One of the scariest scenarios you can imagine is getting into a one-car accident in the middle of the night due to an unexpected malfunction.
That’s what one driver experienced in his truck when a wheel came off it. Though the driver wasn’t hurt and the vehicle was remarkably intact, it still left a mechanic who’s seen a lot in his day wondering what caused it to happen.
The video comes courtesy of Royalty Auto Service (@royaltyautoservice), a St. Marys, Georgia-based mechanic shop with an impressive track record of viral TikTok videos about car repairs. This one, which went up Oct. 31, has registered more than 339,000 views since.
What happened?
“Got quite the situation,” begins owner Sherwood Cooke, Jr., explaining the scenario with the GMC Sierra Denali truck in question. “He does 3,000 to 5,000 miles a week on this vehicle. It’s got 380,000 miles on it right now. Clean vehicle—and has his oil service done, … tire rotations done every few weeks. And he had the oil service done. They forgot to rotate the tires, so he had to take it somewhere and get the tires rotated.”
The driver had a trailer behind him, as he typically does, but with unusual and precious cargo: a Corvette worth $130,000.
He reported hearing an unusual noise for a few minutes with his left rear tire, and then it came off, disappearing in a median on a South Carolina highway covered with fallen trees from a recent hurricane.
An unusual break
Showing the studs shorn uniformly clean on the rotor, Cooke ponders, “We don’t know if maybe the wheel was was over-torqued. It almost looked like it was maybe over-torqued because they’re snapped in the same spot on every single one of them. We’re definitely gonna pull all the rest of them off, and we’re gonna check the torque on them and just see where they’re at so it doesn’t happen on another one.”
“We need to double-check all those studs because if it compromised these studs to this point, it may’ve compromised every stud on the vehicle,” he continues. “We don’t know, but we’re gonna definitely check them.”
He then remarks, “This was a miracle. No damage to the trailer, no damage to the car in the trailer, no damage to the body on this vehicle because it hit the rotor, and because of the suspension that he’s got in here, it didn’t push this up into the end of the vehicle where it would have let the vehicle lay on the ground.”
He also remarked on the theme in the on-screen caption, “This was a miracle that no one got hurt,” given the havoc that a freely rolling wheel might have caused if it crossed the median into oncoming traffic. He noted that the late hour of the accident may have also mitigated the situation a bit.
How safe is a Denali?
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Sierra maxes out at five stars on overall safety and side crashes for recent years, anywhere from four to five stars on frontal crashes depending on the specific model and year, and consistently rates four stars on rollover risk.
Car and Driver‘s review of the 2025 edition lauds its safety features. “The half-ton Sierra has a host of standard driver-assistance technology. It’s also available with nifty off-road assists, such as a Terrain mode that allows one-pedal driving in low-speed situations. The Sierra offers a multicamera system that can give the driver a view of what’s behind when towing a trailer as if the trailer is not there. The Denali can also be equipped with GM’s Super Cruise hands-free-driving tech, which operates on a vast network of roads across the country and can be used with a trailer attached. However, it’ll only change lanes on its own if there’s nothing hooked up to the truck.”
The overall review puts it at 8.5 out of 10 and fifth among full-size trucks. The Denali edition is among the most expensive Sierra currently available, priced at $67,890, and the Denali Ultimate costs a whopping $86,690.
@royaltyautoservice Glad everyone is safe! #gmc #trucktok #mechaniclife #cartok #crazy #fyp #foryou #viral #automotive #stitch ♬ Pop beat BGM / long version(1283324) – nightbird_bgm
Online truck experts weigh in
A number of commenters weighed in with their diagnoses.
“I am a mechanic,” one offers. “I am just wondering if those lug nuts been torqued too many times? Kind of like a head bolt. That’s a question. How many times can he torque a bolt before it breaks?”
Another said, “Lug nuts were loose, the vibration sheered the studs. I’ve seen it a ton of times. The tell tale is what the holes in the wheel look like, they’re probably egg shaped.”
Someone else asserted, “That’s the cause of over use of a air gun and not using a torque wrench to spec.”
“Seeing how he heard something,” another weighed in, “I have the suspicion that they actually were under torque and not tightened.”
The first question actually prompted a response video from Cooke, where he noted that the front tires were a little too tightly torqued, but the other back wheel was under-torqued significantly, which he believes was the case with the wheel that did come off.
The Daily Dot has reached out to the creator via TikTok comment and online media form and to GMC via email.
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