The number of crashes with road crews on Ohio's highways has been increasing dramatically. In 2024, 84 road crews with the Ohio Department of Transportation were hit by a driver who wasn’t paying attention or was impaired. That number jumped to 125 in 2025.
ODOT is trying something new to protect its trucks and employees from being hit by errant drivers. The agency is testing big, autonomous dump truck-like vehicles with what’s known as an attenuator on the back of them. They're called "crash trucks" and follow and park behind road crews.
“We have a dump truck that has an attenuator on the back that is meant to absorb the energy of a crash," said ODOT press secretary Matt Bruning.
Bruning said the crash trucks would use a technique called platooning, where the driverless truck would follow behind the actual road crew, parking behind them on the side of the road. He said the crash truck technology is currently being tested in Marysville to see how they perform in crashes with drivers.
“Obviously, we’d rather them hit nothing, but if they are going to hit something, we want something that is a safer thing to hit," Bruning said.
If the autonomous crash trucks are successful at the test facility, Bruning said they could be used statewide in the future. Other states, like Colorado and Minnesota, are already using these trucks to protect road crews.
