I was going to post the following story in the "getting caught" thread, but it's locked so I thought I'd start my own. Hopefully, a few others will be as amused by this as I am. Anyone else who has a funny story about doing crazy and/or funny shit in/with a car when they were really young(er), post it, especially if the story occurred before you reached legal driving age.

Anyway, here's the story of what was, by far, the greatest thing I did before the age of 13: As a toddler (1-2 yrs old) I tried to steal my grandparents' car. Twice. The first time I was maybe 18 months old. We were all going to go somewhere, and all the adults were dumb enough to leave me in the car with the engine running. I climbed in the front seat and tried to take off. I apparently grasped the gearshift concept enough to get in in gear, but ended up going forward when I needed to go backwards and plowed into the garage door hard enough to tear it off the hinges.

Apparently, no one learned the lesson about me and unattended vehicles. Within 6 months, someone AGAIN left the keys in my grandparents' old car, a big 1971 Pontiac Catalina which I then thought was the coolest vehicle on the road. I hopped in, fired that 400CI engine up, and took off down the hill. According to my dad, who saw the whole thing from the kitchen, I didn't really grasp the analog nature of accelerator pedals at that time; apparently, I stomped the pedal to the floor and spun out, ending up quickly at the bottom of the hill...firmly planted against one of grandad's prize pecan trees. According to my dad, mom completely flipped and sprinted to check on me; my grandfather, fortunately for me, laughed so hard he couldn't stand up. Miraculously, I was unharmed, and the car shrugged the hit off with nothing worse than a trashed front fender and a cracked grille. Don't tell me they didn't make tougher cars back in the day. The tree, on the other hand, still bears a big scar.

Interesting if true.

The misfortune of non-automatic garage doors: After having barely mastered the fine art of operating the clutch and driving a manual-transmission, I opened the garage door and prepared to jerk the car into the garage (still getting the hang of it). Well, as soon as I start to pull forward, I look up, and WHAM! The garage door falls down on the door, shattering the windshield. Repair bill:$ 200.

Adventures in parking: I was manevering my parent's land yacht (1983 Mercury Grand Marquis) into a parking space marked "Compact" at the mall parking garage. Okay, I thought- I'll just compact it on in there. Well, the car compacted itself against a cement pillar, denting the passenger door, and the front bumper got tangled up with a VW Bug parked across from it. Repair bill: Bodywork and paint: $300, not bad (they were able to smooth out the intented door panel and repaint it. Front bumper remarkably was undamaged.) I split the cost with them since my crappy part time $3.25 an hour job wasnt enough to cover it.

Now, I wasn't actually the driver in this story, but I was a passenger and it's probably the craziest thing that's ever happened to me in a car.

During high school, a few friends and I were driving back home from a movie, five of us in two cars. It was pretty late, probably 11PM. Now, I grew up in a small town, so the nearest (shitty) movie theater was about a 15 minute drive from town along a 4-lane highway. Usually it's busy during the day, but there was practically nobody on the road that night. We stopped at a light, side-by-side, and were all talking, listening to music, etc. so it took us a moment to realize someone was leaning on his horn. And kept leaning on it. The only other person stopped there was a redneck in a rusty pickup behind us; to this day I still don't know what set him off, but he definitely had a bee up his ass about something. Considering what happened later, he was probably intending to just blow through the light and was annoyed there were people in front of him following the law.

So, we roll down our windows, and between the two cars we make hasty plans to fuck with this asshole. Light turns green: nobody moves. We start flipping the guy off, shining a big maglight in his face (my idea), whatever. He keeps leaning on his horn until he realizes nothing is happening, and gets out of his truck. Before he can get to us, we start driving...slowly. He hops back into his truck and starts tailgating, but with our two cars side-by-side, he can't do shit. Or so we thought. Roads? Where this redneck's going he doesn't need roads! He pulls out into the unpaved median between the two sets of lanes and FLOORS it, tearing off ahead of us going probably at least 70 or 80 (~112-128 kph for you Euros), way over the posted limit of 55. We decide to chase him, but just as the redneck is just about to disappear around the bend ahead, we see the old flashing red-and-blue appear out of nowhere: he must've fallen right into a speed trap, and the cop had to have seen him pass us using the median. Anyway we quickly slow to just under the speed limit and act like nice, law-abiding citizens as we pass the guy getting booked. I can only imagine the crazy story he told the cop about those damn kids harrassing him.

