If there’s one thing we know about things inside containers, it’s how they can end up outside their containers in a particularly aggravating fashion. When this happens inside a car, some not-so-funny stuff can happen, from big detailing bills to mechanical damage to irreversible psychological harm. Today on Autopian Asks, we’re talking about the worst stuff you’ve spilled inside a car.
If you’ve been following my ramblings for a while, you’ll know that I’m particular about my cars. I don’t let anyone eat in them or drink anything other than water in them, which means I don’t have many spill stories. However, this doesn’t mean I’ve always been a clean freak, but rather that I’ve learned from my mistakes the hard way.
If you ask a mechanically-savvy car enthusiast what the most pungent thing is inside any car, they’d probably say gear oil. This heavy, sulphur-enriched lubricant serves up a Desert Storm-tier nasal assault, and it’s one fluid you definitely don’t want to spill inside your car. Well, back in secondary school, I had to run my old diff oil to the proper recycling facility, which means two bottles ended up in my Crown Victoria. You can probably guess where this is going.
If you’ve never been inside the trunk of a Crown Victoria, it’s roughly the size of the Sydney Opera House. Commodious enough for three or four former associates, it’s not an environment conducive to holding one-liter plastic bottles soundly in place. In my head, the rear footwell’s rubber mat seemed to be a more appropriate place for temporary gear oil bottle transport, but I failed to account for one thing — cheap one-liter plastic bottles have a habit of leaking, particularly when they’re re-used to transport used fluid. Naturally, you can imagine my face when, while driving along, I was smacked across the face with a smell best described as that of robot excrement. Yep, I ended up with gear oil spilled all over the carpets of my Crown Victoria. Well, at least the air-con didn’t work, so the incoming summer would be windows-down.
Another category of fluid that’s not good to spill in a car is anything that goes bad with time. Say, milk, for example. I want to apologize in advance to my parents for sharing this story, and make it abundantly clear that this wasn’t their fault, but simply something that happened to them. I remember years ago, arriving home, only to find that a gallon of milk had leaked, drenching the trunk carpet of their then-late-model Hyundai Sonata. Needless to say, work happened quickly, pulling the carpet and sopping up any residual milk pooling in the trunk floor with paper towels. However, that trunk carpet stayed out of the car for a very long time. Not good, people. Not good.
So, what’s the worst thing you’ve spilled inside a car? Did inducing motion sickness in a passenger by telling them to “watch this” result in a tsunami of vomit sloshing around your all-weather floor liner? Did an evasive maneuver decant your coffee directly into your electronic shifter, requiring some serious repair work? Did you have a glitter incident? Whatever the case is, we’d love to hear it in the comments below.
[Ed note: Wanna read more about Thomas’ Crown Vic? You just passed the link! – Pete]
(Photo credits: Thomas Hundal)
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I volunteer with a organization that takes Veterans, First Responder’s and their families kayak fishing. We had a salt water event at Sandy Hook, National Recreation Area in NJ. We were packing up and I volunteered to pack out the garbage. Along with all my other gear the bed of my Frontier only had enough room for 2 of the 3 bags. I said no worries put the bag full of empty water bottles for recycling in my back seat. Fast forward about 40 – 60 minutes on a 95 degree July after some BS’ing after packing up and starting my ride home I get a whiff of something is that me? Long day of fishing, dealing with bait and fish and stuff you know things get rank. As I’m getting on the Garden State Parkway the smell has gotten a lot worse I realise the bag behind me isn’t plastic bottle but one of the garbage bags and of coarse the bag with all the packaging the frozen spearing and squid came in and the associated juices. That first rest stop couldn’t come fast enough & of coarse that bag had a hole in it as I was moving it to the dumpster more poured out into the truck and on me. It took months for that smell to go away no matter what I tried.
My stories are both fishing related, too, and thankfully didn’t happen to me. The first is about a friend of my brother’s who had caught a conger eel (I don’t think they’re related to true eels, but they are very large, as are their teeth). I’m not sure why he wanted to keep it, as they’re not really considered that good to eat. The long and the short of it is, when the dude arrived home, he had no idea where the fish had gone. Some time passes, and a smell permeates his old VW Polo (same guy, upon visiting my brother one time remarked when he noticed some roof rust that ‘I’ve got a hole in my Polo’ which, for those who are unfamiliar with the sweets, would be called Lifesavers on the other side of the Atlantic, and the hole was very much part of their marketing). What the smell is continues to be a mystery, so the guy starts tearing down the car in order to track it down. Eventually, he does, after lifting the carpet in the boot. And then the disappeared fish rushed back to his memory, only now death had finally greeted the poor bastard, and it lay in a fairly advanced state of decomposition. I don’t know if, or how, the lad got the smell out of his Polo.
Not too long afterwards, the same bloody thing happened to my dad, only this time he had been out collecting peeler crab to use as bait and one crawled out the bucket, got under the floor of the boot and took up residence in the spare wheel of his Renault 19. I actually had to live with that smell. It took a lot of magic trees to cover it up, and I’m convinced it was the true reason the old man wrote the car off in an accident.