About 1993, I was driving a friend around in south Redondo Beach, CA. On the way out of a supermarket lot, we saw an old Nash move forward and bump another car, getting a broken headlight and creasing the other car’s bumper.
An onlooker approached the driver of the Nash to try to help her maneuver out of the way. Instead she pulled forward–and struck the other car again!
Please post your dumb collisions and such here.
I can’t bear to see this question waiting around so awkwardly, so I will tell this true story.
You are a young man in your twenties, driving down the main street of your small hometown. You pass by the funeral home, and standing on the steps of the funeral home, presumably because she is attending a funeral or funeral-related event, is the young woman who you wanted as your girlfriend a few years prior, except the two of you only had one date and it’s not clear if it was actually a date or just a matter of being at the same location at roughly the same time. So you turn your head to look at your not-really-exgirlfriend, who is, as we mentioned, at a funeral home, and you keep driving forward while you keep looking first off to the side and then to the back, and it does not occur to you that you are in fact approaching a four way stop, and while it could have turned out much worse than you simply rear-ending the car in front of you, it probably would have been better had you just accepted that it wasn’t really a date.
And not-really-exgirlfriend, who is at a funeral and doesn’t want to deal with your ass anyway, pretends not to notice the minor car crash that has just happened a few yards away, and instead quickly ducks back into the funeral home.
I can’t decide whether that’s dumb or just plain embarrassing.
Well, it was pretty embarrassing for both of us.
Every damn one of them.
My first accident:
About 10 minutes earlier I was driving down the main drag in town. I saw an accident and one of the parties was someone I knew. On the way home I was looking down each side street (over to the main street) trying to spot the accident and ended up T-boning someone. Yup, I got into an accident trying to see another accident.
One of the things that bugged me about that was that after the other lady told the cop I was going “about 30MPH”. When I talked to the cop I said "I my manual said the airbags go off at 12mph and she said 'yeah, that’s how we know you weren’t going 30. Also, the only witness and the cop seemed to be friends. Luckily there was virtually no damage to my (my parent’s car) but the side of her’s was pretty crushsed.
My parents got rear ended by someone that ‘missed the break pedal’, sucked for him.
Dump truck is chugging along the main road of downtown in Portsmouth, NH, when an SUV driver on a side street has apparently decided he has sat at a red light long enough and bets that he can cross that same main road and get to the next side road off of it faster than the dump truck can reach him. SUV guns it while his light is still red. SUV did not win the bet.
He was lucky that the dump truck hit his passenger side and that he was alone because the passenger side of the SUV ceased to exist. I’d like to think he hasn’t ever run a red light since.
There was that hydroplaning sedan.
Any accident where one or more participants were using cell phones is a dumb accident.
I know someone who really shouldn’t be driving. Fortunately, so far, she has been mainly a menace to herself. Her house, which she has lived in some 40 years, is the last one on a cul-de-sac. She has carport big enough for two cars, with room to spare. A support pole divided the two parking spots and she has hit that pole more times than I can remember. So she finally decided to have it removed. Less than a year later, she managed to total her car while approaching the carport. I’m not clear on the details but it didn’t involve anyone else’s vehicle or property, just her own. And she wasn’t seriously hurt.
The really dumb part is that every time she banged into that support pole, she would pay someone to repair the dings and dents on her car, only to do it again a few months later.
It wasn’t a car, but a bike, and it still makes me laugh. Buncha years ago I was leaving work at like 11 at night. I started walking and approached the nearest intersection, seeing a dude riding his bike on the sidewalk (illegal, and y’know, a damn bike lane a few feet to his left, and y’know, late so it’s not like there was traffic).
He was talking on his phone, holding it in his right hand to his right ear as he approached the curb. No cutouts at this curb. He realized too late that there were no cutouts and he would either have to do a little jump with the bike (needs both hands) or slow way down. Since one hand was occupied, he decided to brake. With his left hand. With the brake on the left side of his handlebars. Yep. Locked up his front brake and went ass over head, sprawling himself and bicycle all over the sidewalk.
He never stopped talking on the phone.
I was doubled over laughing too hard to ask if he was okay. Besides, he was on the phone. Didn’t want to interrupt or anything.
I just watched one a couple of days ago: public transit van was backing up in a parking lot at the city park…and just kept backing up into a car, pushing the car across the ground even as the owners of the car were standing around it doing the “no no no no!” thing. It was so slow, awkward, and avoidable looking.
I felt very bad for any passengers in the bus, who would be waiting for awhile.
I watched a slow motion accident happen in Boston. The intersection where the Southeast Expressway merges into the ring road is (or was) a giant fucking mess at rush hour. Movement can be measured in inches and tempers are on edge. I watched two drivers refuse to give those inches, with both deciding they had the right of way. The guy on the ring road refused to allow the merger to enter, so both kept inching forward until there was a slight impact. Then both got out and started screaming at each other, which further jammed things up.
