By Holly Ocasio Rizzo, Vehix.comHave you heard the tale of the guy in Arizona who installed a jet-assisted takeoff unit on his old Chevy? In an attempt to zip down the open road, he missed a curve and inadvertently blasted himself into the side of a cliff four miles away. Highway patrol officers, as the story goes, found the car-shaped hole in the morning.
It’s a great story and a decades-old one, too. Now comes the dream-shattering part: It isn’t true.
However, many outrageously bone-headed automotive feats are true. In some cases, the boneheads walk among us; in others – well, let’s bow our heads in a moment of silence, and read on. Here are a few natural selections.
Diplomacy under pressureAdrienne Brown, wife of singer James Brown, was stopped by police in Georgia and charged with driving under the influence, speeding and criminal trespass. When her case came to trial, her lawyer claimed she was entitled to diplomatic immunity. Why? Because a year before the offense, a U.S. representative from Georgia proclaimed James Brown to be “our No. 1 ambassador.” It didn’t matter anyway that Brown was an ambassador of soul, not of the nation; American citizens, ambassadors or not, still are prosecuted for crimes committed on U.S. soil.
Pictures speak a thousand wordsA driver in Campbell, Calif., got a $45 ticket after his car was caught on photo radar. In response, he sent the Campbell Police Department a photo of $45. The police chief then sent the driver a photo of handcuffs. The driver paid.
Stronger than a locomotive?A driver in Italy got his Porsche trapped between the arms of a railway-crossing signal just as a train was coming. He got out and began to run – toward the train while waving his arms. Needless to say, he never did it again.
The computer survived …A multi-tasking Northern California driver working on his laptop computer lost control of his car, swerving into an oncoming Hummer. He died at the scene. The couple in the Hummer suffered minor injuries. The computer was not seriously injured, either; the California Highway Patrol found it was still on, plugged into the cigarette lighter and working.
… The unbuckled car thief didn’tAn Oregon driver caught driving a stolen car managed to free himself from the back of a parked patrol car, then drive off in it. He led officers on a 90 mph pursuit for miles, even puncturing a tire on a police spike strip. Still, he kept going. A state police officer, following procedure, rammed the back quarter panel of the car to make it slow down, but instead it spun off the road and rolled. The driver had neglected to fasten his seat belt; he died a week later of his injuries.
Motels are saferA Texas father and son apparently fell asleep in their car after trying in vain to get it unstuck from the tracks at a railroad crossing. A Burlington Northern Santa Fe train hit the car, critically injuring both of them.
Stewed, fried and cookedA drunken driver in upstate New York drove his car into a ditch, nearly knocking down a power line. To avoid calling for help and thereby avoiding a citation for driving under the influence, he stole a nearby farm tractor to drag the car out of the ditch himself. The tractor got tangled in the now low-hanging power lines, electrocuting him.
He was dead rightA University of Nebraska, Lincoln, student wrote an editorial for the school paper in which he advocated against mandatory seat-belt laws. Four months later, he was killed when the SUV in which he was riding slid off a highway and rolled several times into a ditch, ejecting him. The student, of course, practiced what he preached: He did not wear a seat belt.
Hey, smarty-pants – want a ticket?Many motorists have been allowed unfortunate choices for personalized license plates, despite reviews of applications for them. A Los Angeles man, whose license plates read “NO PLATE,” received 2,500 computer-generated parking citations for cars having no plates. A Delaware motorcyclist with the plate “NOTAG” collected more than 200 tickets for vehicles without plates. “VOID” and “UNKNOWN” have fetched their owners plenty of misdirected tickets, too.
It’s a T-Bird! It’s a plane!This must have tough to explain to the parents: A 17-year-old had had his 9-year-old Thunderbird for three weeks when he and four buddies strapped themselves in to catch some air at “Thrill Hill,” the unofficial name of a bridge linking East Bridgewater and West Bridgewater, Mass., that supposedly could send 40 mph cars airborne. Approaching the bridge, he hit the gas; one of the passengers swore he saw power lines out the side window before the car crashed back to Earth and rolled with the speedometer stuck at 85. The toll: two stiff necks, two cut hands, one bruised knee and, of course, one totaled T-Bird.
