These Are the Dumbest Things You've Ever Done in Your Cars

Drove it off the lot.

20 year old Marine stationed at Camp Hansen in Okinawa in the early ‘80s kicking tires at a used car lot. What could possibly go wrong?

Bought a RHD Charcoal Grey Savanna RX-7. Actually bought is was a very generous term. I FINANCED a RHD Charcoal Grey Savanna RX-7 from Okinawa Shimpan Finance Company outside the gate at Kadena AFB. Entire agreement was in Japanese. To this day I have no idea what I signed. Paperwork being as it was back then, when it was time to rotate back to the States, I parked it in front of the finance company, dropped the keys in the mail slot with a note, grabbed a Honcho onto Kadena and flew home.

I got a few half-hearted letters demanding the balance after they sold it, saying they were sure an honorable man like me would settle this matter as soon as possible. Well, that didn’t happen.

It’s been 40 years and I’m still a little afraid to visit Japan.

Respect, because I would have caved since I’m a lil chicken.

Submitted by: 900turbo

I had a 2WD Isuzu Amigo, which was perfect in Wisconsin, where I lived. Then I moved to Seattle, where it was still a pretty good way to get around town. Then I got bored and decided to go drive to Mount Saint Helens.

I looked at my gazateer (because this was before GPS) and found that there was a road that would go right over one mountain pass and get me there without having to drive on the freeway. And it was marked as a road so, how bad could it be? So, off I go, roads progressively getting smaller and less paved until I find myself past a sign saying “road closed november-may” or something like that. As a midwesterner this meant nothing to me so I kept going. Besides, it was march, it’d been warm and sunny for weeks.

The 2 lane road became a one lane carved out of the side of a mountain, and I was getting some serious WTF looks from the guys on motorcycles coming down the road. Kept going until I hit ice. Which was not at all like Midwestern ice. Tried driving up onto the ice but lucky for me my Amigo wanted no part of that.

At this point I decided I needed to turn around and go back. Except, this was a narrow little goat track at this point and there was nowhere to turn around. But, because I was young(er) and dumb(er) I decided to execute an Austin Powers level turn. On the side of a mountain. With no guard rails and barely a road. In a 2 wheel drive trucklet. Pretty sure I used up whatever luck I had for the year on that 300 point turn. Got back down the mountain, took the freeway like a normal person and finally got to see Mount Saint Helens, which I had wanted to see since I was a kid.

You’re the bravest person I’ve ever spoken too, and I mean that.

Submitted by: Buckfiddiousagain

I was living in Prague and some friends and I decided to go to Warsaw one weekend. We rented a car, some kind of Skoda, and set off. This was 2009, so GPS was an add-on that our cheap asses decided to forego. Bad move.

We got there fine by using maps but took a different route home. We ended up in some small Polish town in the middle of the night. The road we needed to take was closed. All of the roads out of town were closed. Nothing was open. It was surreal. The only way out was down a set of stairs, blocked by a temporary fence. So we moved it and I carefully drove down like 30 feet of stairs.

Rental cars can do anything. You were probably not the first person to drive it down stairs.

Submitted by: Unacceptably Dry Scones

In the late 1990s when I got my driver’s license in the hinterlands of Michigan, near where I grew up was a road everyone locally knew as “Rollercoaster Road.” This ~1.5 mile (~2.5 km) gravel road ran through state land and, as such, had no houses or other development along it. The last half-mile or so had these very undulating hills that, if driven at a decent clip, would give one the sensation of riding on a roller coaster. At the end was a T-intersection that would find you crashed into a swamp if you failed to stop in time.

I, being a brilliant intellectual with a driver’s license, decided that rather than worry about having to stop and missing the last couple of hills, I’d go the other way so I’d have the speed for the end. Did it a bunch of different times in my POS ‘86 LeBaron if I was out that way and bored and it was great fun.

One day, I decided to really give it hell. In the T-intersection, I actually instead of just turning onto Rollercoaster Road, I backed up until my tires were damned near off the end, threw it in Drive, and pinned the throttle to the floorboards.

I don’t know how fast I crested that last hill, but I know I was past 80 mph when I started up it and it was a short little one with a good downslope on the other side. I came over it and, for the first time in all the times I’d ever done it, felt the entire suspension unload like I caught air. I landed, hard, on loose gravel at some very high rate of speed, and I felt the car start to go... not straight. In a panic, I actually ended up doing the correct thing and just letting off the gas and not moving the steering wheel. As I drifted toward the right side and had visions of myself becoming one with the maple trees along the side, I started to give it a bit of steering input, and fortunately, I started to get it to start straightening out. In the end, I managed to regain control, bought the car to a stop, and then just sat there shaking like a leaf for several minutes.

Less than five years after that drive (so around 2002), a freshly-minted driver and his three buddies from my high school decided to do like freshly-minted drivers had been doing for many years: Drive Rollercoaster Road. Trouble for them was they were in a late 1990s Explorer with a V8 instead of a crappy ‘80s LeBaron with a K-Car 4-banger. Not sure which way they went or what happened, but they didn’t make it to the end, and they didn’t live. Instead, they lost control, crashed, got pinned in the car, and burned to death.

Needless to say, the entire community was shocked. It was all over the local news, with too many gruesome details besides. The county, shortly thereafter, ended up recutting the road to minimize the hills and reduce the rollercoaster effect in an effort to prevent something similar from happening again.

