On December 29, a driver in Niagara County, New York ended up upside down in a water-filled ditch, pinned in place as police rushed to help. A local bystander reportedly tried breaking the window, but was unable to get the driver out. “Responding deputies arrived on scene and observed a 2009 Honda Fit overturned in the ditch, with the passenger compartment filling with water,” the local police’s statement reads. “The driver and sole occupant, [a] 40 year old… was pinned in the vehicle.”
The Niagara County Sheriff’s Office media release continues, saying “Deputy Virk and Deputy Kennedy entered the ditch and were able to use their department issued rescue tool to break the rear passenger side window, open the door, and pull [the driver] to safety.”
The report states that there were no life-threatening injuries, and that the driver — whom the police say was found to be under the influence of drugs — was then sent to the hospital. He was “charged with a traffic violation and Driving While Ability Impaired by Drugs…[and] released on appearance tickets and remains at the hospital for further treatment.”
Here’s the video of the incident in Wheatfield, NY — an incident that is, to me, total nightmare fuel:
This has been a recurring nightmare for me for years: ending up in an overturned car, underwater. There’s just a terror associated with water rushing in, not knowing how to get out or which way is up or down, and it doesn’t help that I’m a weak swimmer.
Starting today, I’ll be putting that ^hammer into my and my wife’s daily-drivers. I just need to figure out how to fasten it so that, in the event of such a situation, the hammer is easily accessible. I’m all ears if you have a strategy on that.
Anyway, today’s post isn’t about your biggest car fears (ok, it was initially until I found out we’ve already asked that). It’s about your own scariest automobile moment. One of mine is the crash you see above, in which an uninsured motorist in a Chevy Tahoe pulled out in front of me, totaling my beloved 1992 Jeep Cherokee — a vehicle that I later fixed with a fraction of the ~$1,600 payout.
Another one of my scariest moments happened when I was 17 and driving home from my high school girlfriend’s house in the dark. This was in a rural part of Kansas, where a raccoon ran right into the road. I, in my 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee (shown below) made what I thought was a slight swerve, but what was, in reality, a huge swerve in that top-heavy machine. I lost complete control at about 65 mph, drifting into the oncoming lane, then back to the far right of the road, then back to the far left shoulder; back and forth I hacked away at that steering wheel trying to keep that nose pointing straight, and luckily — thanks in part to lots of practice drifting in snow, mud, and in parking lots, I was able to recover. That would have been catastrophic, without question.
I often remind myself how lucky many of us Americans are to have made it out of our teens. So many of my friends have also had close calls between the age of 16 and 18 (this might make you wonder if we should raise the driving age, but that’s a topic for another day).
Topshot: everett225/depositphotos
The scariest moment? It was the late 90s . . . I was driving an 86 Bronco II (an utter pile of garbage with a reputation for flipping over). A late 90s Camaro panic stopped in front of me, I stood on the brakes and kept them down. The rear wheels locked and the rear of the car came around. I steered into the skid . . . When I finally stopped (upright, perpendicular to traffic, and in need of a clean pair of shorts) I couldn’t have been a 1/2 inch from the Camaro’s bumper.
What should have been the scariest moment? I’m in a 2013 Charger R/T AWD, allegedly doing 80+ in left lane rounding a curve of a stretch of highway. I wasn’t paying enough attention, my tire hit the rumble strip, it startled me, I jerked the wheel HARD toward the right. There was a scary amount of tire noise and another leftward correction. I have no idea how I saved it, but I did.
A lot of people bag on the Bronco Sport, but I always tell them this isn’t the first time Ford tried this and that the previous attempt was a lot worse in execution. A friend had one back then, and looking back on it, I’m amazed it never rolled.
Why do people bag on the Bronco Sport? I’m guessing because it’s confusingly named when compared to the big bronco. All things considered I think they are a delightful alternative to the other blobular crossovers roaming the streets. Remind me of my 1st and 2nd Gen Escapes.
I think that’s it – the enthusiast crowd wants it to be a ’90s Jeep Wrangler-sized off roader or something. I get that desire, but it’s sadly not where the market is (or ever really was).
