The internet is full of practical tips and tricks. Unfortunately, it’s also full of plenty of weird PSAs as well. A new TikTok, from user @oldtenderman, has surfaced that falls into the latter category. The roughly minute-long clip is supposed to dissuade people from speeding—which isn’t a bad thing. The way the creators went about it though was particularly silly, and it’s being mocked now on the internet. In the video, a red van ambles down a desert highway at 7mph and rams directly into a giant suspended medieval flail (because those are always so pesky hanging out on the road). The video repeats several times, with the van increasing in speed each time.
The results are what you would expect—the van gets increasingly damaged as its speed increases at the time of impact. But the video keeps going until it veers into complete ridiculousness. It gets downright comical as the van begins getting up to speeds of 155mph and beyond. At that point, the clip begins showing the van being catapulted into the sky and crashing after hitting the flail. The TikTok account where the video originated from has 1.9 million followers and is full of similar speeding crash videos.
The van video was reposted to Twitter by a user named @kdhanjal12, who espouses some problematic viewpoints. They defended the video from a few rebukes saying, “I don’t think it’s anything hilarious, you should be thankful that it’s not real life experiment the drivers would’ve been dead by now. This is just a computerized stimulation.” They added when a user brought up that no one is going 300mph on the interstate, “You’ve raised a good question. They might or might not change that too when we have full on electric vehicles on the road.” Ultimately, speeding is dangerous and should be avoided—but this PSA against it was a bit of a fail. See some of the internet’s reactions below.
