Photo: Screenshot from LiveLeak
Road safety is a very complex concept, but as the name suggests, it all needs to start with the road itself. If the driving surface isn't at least decent (asking for "optimal" would probably make us sound absurd), then all sorts of bad things can happen.
Drivers in countries that have notoriously bad roads are used to it, so they know better than to approach the legally maximum allowed speed when the road surface imposes its own restrictions. The more dangerous situations arise when an otherwise impeccable road suddenly develops an issue.
Personally, I was the victim of such a situation that in the end led to two wrecked tires and one chipped wheel after the car's right-hand side went through a large, sharp-edged pothole at speed. You could say it was my fault for not spotting it in time, but the situation was more complicated than that.
But if a single pothole on a clean road is indeed flashing like a lighthouse, a ridge caused by extreme heat is much more difficult to spot. Especially when it forms on a busy highway, where cars drive at speeds of 70 mph or more. Watching them hop like bunnies is funny, but I bet the owners of those cars didn't find anything amusing about the damage their vehicles might have suffered nor the potentially dangerous situations a crest like that might have caused.
Just imagine what would have happened if, for some reason, one of the cars didn't approach it perpendicularly, but at an angle. Or if a driver got scared and turned the wheels while in mid-air. The car would have spun, and a chain reaction wouldn't have been that unlikely.
Luckily, nothing like that has been reported, and all we're left with is this mildly amusing video of cars that seem to hop on command as if they were the sheep we count when trying to go to sleep. In fact, that's probably why I feel slightly woozy right now.
Personally, I was the victim of such a situation that in the end led to two wrecked tires and one chipped wheel after the car's right-hand side went through a large, sharp-edged pothole at speed. You could say it was my fault for not spotting it in time, but the situation was more complicated than that.
But if a single pothole on a clean road is indeed flashing like a lighthouse, a ridge caused by extreme heat is much more difficult to spot. Especially when it forms on a busy highway, where cars drive at speeds of 70 mph or more. Watching them hop like bunnies is funny, but I bet the owners of those cars didn't find anything amusing about the damage their vehicles might have suffered nor the potentially dangerous situations a crest like that might have caused.
Just imagine what would have happened if, for some reason, one of the cars didn't approach it perpendicularly, but at an angle. Or if a driver got scared and turned the wheels while in mid-air. The car would have spun, and a chain reaction wouldn't have been that unlikely.
Luckily, nothing like that has been reported, and all we're left with is this mildly amusing video of cars that seem to hop on command as if they were the sheep we count when trying to go to sleep. In fact, that's probably why I feel slightly woozy right now.
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