I’d get the criticism if they only had the Bronco Sport and not the proper one, but that’s not the case! They don’t have a platform smaller than the Ranger that they could build a smaller 4×4 anyway.
My username says it all… twice…
In high school, I was driving home (a small farm about five miles out of town) at night in my Datsun 510 station wagon. About halfway between town and my parents’ home there’s a narrow bridge with no shoulder on either side. Concrete railings on both sides.
I am doing ~55 mph as I get on the bridge with my antiquated, sealed-beam, high-beams and spot a harvester/combine entering the other end. With no lights on whatsoever.
I nail the brakes as hard as I dare and realize I won’t be able to stop before we collide. I steer right as far as I dare without hitting the railing and watch the edge of the combine miss the outside rear view mirror by two inches at most. Simultaneously, I heard a horrible noise on the right side of the car.
I was convinced that I had destroyed the whole side of the car. It still steered straight and I continued home. I was shaking. I ran into our home and told my parents what had just happened. My dad came out with me and a flashlight and couldn’t find any damage. I don’t know what caused the noise but was happy with the outcome.
Easy…3 and a half weeks ago, I was driving to work in my beloved 2009 Hyundai Accent hatchback named ‘Humdrum’. There had been a flash freeze overnight. I had my Michelin X-Ice winter tires on and was going 70 in an 80 zone as I knew it was slippery. Came around a corner, saw black ice in my lane amidst some snow, so went to straddle it. Right side tires hit black ice and slid a bit, lost the back end and flew into the ditch on the opposite side of the road sideways going 70. Car was somehow pretty much intact, but the front dug in and spun the car 180 degrees up and around so that the front landed down and it was sitting perfectly perpendicular to the road in a deep ditch. Poor thing was totaled 🙁
Air bags didn’t even deploy based on how the accident happened. I was very stiff and sore for several days, but that little car kept me safe….a few more feet into the ditch and I would’ve been hitting a huge grove of trees…
I was lucky.
Just picked up my new ride on Friday – 2022 Nissan Sentra SR with a 6-speed manual. I WILL be putting studded tires on it…
You probably already know this, but be careful with studded tires. They work great on ice and help some in the snow, but they are treacherous on dry or wet pavement. Modem all season tires do a pretty good job without studs or any dangerous dry road issues.
It was March 1985, and I was heading into work in my ’84 Celica GTS notchback. It was raining but cold enough to cause some freezing rain on the higher points of the highway.
As I headed down a hill, the tractor-trailer ahead hit the brakes for a car that spun off the road, so the truck jackknifed in front of me. I steered around him but slid sideways on the black ice, hit the curb on the side of the road, and rolled the car over on its top. The roof crushed to just touching my head.
The funny part was that when I got out of the car, a local cop was already there. I had just returned from working in Alaska and was wearing a partial fur parka I bought there for winter work. The cop told me he thought a dog was coming out of the car at first, as the furry hood was over my head.
Amazingly, the insurance company said the car, being a year old, was worth too much, so they repaired the damaged roof and other things. I sold it not long afterward, as I wasn’t sure about the rigidity of the roof after that.
Oh this is easy. It’s 1985 and this girl I’m seeing is all freaked out because there was a snowstorm and her folks were stranded, so she was home alone. She begged me to come “save” her, so i hopped into my 1975 Chevy Impala and drove her house.
Problem: her house was 45 miles away, in the country. The storm was over but high winds created a drift blizzard on the ground. That Impala and it’s rook driver had no business driving on rural roads (in the dark) with 2-foot drifts, but the driver was young, dumb, and full of something.
I made it to her house and got stuck in the driveway. I’ve never been as scared shitless in a car as I was that night, and it was several hours on end.
Worth it for the girl, though.
It usually is, if only as a story later, as nothing can usually beat cars + girls.
My three favorite thing are:
Girls
Cars
Weed
YMMV of course.