A few years ago I was hanging out with a friend of mine who I hadn't seen in a very long time, so went to grab a meal and what have you. As we're returning to my house (we're on a two lane road) and she decides to switch lanes and go into the right. She didn't see that car that was in the lane already. So, she changes lanes, and this guy in a panic pulls into a restaurant parking lot at about 40, 45 miles an hour, jumps the curb and ends up running straight into the concrete base of the building's 40 foot tall sign. The guy she forced off the road was fine, and actually kind of cheerful for whatever reason.

Last year I drove to Florida with my lady-friend and two other friends. I was driving one car (my buddy Sean’s) and my pal Jake was in the other. We had been on the road for almost 30 hours by the time we finally got into Florida. Our buddy Jake was taking us all to his family time share, but insisted that we follow him and wouldn't give anyone else directions or even what the place was called. Had he given us any info, we would have been able to notice the billboard for the exit to our destination 50 miles back. So Jake is lost, stopping at gas station after gas station trying to get directs, and every time he'd come out, he'd say something 'guys, I got it this time, I know where we're going" (which he didn't). This particular part of the Floridian city we're in is mashed together with the highways, so imagine highways running through out a city. He's driving like a retard, using no sort of turn signals, whipping U-ies in the middle of the damned highway, and I have no choice but to follow. We've all been up at this point for 30+ hours: We're tired, hungry, aggravated and all we want to do its sleep. Something we didn't know about Florida is that they have cameras at almost every stoplight. So imagine how much fun the FSPD had watching two cars appear to be playing to kind of game of tag, breaking about every vehicle law you could think of. So after about an hour of this awful and nerve-racking trip of bullshitery, we finally get pulled over. In a haze, I look over at my buddy Sean and attempt humor. I said "hey man, you remembered to flush the crack, right?" He just looks at me and said "ha-ha...oh wait, I have my pipe in the glove box thought." My face turns white just as the cop walks up to my window. He runs my license and...Turns out it was suspended due to a ticket i had received earlier that year. Suspended. In Florida. While driving like an epileptic. The cops let us off and I agreed to not drive for the rest of the trip. After the fact, my buddy seen tells me he was kidding about the pipe, and didn’t even bring any weed with him on the trip.
Shat bricks.

.

When i was 2 or 3, my dad had gotten out of his geo wagon, and i guess id gotten in, at the same time the garage door was closing. Now I dont remember why, but the car was parked outside of the garage, and i somehow managed to reach the pedal, so i drove the forward into the car, denting a bit of the garage door, and breaking his antenna. Honestly, I dont know how i still remember it when my parents bring it up, but yeah. What was funny is that 10 years later my dad bought a new antenna, and when we took the old on out, we found out there was a spare in the car all along. But that car ended up blowing out a year after that.

I've always bee a little paranoid about the road/cars, and a friend I often ride with is the exact opposite. I'm still a year young for my licence, so, the friend is obviously driving. Nothing THAT bad has happened yet, other than smashing the front on a curb hitting a parked car at Carls Jr, going 70+ in residential neighborhoods, smashing our side into a car parallel to us (just some paint damage and dents) and hotboxing while driving, which I find conspicuous and dislike.

This thread needs more Darwin.

Darwin's a load of shit, man. The amount of stupidity I've lived through would have that fucker rolling in his grave.

