OK, the other night my dad was stopped at a stoplight. As he tells it, a white car comes hurtling straight towards him, catching him completely off guard. My dad figured the car would swerve to avoid him, so he stayed put and didn’t move. Not so - the car kept going.
A split second before it crashed into his front bumper, my dad realized there was no driver in the car.
Fortunately nobody was harmed. After the smoke cleared, it was found that a Chinese man (who spoke very little English, it turned out,) FELL OUT OF THE CAR as he was accelerating. His jalopy then continued straight towards my unfortunate poppa. The body damage isn’t too severe, and my dad’s fine (I don’t know the status of the other “driver.”)
Just thought I should share this rather bizarre accident.
I guess that’s another reason for the seatbelt law. Not so easy to fall out of a car if your seatbelt is on! That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. :dubious:
Oh man…that is freeking weird. It’s akin to my recurring nightmare of one of those cars on a car carrier truck coming loose and crashing into me. Glad he’s OK. I imagine he’ll be kinda freaked out for a while.
I can’t reach. I’ll just lean out the window a bit and… Car jerks forward since it’s in gear, and he took his foot off the brake. Wooh… How the hell did I end up on the ground.
or
I can’t get a signal I’ll lean out the window to improve the signal. Oops, the stack of books I sit on are shifting. Ow… What happened? Shit there goes the car, a book must be on the gas pedal.
or
What’s that? Bad spirit sitting in front by me. I will leap from moving car to save ones self from spirit demon. Now car is being spirirted away most quickly down street. Ancestor spirit please stop car. You did not have to crash car, ancestor. That is strange man, not ancestor.
I’ll never forget riding down the interstate with my parents as we’re going down this long hill / side of a mountain and we see one of those pop up trailers rolling along ahead of us without a car in front of it. We all flipped out and dad immediately slowed down waiting for it to lose course and sling itself to one side or the other. Only… it didn’t. It kept going straight.
The kids are all pressed up against the windows and staring out the windshield watching this amazing trailer roll down this mountain. Then the hill came to a turn and we were sure it would finally veer off the road.
No, it makes the turn. I mean, we’re all going “WTF Mate?” And so dad finally gets wise and pulls alongside of it. There is a tiny-miniscule-truly a skate with engine pulling the trailer along such that it is invisible from the rear. Man, we laughed for hours on the road trip.
This thread caught my attention because when I was pretty young, my family had a Plymouth Horizon that decided to leave home driverless and cause a minor accident.
In this time of global tension and uncertainty, I want to make it clear that the Chinese were not involved. My theory is that the car was depressed and running away from home because everyone who had the misfortune of driving it would say it was a piece of crap. These comments were not usually directed at the car itself but I’m sure these comments hurt anyway. After all, the car had no way of knowing of knowing that Plymouth’s advertising slogan at the time was “Plymouth. It’s a piece of crap.”
Anyway, we lived on a very, very, very slight incline but apparently not slight enough to stymie a Horizon parking brake. The car just kind of wandered off, went the suburban equivalent of a city block, crossed a busy intersection (we’re still thankful there was no major accident here), and crashed head-on into another car that was stopped at a stop sign. There was minor but non-trivial damage and no injuries. There was no damage to the Horizon, would that it had been totaled.
“I kept blowing the horn” the other driver said. By “other” driver I mean, of course, the only driver.
I fully expect to die as a result of a car rolling off one of those damn trucks. Sometimes I’d like to know if it has ever happened and then sometimes I think I’m better off not knowing. Some ignorance should be left unfought.
Long years ago (in the early 80’s) I lived in an apartment complex with a slight but noticeable incline downhill where you entered the complex. An A&P supermarket was just streetwards from the apts.
One Saturday I was out puttering around my car (cleaning it our or something) when I hear this big BOOM! I said to my self, “WTF??” and started looking around to see where the sound might have come from.
A lady had parked her car beside the A&P and run in to do a little shopping. Either she had failed to put it in park, or it had slipped the parking brake, or something, but the car had rolled down the hill (about 75 yds, I guess) and slammed into the end of one of the apartment building. The building was brick. The bricks were noticeably dislocated. The car (a big old Thunderbird) looked fine. There almost had to be some kind of damage under the hood, but it sure wasn’t anything obvious.
Made me really realize how well built some of those old tanks of cars were though.
It was a corporate law firm, and the client was an auto manufacturer.
Actually, E-Sabbath had it pretty close from what the reconstruction came up with. And his take was what the plaintiff’s take was. The car company’s take was that she never put it into park.
And Hypno-Toad watches as much Monty Python as I do, because that is exactly what I thought of when I first got the case.
It’s easy!
Step One, open the car door…
Perhaps this is a case of mistranslation, and the Chinese gentleman’s Irish neighbor who said, “May the road rise up to meet you…”
Just who was suing whom at that point? 