Here in Portland, cutting the corner when turning seems to be something they forget to tell people not to do in drivers’ ed. My wife was waiting for the bus and noticed a woman waiting to pull into traffic at a cross street stop sign. Another woman coming down the intersecting street, turned the corner and hit her head-on. :eek: Both got out, with the waiting driver giving the other one hell. The other driver’s response: “Well, you don’t have to get mad; it was just an accident!” :smack:
A guy ran into the back of my car in a McDonald’s drive-through line while I was at the speaker, then ran into it again about a minute later just as I reached the window.
In my early driving days, I had more than once forgotten my foot on the accelerator, and ended up pressing on it hard when I actually wanted to hit the brake. Once when trying to pull out of a strip mall into 40mph traffic. Once at Walmart’s parking - I shot across the slot where I wanted to park, crossed the walkway and went on to the slot opposite. Thankfully there was no blood on the pavement, it being late night. :eek:
A couple of months ago, I was driving home with the eldest Torqueling when I saw a police truck coming up fast behind me, running lights and sirens. He wasn’t fixing to pull anyone over, he was just heading somewhere fast. So, we cleared the lane for him, and he shot on past, heading north.
Well, at the east-west intersection right in front of us, everyone had stopped and was waiting for the police truck to get through. Except, apparent, the one guy who wasn’t paying any attention to the lights and siren. He went through the intersection, slammed into the side of the moving police truck hard enough to knock it sideways and spin it off over the curb on the north-east corner. He got out of his car looking like “Ohhhh hell, I done it now.” We didn’t stick around for the aftermath.
Around here cops & fire trucks *with *lights and siren blasting slow to about 10 mph at each traffic light they’re going through on the red to ensure nobody is obliviously blasting through on their green light. Once they’ve looked both ways they gun it to the next light.
Given the soundproofing in modern cars, plus loud stereos, & self-absorbed or elderly drivers, I think this is a smart policy that will probably be going nationwide over the next few years.
A few months ago, I was walking out of a mall type area, when I heard the characteristic crunch.
I turned around to see a truck pulling forward from where it had backed into a parked car while attempting to park. And I don’t mean ‘scraped against it’, I mean dead centered it, hard enough to push the car’s (it was also backed in) rear wheels up onto the curb.
I turned a statement (with plate numbers) in to the security office when the driver of the truck pulled to a different part of the lot and went inside the establishment without leaving a note on the vehicle they’d mangled, cause fuck hit and run drivers.
Years ago, I was headed East on I-40 in North Carolina when the **Road Work/Expect Delays ** signs started, miles in advance of the actual work zone. These signs started 5 or 10 miles out, increasing in frequency as we neared the inevitable bottleneck, and although traffic continued as normal I remember thinking that we had been properly warned. So I topped a hill, and lo at the foot of the same (long) hill, the bottleneck. It was dark, and, from the top of the hill, you could clearly see the line of hundreds of stationary or semi-stationary tail lights from at least a mile away. It was very similar to having a helicopter view of the stopped traffic.
When I was about halfway down the hill, one set of taillights/car approaching the backup went apeshit, veering uncontrollable leftward (perhaps glancing off a guardrail) before overcorrecting back to the right and then rising into the air as the driver rear-ended the living shit out of someone at the throat of the bottleneck.
So, with a minimum of 5 miles of warning signs, coupled with another mile or so of visual evidence that they should probably slow down, some fuckwit managed to get within tens of yards of a traffic jam before realizing it existed, and then hit another car/cars at 50-80 miles an hour.
I have no idea what sort of injuries/fatalities resulted from this, but nothing would surprise me, and, no matter how long I live, it will probably remain the stupidest single act I’ve ever personally witnessed.
I didn’t see this one, but I did see the aftermath.
About 35 years ago, one of my buddies in my neighborhood got braces. He also got a bicycle, a cool motocross-type bicycle that I envied.
My buddy, who had book-smarts out the wazoo but very little walking-around sense (or biking-around sense), decided one early summer day he wanted to read a book. It was nice outside, though, and he wanted to ride his bike too. It was a conundrum … what to do?
He solved it by doing both. He mounted his bike and started riding it down the street while reading his book at the same time. After three blocks or so, he rode his bike into the back of a parked car.
His bike was toast, and he did about $400 worth of damage to his braces; they had to be straightened and realigned. His mother nearly whomped his head off when she found out what he’d done.
This was kind of hilarious due to the cartoon physics. I was driving past an intersection in the middle lane. On my right, a car had decided to gun it to beat the yellow. However, he apparently missed the gigantic bus-shaped bus that was stopping right past the intersection in front of him on the right lane. The little car slammed into the back of the bus and, I kid you not, the side windows shattered and popped outward at the same time, showering pedestrians on the sidewalk with glass. I always thought the windows would just shatter and fall down, not pop out like that. The guy must have crumpled his frame or something for it to fly out like that