On the edge of an Atlanta road, the rear of a small Kia appears to have been crushed as if run through a compactor. Metal folds up to the back seats, the rear window is shattered, and debris litter the asphalt. Opposite it, the Ram pickup that struck it shows only a slightly damaged bumper. This scene, filmed and posted on TikTok, went viral and rekindled the question of how much damage big pickups can cause to small cars.
The driver, Grace Roberts, aka @not.yoursavinggrace, appears in the video with an ice pack on her head at the roadside. She had just survived this Kia–Ram crash while the vehicle was stopped, according to her account. In overlay text, she vents: “I hope the sun explodes, this big truck just ran into me while I was stopped”, she says in her TikTok video. The clip has racked up over 2.7 million views, and many commenters focus less on the buzz and more on the disparity in damage between the Kia and the Ram pickup.
A Kia–Ram crash that reveals the gap between small cars and big pickups
In the footage, the rear of the Kia is crushed to the point that it’s hard to tell where the trunk ends. The sheet metal is dented all the way into the cabin, the rear windows are blown out, and debris covers the roadway. The Ram, by contrast, appears to have sustained only a localized deformation, very low down at the front bumper. It’s hard to believe these two vehicles endured the same collision. The photos don’t reveal all the forces at play or any hidden damage, but they leave little doubt about the violence inflicted on the small Kia.
This visual imbalance illustrates a phenomenon long studied by road-safety researchers: crash incompatibility between heavy and light vehicles. When a much heavier vehicle strikes a lighter one, the heavier tends to push the lighter forward along its trajectory. The occupants of the lighter car absorb higher forces. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has shown that, in studies of crashes between 2017 and 2022, pickups were about 1.9 times more likely than cars to kill the driver of the struck vehicle. In the 2011–2016 period, this ratio reached 2.5, a decline tied to design changes such as aligning energy-absorption structures between pickups and sedans, but weight remains a parameter that engineering cannot erase.
Special license for big pickups? The Atlanta video rekindles the debate
In the comments under Grace Roberts’ video, compassion quickly gives way to a broader debate about dangerous big pickups. One user sums up a sentiment shared by many: “The big [expletive] trucks need a separate license. The standard driver’s license isn’t enough.” Another shared their own catastrophe: “My parents’ car was wrecked by a guy driving a relatively calm F-250 Super Duty… they’re definitely handicapped because of him.” Some call for an intermediate licensing category between a standard car license and a professional-driver license, while others advocate at least higher mandatory insurance for these behemoths.
In Georgia, however, the law does not distinguish these heavy pickups from other passenger vehicles for licensing purposes. A commercial Class B license is required only for a single vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating of at least 11.8 metric tons (roughly 26,000 pounds). Class A covers combination vehicles with a trailer that exceeds the same threshold, with a trailer over 4.5 tons. Below that, a regular car license suffices to drive a Ram pickup or a hulking F-250—an ordering that online observers scrutinize, but no single incident, however spectacular, can settle. For a French driver accustomed to a Category B license limited to 3.5 tons and far rarer pickups on the roads back home, these Atlanta images remind us that as vehicles grow bigger, the gap with small city cars widens in a crash.