One of the scariest moments I had was driving my old beater Chevy 4×4 on the snow packed dirt roads heading out of my mountain neighborhood. I was late for an appointment and going too fast and lost control. I ended up doing two and a half spins going down a steep hill and finally came to rest with the truck in a snow drift at the very edge of the road, inches from tipping into a 6+ foot deep ditch.
Although I narrowly avoided disaster the truck was still in danger – any attempt to drive / pull it out was likely to roll it into the ditch. Fortunately at the time I owned a telehandler forklift (I mean, who doesn’t?) so I used some chains around the suspension to keep it from sliding off the forks, then picked up the front end and slowly pulled it back onto the road. By then I had a pretty good audience including a county deputy, who asked if he could call me to help with folks sliding off the highway.
At that point I broke down and bought a set of new snow tires – paid more for them than I had for the truck. Shortly after that I loaned the truck to some goofy kid who wanted to rescue a broken down Jeep from the wilds of Western Colorado, but that’s a whole other story.
This didn’t happen in San Francisco, but picture the type of hills in San Francisco, because that’s the approximate visual. I was 16, had my license maybe 6 months. I had been on a relatively flat road, perpendicular to the hill. Turn to go down the hill and within about 30 seconds, suddenly, I have no brakes. No conspicuous signs to me before that moment there were any problems. I spent probably too long just thinking “what, no, why isn’t this working, what, what the hell”, before my brain started functioning again and told me to pull the emergency brake, and hope like hell I slowed enough to stop before getting to the bottom, which would’ve thrown me into a very busy boulevard. Stopped with about 10 yards to go.
This was back in the late 90’s in Spokane, WA when I lived there, in an 87 Camry; which was a nice light blue in color and ran like a top. I was on I-90, hit some black ice and spun around facing traffic…I was really lucky no one was around in that short gap of freeway traffic. I was able to turn around the right way and keep going. I’ve never been in an accident and learned a lot of skills driving in snow and ice; that was the only incident. I even delivered pizzas in the winter
I’ve never had any real bad scares, closest I’ve come was almost crashing a rental Taurus in rural Andover Massachusetts in 1990. I came into a right hand exit ramp a little hot, the rear started to slide, the left rear bounced off the curb and all was good.
I was definitely headed for a tow truck ride before divine intervention saved me.
Deep in winter on an interstate in the mountains of Tennessee, hours from home, I’m flying along at 80 mph when I realize the road surface is a sheet of ice. (I’m 19, inexperienced and stupid.) I’m driving a muscle car, and letting off the gas is like hitting the brake, so I ease off slowly and get down to about 60 mph before I lose control and perform about five 360s down the highway, maybe more. It felt like an eternity before the car stopped. On one side of the road was a 50-foot drop, and on the other side was a shallow ditch, and I’m still alive because I ended up in the shallow ditch. No damage amazingly.
Back in the ’90s, I once (in my rearview) watched a Mustang do similar on an expressway in Chicago. My rear scan picked up unusual movement, and I couldn’t believe what I was watching. Even more amazing, it didn’t hit anything/anybody as it spun.
Yeah, I was all alone out there, which made it scarier because if I had gone over the edge no one would have found me. If there was a car way back behind me I must have looked like a disco ball.
I think the scariest car moments aren’t in the ones that directly happen to you, but the ones that happen to your loved ones.
I will aways remember that feeling of my stomach dropping to my ankles getting a call from a police officer that my wife and 3-month-old daughter were in a car accident. Thankfully, it happened only a few miles from my work, so I got there in only a couple minutes. My heart was pounding the entire way, and your brain starts doing dire “what if?” scenarios.
They were rear-ended by a distracted driver on his phone, broken glass was all over the kid’s car seat, and the back of the car was pretty well caved in. Incredibly, the blanket draped over the car seat kept the glass off the kid and she was totally fine. My wife was scratched up and dazed, but ok. Both got checked out at a clinic to make sure, but they were fine.
