Thankfully, both drivers involved in this genuinely scary crash managed to walk away, according to the video description. Still, you definitely don’t envy any of them.
Frontal collisions are the worst – the absolute worst. When it comes to the impact forces that your vehicle can handle, you’d much rather hit a stationary object or have a side collision (though debatable), than having to add together the kinetic energy of two moving objects as they’re unsuccessfully playing chicken with each other.
Having said that, nobody in this video was “playing” and the man behind the wheel of the incoming truck probably woke up right in the middle of a real-life nightmare.
The driver of the “dashcam truck” was the one who had to experience the whole ordeal, start to finish. Even if you’re paying optimum attention to the road (as you should), seeing a pair of headlights suddenly come straight at you will shock you, to start with.
You’re then left with one of two choices. Brake and steer left, or brake and steer right. There are other choices, yes, such as not doing anything and hoping it’s all a dream, but that generally tends to end badly.
In this case, the driver chose to steer to the left, which actually had the added “bonus” of more danger, since a car could have sped past the sleepy man’s truck at any second. However, there wasn’t much time to react, and at one point it became somewhat clear that yanking the steering wheel left was the obvious choice.
Unfortunately by then, it was too late. Or so it seems. Maybe the driver could have steered left sooner (looks like there’s room) but at this point we’re just speculating.