Jalopnik Readers' Worst Driving Blunders

Jalopnik recently asked its readers to share the driving blunders that still keep them up at night. The responses, collected in a story published last week, range from slow-motion crashes to wrong-way drives and sleep-deprived ditch dives.

One reader described the slowest crash they had ever seen: a 2000s Lincoln gently scraping along a concrete bollard on a road that prohibited trucks. The car’s front end and driver-side door were torn, but nobody was hurt. The reader was left wondering how someone could miss something so obvious.

Another reader made a costly mistake at the gas station with a brand-new Civic Hybrid Sport. After filling up, they drove away with the nozzle still in the tank. It snapped off the pump and broke the fuel door actuator.

A former delivery driver recalled piloting a manual Datsun truck in the 1980s. While reaching to catch a sliding bag, the steering wheel slipped, and he ran straight into a steel bollard at 10 or 15 mph. The boss, who had also been his childhood baseball coach, let him keep the job.

One reader misplaced their glasses at a party and avoided the freeway. Instead, they ended up driving the wrong way on a one-way street right in front of the police department.

A 67-year-old driver with over a million accident-free miles fell asleep on the highway six weeks ago. He drove into a wide, gentle ditch with no damage, but the incident shook his confidence.

Another story: a reader parked legally at a grocery store, only to have a drunk driver mount the curb and hit the parked car. The drunk’s insurance argued that if the reader’s car hadn’t been there, the accident wouldn’t have happened. The reader’s insurance company’s lawyers had fun fighting that one.

A traveler in Italy nearly entered a ZTL (traffic-limited zone) and had to make a panicked three-point turn on a narrow cobblestone road in a rented diesel Fiat, while locals watched.

One young driver with sleeping family on board drove 4–5 hours with paper maps and ended up in South Carolina, a state not on the route.

A teenager who had just rebuilt a 1968 Camaro started the engine without the shifter connected. The car took off into his parents’ garage wall. Damage was minor, but the car wore a broken grille and bent bumper for years.

Finally, a reader survived a crash with a drunk driver in a 50-foot tractor-trailer on Toronto’s 401. He woke up three days later in the hospital and took three years to get back behind the wheel. His back still hurts 40 years on.

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• driver errors
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