Some years ago, on a narrow country road with a ditch and embankment on either side, I was dead tired on the way home in the Hiace work van after a long day, when I allowed the van to drift a bit too far to the left and put a wheel onto the dirt verge, which kicked the van sideways. In my tired state, I still managed to countersteer, but the van still flicked hard to the right, then overcorrected back to the left, before flicking back and ending up pointing the right way again. I’m fairly certain that at one point it managed to be at right angles to the road and sliding sideways, fortunately without enough grip to flip it on its side.
Years before in my first car (MKII Cortina 440) I was pushing too hard through a series of sweeping bends on a tight road climbing the side of a river valley, and eventually lost the car in a spin exiting one of the bends. The only thing that saved me was that at the point where the car lost all grip and started sliding, its momentum took it straight down the middle of a rare straight section of road, executing at least 4 full revolutions before it came to rest pointing in the right direction. Being young and stupid, this didn’t actually scare me as much as it should have, but my passenger at the time (who I’d only met an hour before!) was white as a ghost, and jumped into a friend’s car at the earliest opportunity rather than stay in mine!
But the scariest was the time I misjudged the relative speeds of the car I was over taking and the oncoming truck while on my first bike (Suzuki RG250 2 stroke road bike).
I pulled out to overtake thinking I had plenty of room, but was going at a speed/gear combo that put me JUST below the start of the 2 stroke powerband, so the bike didn’t accelerate like I expected. As I got past the car and pulled back over it felt like the car and truck were close enough I could have touched the front corners of both as I sneaked through. A mile up the road was the first place I could pull over and get off the bike – I was shaking so much I fell over as I got off and had to sit on the ground for a while taking deep breaths before I felt steady enough even to stand up.
Rolled a FiST. 3 times in the one crash. Had to crawl out of the sunroof in the rain and look for my phone and glasses (I’m basically blind without them), which fell out of either the shattered windows or sunroof during roll 2 or 3. Cop made me walk a sobriety test (after blowing well below the limit) on an ankle I’d been able to walk on for around 2 days. It wasn’t a great night
It’s funny, my scariest is not the one that ended up worse. In high school my best friend and I would cruise around town checking out roads we hadn’t been down before. We go down this one side road that should be a shortcut to the center of down, down a steep hill, but what we didn’t realize is it turned to gravel and turned sharply at the bottom of the hill. I can vividly remember we’re going around the corner and the car goes up on the side bank, I look up and there’s my friend in the passenger seat, eyes bugging out as sure as mine were. We come down the bank on the other side, car relatively unscathed except some front bumper trim, but then I had to go home and tell my Dad about it. He was fairly cool about it, but was grounded from cruising around for a while after that.
For the one that ended up the worst, years later, I’m a grown a$$ adult, heading to my job early one morning, come driving around a corner(same town, different road I drive on every day) and it starts downhill with a left curve then turns to black ice, I can remember considering going into the oncoming lane as that looks dry, but it’s a blind corner so don’t risk it. The car’s slowing down ok so I’m not terrible concerned more of a, oh crap here we go again, but as it goes off the road it just catches the start of a guardrail that acts like a perfect ramp to roll the car in a nice slow controlled fashioned so it stops perfectly upside down off the side of the road, no glass is even busted. It was my Dodge Neon coupe, which had frameless glass manual crank windows. So when I gather my wits I roll down(up?) my driver’s window and open the door no problem. As we’re waiting for the wrecker(aptly named as it ended up totaling the car.) Another car locks and skids off into the lawn right before my car, then the cops close the road until the sand truck can get there.
So to David’s point of having a glassbreak device, also maybe just have manual frameless glass windows so you can open your door easy. 😉
Back in the day when your worst fear wasn’t the law, but your dad finding out.
Exactly! I can still remember that long ride home stressing it, going around the car with a flash light while he just stands there pondering.
About 7 years ago, I rolled my 500 Abarth at autocross. As I was upside down, I felt like the car was slowing and thought I should stick my arm out the window to try to push it back upright. Thankfully, my brain overrode the instinct to stick my arm out while falling and I just grabbed my harness and held on till the car was back upright. When I watched the video afterwards, I realized the car rolled the opposite direction to what I thought it did, so if I’d stuck my hand out, it likely would have been broken by a large amount of Fiat. When they say “keep your hands inside the car” during driver’s meeting, I really recommend you do so.