When I was in my teens, I was driving around with a buddy and we decided to take an alternate route to a friend's house. The friend lived in the rich part of town (technically the "lower" rich part of town, but I digress), and I took a road that I thought led straight there. Lo and behold, it was a dead end. There was a slightly off-road option though, in the form of a short bike path that linked the little side street we were on with the main road that I usually took to get to the house. We were in an all-wheel drive station wagon, so, we figured, "Might as well take the bike path. This Subie is made for this kind of adventure." I remember we were just blasting Indian music out of the car and having a good laugh. Anyway, I drove along this bike path, the pine tree branches giving the car a nice buffing, and in no time we got to the edge of the main road. I looked left, I looked right, and I drove out and began to make a left, when in within a split-second, there was a screech of tires on the road, a sustained honking, an angry yelling, and a headlight as close as I've ever seen it to my passenger window. It was surreal; I could make out the little vertical and horizontal plasticky lines and those two little plastic bumps that older headlights had. I knew that it was the closest a car could come to hitting another car. It couldn't have been more than 10cm. Of course, this headlight, and the car it was attached to, was about one foot away from my buddy that was sitting in the passenger seat. He let out a long sustained yell which blended nicely with the droning of the angry driver's horn. We were also still blasting those Indian tunes. I took off down the road, the other car chased me for a bit but we turned off the main road, zipped around some smaller streets, lost him, and finally got to my friend's place. We were laughing like idiots for 20min, half out of the sheer lunacy of the situation, and half out of escaping death or getting mangled.

It's one of the few times I was in the wrong as a driver. I still don't know how I didn't see that guy, but I'm really glad he didn't hit my car and/or maim my friend.

^sometimes, if there is a passenger in the seat next to you when you are making a left turn, the passenger's head/body can create a momentary blind spot. So, in other words, when you looked to the right, your buddy's head was blocking the view of the approaching car at that exact moment, so you didn't see the car. Although this sounds far fetched, it really isn't; I have had similar things happen to me and I have SEEN this happen to other people. One of those driver safety tips is that if someone else is riding shotgun with me, I will typically take longer to glance to the right before I turn left, so I don't miss a car coming from that direction.

When I was 19, I had my first car, a 1989 Ford Crown Victoria. I decided to take this car "auto crossing" in a residential area. I had 4 passengers in my car and it was late at night. I didn't realize how poorly the car handled and completely failed during a drift. I ended up skidding into someones lawn and crashing into there tree at around 40 MPH.

No one felt a thing, and the car still ran and drove, however it was severely mangled. The police showed up, one of my 'friends' ran off and never spoke to me again, and the other people in my car were laughing it up. Honestly if I didn't have a full frame car with a v8, I doubt I'd have left without a scratch. I wish I just drove home instead of getting out of the car...totally ruined my life for a few years.

Two years later, I was driving a 1988 Chevrolet Caprice. I was driving past a friends house and he just happened to be outside at the time, so I swooped him up. As he got in the car, I said "I'm gonna leave some rubber." I positioned the car at the end of the driveway, facing oncoming traffic. I then proceeded to cut the steering wheel all the way to the right. I then floored it from a dead stop out of his driveway onto the main street. I ended up leaving an ENORMOUS cloud of smoke. It was so bad, I heard that people came to a complete stop and that traffic got severely delayed because of it. I was unaffected seeing as it was behind me....but later that night, I dropped my friend off and there was roughly 120 foot span of tire tread on the ground. This was a 305 V8 with 170 HP, 250 ft/lbs. I was surprised it even happened.

A year later, I sold that car and bought a car that I would hope to preserve and potentially restore at some point. The stupid shit ended for the most part minus the occasional drift through a U-turn or bend.

Autocrossing in a fucking Crown Vic...hilarious!! Sort of sounds like the same principle as drag racing with a Prius, ha ha! That Mercury Grand Marquis I used to drive (it was my parents) was like driving a fucking semi truck- you seriusly had to do some planning ahead to steer that thing go around a corner. That car had the same basic body as the Crown Vic but a bit more luxurious, and it's trunk was practically big enough to store a Mini-cooper in it. Worked great for sneaking your cheap-ass friends into the drive-ins who didnt have enough money to pay their way in.

Haha yeah. Strangely though, the '88 Caprice handled fucking great. It really noticeably out handled the crown vic. You would figure they would be very similar, but I just had better grip overall in the caprice. Now i have the police model and it handles better than the Camaro from that period. Either way, I learned my lesson from that crash. The only stupid shit I do now mostly involves a straight line or maybe a slight bend..and only in daylight.