Every day I log on to see everybody losing their shit “he did something illegal!!!” Ok bro yeah it’s every day and nobody is doing anything so it’s gonna keep being every day
I can’t believe that Elon just has to say that teslas are safe, convincing people to buy them, when a simple online search will reveal that they are the deadliest cars on the road - by a wide margin.
Truck Mounted Attenuators are engineered to get rear-ended. There is a human sitting inside.
A TMA is a $50,000 sacrificial vehicle. The entire back end is an aluminum honeycomb cartridge that crushes in a controlled sequence, absorbing the kinetic energy of a 4,000-pound vehicle at 70 mph so the work crew ahead stays alive.
The driver parks the truck behind a pothole patching crew. Watches the mirrors. Waits to absorb whatever comes.
Missouri owns more than 500 of these. 50 hits last year works out to roughly one per week, every week, in a single state. Each replacement runs $50K. That is ~$2.5 million in destroyed vehicles in 2025 alone.
Every hit is a driver moving fast enough on a highway that they never saw a full-size truck with a flashing arrow board, LED signals, and a crash cushion sticking off the back. One motorist hit a MoDOT TMA at 70 mph with no brake marks on the record.
The average text takes five seconds to read. At 55 mph that is more than a football field driven blind. Missouri passed a hands-free law in 2023 because the baseline for driver attention dropped far enough that road crews could not safely repair a pothole without a sacrificial vehicle between them and traffic.
TMAs exist as a physical admission that on any given highway, a meaningful share of drivers are not looking at the road. 50 hits a year is what that costs to absorb.