How Not to Tow Your Truck

We’ve all been there – stranded on the side of the road, looking for a reliable tow truck. Now, there’s the right way of going about this and then there’s the wrong way. And in this incident, we get to see how it’s not supposed to be done. Thankfully, the only harm that comes of this can be seen below.

But it brings up an issue that gets too oft overlooked when dealing with towing another vehicle. There’s a concept in physics known as inertia. It’s defined as the resistance of any object to a change in its state of motion – which can include things such as speed and direction. An object at rest tends to stay at rest.

And conversely, a moving object keeps moving until a force is applied to it. Thankfully, living on planet earth, gravity acts as a downward force which brings all objects to rest given enough time. It certainly saved these truck drivers from getting into much more hassle than either would have wanted. Cars that are parked tend to stay parked unless work is applied. (more…)

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In this case, when you take a two ton truck and push it into the back of another, the force applied will overcome inertia and translate into the parked vehicle’s forward momentu