Sounds like you got off real lucky with this one. Jesus, that sounds very not-safe.

Submitted by: xequar

Not terribly dumb, but was on a trip up to the Catskills with my now wife, then GF and as we were going down a pretty steep road. I put my mom’s Maxima in Neutral to coast on down. Then at the bottom around 45-55 MPH I went to put it back in drive and brain farted and put it in reverse. It promptly turned off and I thought I blew up the transmission 6 hours from home. Luckily all I needed to do was put it in park and turn it off and back on and everything was good. My wife still reminds me of that on a monthly basis about 15 years later.

I’ve always wondered what would happen if you did that. I’m glad I now know and will never never do it myself. Better you than me, know what I mean?

Submitted by: Big Block I-4

In 2001, my step-mom had a 98 Accord V6 that was the lease was finished on. It was already inspected, and drop off was set for 9 days later. My VW Corrado at the time was getting painted, so I had no car and my dad was like ‘just take the Accord.’ Well, being that it was already inspected for the lease turn in, mileage, condition, etc were not any of our concern. I did some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever done in a car. Racing, jumped it, burnouts, trays under the rear wheels for drifting, maxing out the speedo with it bouncing off the limiter. I think I ran an entire tank of gas through it in 110 miles. When I was done, ran it through the automatic car wash once and vacuumed it out, then dropped it off. Never heard a word, so I guess it was fine.

The car was already gone in spirit. It was someone else’s problem. Good for you, my friend.

Submitted by: 50DrunksInABar

I didn’t do it, but it was done to me & it was, by far, the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen done in a car.

It’s 1980, I’m 14 & I’ve got a hardship license - pretty common for farm kids in that era. I’m in my 1974 Datsun B210 and on my way to school with my 16-year old uncle (my family tree may or may not actually fork).

My uncle reached over, grabbed the keys, turned off the car & threw the keys out the window. Nobody died, but it wasn’t for lack of trying on his part.

Huh???

Submitted by: Reventlov

1988 Subaru GL wagon. This is probably up there in some of the dumbest thing I’ve done in life and, frankly, lucky nothing awful happened. But there was a really long, straight stretch of road along a well-known reservoir in upstate NY. We would go to this straight(ish) stretch of road and drive around 30 mph, set the cruise control (she was fully loaded!) and switch positions between the driver and the passenger. At the end of the long straight was a hairpin left turn leading to a stop sign where two friends and several other people died on motorcycles in unrelated incidents (it was a very popular place to see how fast one could go in a straight line). Now, this is dumb enough by doing it while everyone else was in the car. But no, we had to up the ante. So I would go out the window, pull myself up by the roof rack, cross across the top of the car, and back in through the passenger window. I have a million dumb stories with that car. But doing that (regularly!) was probably the dumbest.

This little activity has a name, but for the life of me I cannot remember what it is. I think they did it on Top Gear years ago. I don’t know. My brain is dying.

Editor’s Note: I believe in the mid-aughts we called this “Ghost Ride the Whip.” My car friends may have attempted this several times with success. Although, another kid in school (not in our group) fell off the car and still, to this day, can’t taste a thing. — LC

Submitted by: Kerberos824

When I was a lot younger and generally making a lot of questionable decisions, I once purposely tailgated a fully marked cop car. When he inevitably lit me up and pulled me over, from in front naturally, he basically asked me what my problem was and why I was driving so close. I told him he was going too slow, which was fair in my opinion because he was barely doing the speed limit. Thing is, my car was pretty heavily modified so aside from calling for backup and making a big roadside spectacle of me, the cop also spent the next hour or more “inspecting” everything, calling in to his station, threatening to have my car towed and then finally leaving me with a pretty decent bunch of fines and a few follow-up inspections and reports.

I don’t know what the hell else I thought was going to happen. Seriously, I don’t think I would hang out with past-me.

Be better than this.

Submitted by: elgordo47

I would say driving down the steps of the Philadelphia art museum in one of my Jeeps was pretty stupid. But driving back up it was really stupid.

Riding a motorcycle on the pedestrian path of the Brooklyn Bridge to get away from the police.

Not me but when me and my friend were playing Starsky and Hutch around (what was) an abandoned neighborhood near the Philadelphia zoo. And he got a little too slidey around a corner and backed his car through an (abandoned) house.

Got a box crown Victoria stuck between two very large trees in the Susquehanna State Forest. As far as I know it’s still there.

There’s a bunch more.

Did you at least do the Rocky thing at the top of the Philadelphia Art Museum stairs?

Submitted by: chewymilk

As a teenager I got my parents 1995 Suburban Fully Airborne by hitting a low spot in a rural neighborhood by my house, to do this effectively we had to hit about 70mph and blow through a 4 way uncontrolled (no stop or yield signs in any direction) intersection. Visibility was not great due to the large amount of trees, so it was “safer” to do it in the winter when the oaks had no leaves and in the evenings when headlights were on.

There is a very good reason Automobile Insurance is so high for teenage boys.

Sounds gnarly, dude. Napoleon Dynamite would be very proud of you.

Submitted by: klurejr

*Googles statute of limitations*

Nah, maybe in another 7 years.

This is the only correct answer.

Submitted by: engineerthefuture

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