape disaster.

These out of control vehicle ramps are simple, but seriously effective. At one point in the ramp the vehicle encounters loose gravel that’s been graded at an upward angle to help slow down the vehicle. When a truck hits this area of the ramp it will come to a stop quickly and with more control than it would have if it was left to continue down the road out of control. This simple design has been an effective lifesaving device for many truck drivers over the years, giving them a place they can still salvage their truck and their lives.

While the need to use this ramp is frightening enough, you can see from the video below how quickly a truck is brought to a halt and how much control it stops with. Whether it was the brakes, the accelerator or the steering that caused the truck to need the ramp isn’t certain, but there’s no doubt the driver was more than thankful they were able to use an out of control ramp to ensure they could salvage the truck, the merchandise and most of all their life. Check out this video and see just how scary an out of control truck can be.