Skip To...
Road safety depends on every driver understanding and properly operating the essential functions of their vehicle, especially when those vehicles pose serious risks to others. If you do not know how to use critical safety features as basic as turning your vehicle lights on, ask someone or even Google it. Don’t say you’ll “figure it out later” while actively driving on public roads. In Minnesota, a man who was driving his car late at night recently came upon a truck driver who appeared to be operating her vehicle without her trailer lights on.
According to the man, he noticed the truck driving several miles ahead of him in the dark and decided to pull the driver over to alert her about the issue. In the video he shared on TikTok, the man can be heard asking the woman whether she was aware that her trailer lights were off. She responded that she had tried to locate them but could not find where the lights were controlled.
The man was so shocked by her answer that he had to ask her to repeat herself. “You don’t know where the lights at?” he asked. He warned her that her actions could easily cause a serious accident and put others at risk. When the man questioned how long she had held a commercial driver’s license, the woman said she had been licensed for only two months.
Although she acknowledged that she was wrong to be driving in the dark, it did not seem that she fully understood the level of risk she was creating, as she continued repeating that she had attempted to find the lights but was unsuccessful.
Driver Struggles to Produce CDL During Exchange
Eventually, the man asked if he could see her CDL. The woman initially reached for a paper on the passenger seat and handed it to him, but he told her that what she was holding was not it. After he asked her if she knew what a CDL was and she responded that she did, he asked her again to hand it to him.
However, for someone who claimed to know what it was, she did not reach back to the passenger seat where she had placed the paper earlier. Instead, she stood up from her seat and began searching in a compartment above her and inside the truck’s cab. The man had to remind her that she had already given it to him before she returned to the passenger seat, picked up the paper, and handed it to him again.
After briefly asking her a few questions, including whether she was from the United States — to which she responded that she was not — he handed the document back to her. He also told her that while he was letting her go, he did not believe she should be driving under those conditions.
In the video’s caption, the man clarified that the trailer’s electrical wiring appeared to be damaged, which prevented the lights from working. He also added that he called the authorities, who ultimately handled the situation afterward.
Netizens React to the Minnesota Driving Incident
In the comments, many netizens were worried that inexperienced drivers are being placed behind the wheel of large commercial vehicles without adequate oversight. “These are the drivers I’m sharing the roads with?” one person wrote. “They just hire anybody now days [sic] for truck driving,” another commented. “No respectable company would let someone that [sic] only been driving 2 months drive by themselves OTR,” a third said. “She was putting so many people in danger!!” a fourth added.
Some commenters also praised the man for intervening, with one writing, “Thank you for your service,” and another saying, “I’m glad you recorded it. I knew about some of the nonsense that occurs in the trucking industry, but this is beyond outrageous.”