I rolled my Renault 5 once over hard and twice over easy and my helmet came out the window before it had entirely stopped. The only camera wielding photographer froze since she thought my head had popped off. It was kind of like a fairground ride not really that scary.
Yeah, head out of car is so, so much worse, I’m glad it’s still attached to you!
So am I. It was just weird, as far as I was concerned the ride was done and the helmet was coming off. Perspective gets a little distorted.
Not long after getting a motorcycle I came into a corner to fast stood it up in a panic and was well into the other lane. Thankfully no one coming but luck was the only reason. Stuck with me forever, I can’t control other drivers behavior but I can certainly control my own
Yikes. I’ve been there too, and at least for me, the retroactive understanding of the whole “the bike goes where you look” inexorability really freaks me out. It’s true on any vehicle, but the immediacy of it all on a motorcycle is really visceral.
How about the time I ran a red light at 114mph in a 1960 Chevy El Camino with no seatbelts? Not scary enough? There was traffic! And a cop car in the parking lot of the 7/11 I blasted past!
Still not scared? How about the time my wife, my son and I were driving through West Virginia in the winter? I passed a car, but when I tried to get back in the right lane, I was on black ice. When I got off the ice, my front wheels were still turned, and the car started whipping back and forth as I tried to regain control. I took my foot off the gas, but the car didn’t slow down. I forgot the cruise control was on! The car (Geo Prizm) was thrashing so violently, my wife was thrown into the gearshift, knocking it into neutral, which killed the cruise control. We slowed down, I regained control, and on we went.
STILL not scared? Here’s another black ice story. I learned to drive in the deserts of West Texas. Signs like “CAUTION! BRIDGE ICES BEFORE ROADWAY” are everywhere, but they don’t really MEAN anything.
But the year I lived in Iowa, I learned there, they actually DO. One evening, I was driving between Cedar Falls and Cedar Rapids. It was winter, and snow was on the ground, but the roads seemed clear. I noticed that ALL the other cars on the road pulled off at this one exit, which was odd because we were kind of in the middle of nowhere. I was in an E350 extended van and pulling a 20′ enclosed tandem axel trailer, and I just drove right up on the overpass that everyone else exited before.
For once, I wasn’t speeding or anything. But as I got on the overpass, I felt the rig start to jack knife. I steered into the skid and straightened it out, only for it to jack knife the OTHER way. I steered into it again, gathering it up.
Just in time to hit the end of the black ice.
The wheels were still turned, so it did a snap360, and I slid off the road and snowplowed down the side of the overpass.
To this day, I am convinced that the only thing that kept me shiny side up was the suction generated when my sphincter tightened up.
Everyone who had pulled off at the exit watched me do this, too. Among them was a deputy sheriff who gave me a ride into Cedar Rapids where I could call my wife to come pick me up at the Denny’s.
I have many more terrifying stories….
Being born in Nebraska, and having spent formative years in Iowa, I believe it. Couple of mine from before I could drive:
Driving from Iowa City to Downers Grove one snowy night in a 74 Super Beetle doing maybe 40, we were passed by a land yacht at seemingly twice our speed, blinding us. As the snow-spray cleared, we see the yacht coming at us in our lane. Dad tries to slow, but we just yaw…it’s coming at us faster—but starting to cant towards the shoulder, when there’s another big poof of snow—and it’s gone.
A few years later, my stepmother & sister watched Dad & I do 2-3 perfect 360s in that SB on a bridge as we moved out of Iowa for good. Dad had downshifted to 3rd and spun the wheel during the last, slower spin, , so he caught it when we came off the ice, then just kept on truckin’ on down the road. Albeit a bit slower.
Euro spec CRX (ZC engine, 130hp), back in my student years in France:
Exhibit A:
Entering a German Autobahn after an hour of slow, annoying, congested mountain roads, I put the pedal to the metal. FREEDOM AT LAST !!! Wheee !!!
