Despite what driverless cars may have you believe, driving a car is easier than it looks. Once you comprehend all the tools at your disposal, get comfortable with the controls, and get enough experience under your belt, you can probably go your entire life without a crash. The problem is we’re not always operating at 100% when we climb into a car, and we’re never the only person on the road.
We asked our readers last week what blunders behind the wheel still haunt their dreams. While I still feel terrible for making a left-hand turn onto the wrong side of the road, others have done far worse. The responses in the comments section made me shudder with the sudden realization of how poorly things can go with a very heavy vehicle. I don’t know what I’d do if I smashed a hole through my parents’ home or ripped the hose off a pump at a gas station. Without further ado, here are the moments out on the road that still keep you up at night.
Witnessing the world’s slowest car crash
It wasn’t something I did, but what someone else did that stuck with me to this day. I was working retail with my friend, and we decided to take a walk to the local Chinese restaurant from our store in a plaza. In the plaza, there’s an intersection with a road that prohibits shipping trucks, and it’s noticeable with concrete bollards and a height restriction sign, you can drive through it in a normal car as long as you are careful to avoid the bollards. As we were walking back with our order, we turned our heads to see a person driving a 2000s Lincoln slowly from that truck-restricted road, going probably <5 MPH. What happened was the slowest crash of the car tearing the driver-side front end and door along the bollard. No one got hurt, fortunately, but it stuck with me in a “how did you manage to not avoid the obviously unavoidable thing?” sort of way.xtagstartz/p>
Taking the fuel nozzle for a ride
I was driving at about 5:00 a.m. in my wife’s brand-new Civic Hybrid Sport. It’s not anything fancy, but the newest car we had ever had prior to that was a 9-year-old Outback, so my wife babied that car to death. I filled it up, ran in to get a breakfast pizza, and ate it standing outside the car so I wouldn’t drop any crumbs or grease or whatever. I finished, wiped my hands thoroughly, got in the car, and drove off with the fuel nozzle still in the gas tank. Snapped that thing clean off the pump and busted the actuator on the fuel door.
Idiot.
Submitted by: Alex Nicastro
Save the delivery, wreck the truck
When I was in college in the ’80s, I did delivery for a local pharmacy. The delivery vehicle was a manual Datsun truck. One day as I was leaving the store on the winding drive behind the strip mall it was in, all the bags I had in the passenger seat started to slide off. I reached over to stop them…but the steering wheel slipped in my hand, and I ran straight into a steel bollard. I was only going 10 or 15 mph, but it sure did a number on the front of the truck. My boss had also been my childhood baseball coach, and fortunately he didn’t fire me.
Submitted by: CSX321
Literally driving blind
I misplaced my glasses at a party. I didn’t feel safe taking the freeway home, so I stayed on surface streets. I wasn’t familiar with the surface streets, but I was confident I could figure it out. I got pulled over, and the cop asked me if I knew why they pulled me over. That’s when I realized I was driving the wrong way on a one-way street in front of the police department.
Submitted by: Rollerrobb
The personal odometer is starting to get high
Happened 6 weeks ago. I have driven over a million miles accident-free. Between driving city transit buses, highway motorcoaches and working as a tour bus driver plus personal driving, I never had an accident. But 6 weeks ago, at 67 years old, I fell asleep on the highway. I drove into the ditch. Thank god it was a big, wide ditch with a gentle slope and not damage was done. But I learned I am not the same driver I once was when I could do a 1,000 miles in a day.
Submitted by: Rallyman
To the insurers: car crashed at a standstill while empty
About seven years ago, I parked in a legal spot at the grocery store. While I was inside, a drunk driver mounted the curb, drove across about 10 feet of grass, and hit my former car. His insurance declined to pay on the grounds that, if my car hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have hit it which somehow meant I was at fault.
My insurance carrier, or more precisely their lawyers, had fun with that one. And yes, I had to break my perfect record by filing the claim with them.
Does that count?
Submitted by: John
Not every paved road is driveable
Having to make a hurried three-point turn on a slender cobblestone road during vacation in Italy after nearly driving into a ZTL (traffic-limited zone) in a little hilltop town. I still feel the eyes of the locals watching me in judgment as I apologized in broken Italian and fought with the balky shifter in the rented diesel Fiat. Lesson learned: always get a map of the ZTLs in Italy.
Submitted by: BC
Wrong state, but whatever
I laugh at it looking back, but when I was 18, I ended up in the wrong state after driving for 4-5 hours. This was before even the GPS cig lighter navigation things. It was all paper maps. I was on a trip with family and everyone had gone to sleep, so I just kept driving on some highway and ended up in South Carolina, when that whole state was not on the route. But hey, gasoline was 99 cents, the nation was running a surplus, I was young, and times were great.
Submitted by: Tex
Putting your first project car through your parents’ house
While in high school, I bought a ’68 Camaro. I spent many days fixing it and learning about maintenance, eventually making it a fairly nice car with many NOS body panels on the front end. My junior year, I hired out the body work. I had the car repainted to its factory cordovan maroon color. Then it came time for the engine rebuild. I sourced a 68 small block and heads and opted for a factory Z28 manifold.
One day while finishing up the engine install, my neighbor came over and asked, “How’s it run?” I had just reconnected the automatic transmission to the crank, but not yet the shifter. I reached in through the rolled-down window and turned the key. The car fired right up and took off straight into the back wall of my parents’ garage.
At that point, my neighbor quietly said, “I think I’ll go home now.” Luckily, the damage to the car and house was minor, as I was able to turn the car off almost as soon as it took off. We repaired the wall and the car maintained a broken grille, bent bumper, header, and valance panel for the next few years.
Submitted by: C M
Can’t remember the crash, but your body does
My accident with my 240Z on the 401 in Toronto with a 50-foot tractor-trailer – the driver was drunk. The only thing I remember was a white wheel. I woke up 3 days later in the hospital. It took me 3 years to get back behind the wheel. And my back still hurts to this day (that was 40 years ago).
Submitted by: Luc Desaulniers (minardi)