Euro CRXes have a rear seat which can fit two very small kids. I have two 6ft tall heavy friends on the back, their knees digging the headliner, one more heavy guy at the front. As I reach a comfortable 190km/h-ish, I enter a long gentle curve. Which is fine. It’s a German Autobahn. If it was a tight curve, there would be a speed limit. That’s how Deutsch Autobahns are.
Then the curve tightens. And tightens. And tightens.
I have to lift off the accelerator.
The CRX’ entire length, bumper to bumper, is 145 inches. Not the longest wheelbase there is (a full 20cm shorter wheelbase than its Civic Hatchback sibling of the same gen, which is why in France Civics were the prefered base for rallye racing, not CRXes. But that’s another story).
The rear end starts to nicely, gently, slide, poking its nose, trying to see what the front end is doing, and who the hell is driving. I start to ever so slightly countersteer. Just a bit. I have the presence of mind to do what’s needed: Absolutely nothing. Just grind my teeth and wait it out.
An eternity later (probably a few seconds) the car gently stabilizes and we’re on rails again.
Somewhere, someone, a nice Japanese engineer, has anticipated that some day me idiot will do something idiotic like this. I now have drifting a shoebox at 100+ mph off my bucket list.
Supporting documents:
Exhibit B:
Same CRX. France backroad. About one car wide. I am the king of the world, the car is full of extatic kids. I gun it to a 170km/h ish, then think “A little bit more“, then for no apparent reason think “Nope” and jump on the brakes. They do what they can, but we’re heavy, and I can feel that they are struggling. Good thing I’m in a straight. But then it turns out I’m not – there’s a curve at the end (how surprising). I manage to red-hot brake just enough to make it (barely) through the curve. Did I mention said road is in a dense forest…
Maybe not the scariest, but it did happen to me this afternoon – driving up I-95 from Florida, was outside of Charleston SC, right behind an 18 wheeler who blew a tire at 80.
It sounded like an explosion, and then he starts to weave and big chunks of tire are bouncing my way fast. I’m a fanatic about proper following distance so it was able to dodge the big hunks without too much drama, and miraculously nothing worse happened, but wow it sure felt like it could have. My heart was pounding for the next mile.
(I’m outside of Richmond now at a rest stop – they have VA for for lovers hats in the vending machines- oherwise a fantastic road trip)
Man, I hate that I-95 run. Hope the rest of your ride was easier.
Thanks! Weather was beautiful, which made things much easier.
I’d just the other day repaired my cracked bumper cover (ironically caused by unavoidably running over a tire chunk at speed a while back) and all I could think of as the rubber rained toward me was “damnit not again I just fixed that and with that pricey epoxy!!”
Ain’t that always the way it goes? Happy new year and happy motoring!
The wreck that totaled my Civic. I’ve mentioned it a few times, and gone into detail in Discord, but here’s the full story with context first.
I played lots of sports (mostly the back yard variety) as a kid and suffered a few concussions. About five years ago, I hit my left temple, almost knocked myself out, and had migraines every day for six months and for about a year and a half after if I didn’t get 8-10 hours of sleep a day and got tired, I’d lose the ability to walk, talk, or know who I was. They were afraid I’d had a stroke when I went to the hospital. I would half-jokingly say the next one would make me a vegetable, and anyone who knows me well doesn’t want me living alone.
Fast forward to this past June. I’m on a date with my fiancée, sitting at a red light after getting barbecue. It’s afternoon and we’re facing into the sun, and even with sunglasses it was a bit of a challenge to see. I’m talking to her about whether we take the scenic route home or the much quicker way, and lean forward to adjust my GPS. I just hear a crunch, feel the car jerk forward, and in my head hear a “oh fuck, we just got hit” before everything went black. I came to staring at the roof of my car. That split second between getting hit and getting knocked out was the most terrified I’ve ever been in my life.
My power seat had enough give, or I hit it hard enough, to lay it back as far as it goes when I crashed back into it. The guy who hit me told the police I was out for about five minutes and he was afraid he’d killed me. Poor guy was in tears when I finally got my car off the road. Helped me out of my car, made sure the police were called (older guy with no cell phone and a speech issue, but even concussed me could understand him fine), and tried to make sure we were okay.
Basically the same health issues/experiences too.
The last turd that hit me knocked me out for 5 minutes.
10 years later my history of concussions, and three TIAs still have me messed up.
The turd that hit me never even bothered to see if I was alive, or if there was anyone else in my truck. If I’d been clear headed when I woke up I would have beaten the shit out of him for breaking my back as well.
I hope you are ok now a days.
Happy New Year.
I was a passenger in my then girlfriend/now wife’s Honda Civic. We were headed to a Boxing Day party. It was snowing and she lost control going around a curve where a Jersey barrier served as the median.
She was going a little too fast for conditions and was passing a car going too slow for conditions as the road curved to the left. Instead of gently decreasing her steering input to allow the car to naturally drift back into the right lane, she abruptly steered right and then back left.
Yup, the old Scandinavian flick.
The Civic of course responded exactly as you’d expect. By swinging its ass wildly around. She tried to countersteer, but we went nose first into the barrier. The impact wasn’t hard enough to pop the airbags, and the now wounded Civic continued for another half revolution, ending by impacting its rear end against the barrier.
This left me sitting in the passenger seat, with nothing between me and oncoming traffic but the Civic’s door. Coming around the curve I saw it. Coming in at about 50 mph. An early 90’s Lumina. They have a distinctive front lighting pattern. I wasn’t really scared, per se, so much as I was disappointed that the last thing I was ever going to see was the schnoz of a goddamned Chevrolet Lumina.
Fortunately, the Lumina driver attempted to go around us and instead of impacting us/me right in the passenger door instead impacted the right front.
That unfortunately sealed the Civic’s fate, destroying the right front suspension, and did leave me with a sore neck for weeks. But I lived.
I drive now when it’s snowing out.
Lessee:
Getting backed over in a Fiat X19 by a clueless metal blasting Dudebro in his jacked up 4×4?
Sideswiping the car of the girlfriend of my HS’s varsity champion wrestler?
(turned out they had just broken up poorly so it worked out for me)
Being the passenger in a 135 mph Datsun 510 (just resurrected from serving as a dumpster) kitted out with a used L18SSS from a Japanese police car and four completely bald, used bias ply tires?
Commuting in a tiny British sports car on a modern(ish) California freeway?
Blasting flat out through the the Mojave in a coolant free Toyota Tercel SR5 hoping to Christ to reach the AAA free 100 mile towing limit before the engine exploded?
Emergency braking and swerving in grandma’s early ’80s Lada 2101? Grandma and her sister were in the car with me as were a couple other folks and a trunk completely packed with junk.
And those are just the ones I remember…
Driving the white rim road in Moab to an overlook with my girlfriend in the passenger seat and a ring in my pocket.
Alternative- driving my 87 crown vic home from college, i went wide open merging into the highway. Suddenly an explosion sounds and i have no idea whats happening. Muffler exploded.
One time I was headed home around 8:30 or so at maybe 60 mph in a very light drizzle through a freeway work area (the work area have been on the other side of the Jersey wall in the collector-distributor lane, since it was barely disturbed at all) with maybe very lightly roughed-up pavement, and my 1990 Mazda Protegé LX started to fishtail for no imaginable reason. It did it for about a quarter mile, then suddenly spun around 360 degrees and came to a rest against the right barrier wall facing the opposite direction, not even feeling any impact (there was a minor scrape I noticed much later.) Fortunately traffic was light and I didn’t come close to hitting anyone. I took a couple minutes to settle, then turned off my headlights to keep from blinding oncoming traffic and settled for a minute or two more, and finally started the car, turned around and continued on my way. That best the time when I was 16 and slammed on the brakes on a tight curve when a dog ran out in front of me and rotated in a similar way (dog just kept ambling along unbothered.)
Also: Was this post just a way for you to flex by mentioning that you have a wife, and had high-school girlfriend, and post that picture of you looking all teenage disaffe… wait, no, that picture with that haircut is an anti-flex if anything, so never mind that last bit.