To say that the repair industry has had their fare share of wild, unimaginable and un-explainable collisions this year would be an understatement.
Collision Repair has seen it all. From high-flying Ferraris, to fast and furious four-year-olds, 2019 has not been the year for squeaky clean driving records and unscathed cars.
Here are our top five most read Believe it or Not articles, catch up now so you’ll be all ready for another decade of weird and wild car conundrums.
From a major drug-bust to a terrifying avalanche pouring over a series of vehicles, Collision Repair has prepared the top three unbelievable stories of the week!
1. Suspicious Tires
A number of Canadian Ford dealerships made an unexpected discovery. Dealerships in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Quebec found large packets of methamphetamine hidden in the spare tires of Ford Fusions that didn’t actually match the make or model of the vehicle. The vehicles were shipped over from a Mexico car factory. Police said they believe the shipment of illegal drugs was part of an operation run by the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, which is the group that controls the area around the Ford factory plant in Hermosillo, Mexico. In total, they found 180 kilograms of meth which is an estimated street value of $4.5 million.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/belanger-ford-international-drugs-1.5035544
2. Total Whiteout
The most expensive new car has been sold for 16.7 million euros which is about US$18.9 million. The one-off Bugatti luxury sports car which is also referred to as “La Voiture Noire” meaning “The Black Car” is a low-slung sports car with a huge 16-cylinder engine and of course a Bugatti trademark on the front grille. The vehicle made its debut at the Geneva auto show and announced it had already been sold.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/autos/most-expensive-new-car-ever-bugatti-sells-for-19m-1.4325985
3. La Voiture Noir
Terrifying Dash cam footage shows a blanket of snow coming down on a series of vehicles traveling on Colorado’s Ten Mile Canyon region. Shaune Golemon was driving on 1-70 when his daughter took notice of the wall of snow that was coming down from the mountain that surrounded them– it was indeed an avalanche. The avalanche came down and completely covered the vehicle making it impossible to move or see. There were no reports of injuries and they were able to safely get out of the vehicle after the snow was finished coming down. Local media confirms the avalanche was not a controlled slide. Warnings were in place at the time of the incident.
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/avalanche-engulfs-car-on-colorado-highway-video
Have you ever seen a McLaren built out of Lego? Or have you heard about the new technique firefighters are using to cool down smoking vehicles? Collision Repair has prepared the top four unbelievable stories of the week!
Bumper Madness
Footage of an angry woman bashing a crashed vehicle with a car bumper has gone viral. The woman was chasing the man in the vehicle threatening to hit him with a brick and ramming his car until he crashed it. She then took a car bumper and started smashing the vehicle with it, causing a lot of damage to the front. Overall the vehicle’s airbags were deployed, the radiator was completely damaged, and it was leaking oil. Police were called and the woman was arrested. This isn’t the families first run-in with the woman. The victim’s wife told WELSH 2 News that they already have three different restraining orders issued on her.
https://www.wesh.com/article/caught-on-camera-woman-attacks-man-with-car-bumper/26969948
Burning Up
A group of employees witnessed smoke coming from one of the electric vehicles on display in the showroom. As a quick reaction, they decided to drive the BW i8 outside and call the fire department. But because it was an electric car, firefighters needed to do more than just hose it down. They pulled up with a hybrid coupe and a crane where they picked up the vehicle and dumped it into a large tank of water. Firefighters said they immersed the car into the tank because extinguishing it is “difficult with these cars.” The vehicle stayed inside the tank for 24 hours.
https://www.facebook.com/BrandweerMWB/posts/2902012643145806
McLaren LEGO style
First, there was the LEGO Bugatti and now they’ve made a replica of the McLaren Senna. This vehicle contains 467,854 individual pieces which took the LEGO builders about 2,725 hours to finish and 2,000 hours to design the concept. While this LEGO car doesn’t actually have an engine, there are some features that still work. The lights flick on and off, there is a simulation of an engine sound when the start button is pushed and the famous McLaren doors can swing up and down. In total, the LEGO Senna weights 3,348 lbs, which is 1,102 lbs more than the weight of an actual Senna McLaren.
https://www.motoring.com.au/lego-mclaren-senna-is-unbelievable-117683/
Locked Out
Pete the Pug managed to lock his owner outside of her vehicle, forcing her to wait three hours for the American Automobile Association to come and help her unlock the vehicle. The woman’s son, Nick shared the screenshots of the conversation he had with his mother on social media along with the photo that was taken of Pete sitting in the driver’s seat of the car. The first text read: “Pete locked me out of my car.” He accompanied the photo evidence with a tweet that says, “So my dog locked my mom out of her car.” The tweet received more than 90,000 retweets.
Collision Repair has prepared some unbelievable stories to share with you this week. From someone driving right into a dealership to a man driving his Ferrari right into the ocean. Check out the video below to see the top four unbelievable stories of the week!
Lost and Found
Melissa Bradbury, the driver of a CR-V in St. Johns, Newfoundland reported her vehicle missing from her sister-in-law’s driveway in November. She informed her insurance and they initiated the vehicle was a write off. Until recently when she received a notice that her vehicle had been parked on the road of a residential street for the past few months. With Bradbury and the residents of Eric Street calling the city for weeks, she wonders why it wasn’t found any sooner.
http://vocm.com/news/st-johns-neighbourhood-fed-up-trying-to-deal-with-abandoned-vehicle/
Deep Sea Dive
Talk about strange, but a 48-year-old man driving a Ferrari in Florida, drove his luxury vehicle straight off a dock into the ocean. Security footage caught the incident on camera, where it looks like an officer is telling the man that he couldn’t park there. He scurried to his vehicle and then drove right off the dock into the ocean. Sinking down 30 feet, the man was reportedly not injured. The vehicle, however, had to have been pulled out using inflatables. It’s still a mystery as to why he would even did that in the first place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=1hnK6hX8QqI
Because You Had A Bad Day
It’s the second incident this week of someone smashing through the glass and driving right into the showroom of a dealership. The first was in St. Johns but just the other day, a 20-year-old man must have been having a bad day when he mounted a curb and swerved into the showroom of a Porsche dealership in Toronto. He drove right through the glass, hitting three vehicles, one of them being valued at $145,000. The overall damage to the building and the vehicles is costing nearly $100,000.
https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/car-driven-into-toronto-porsche-dealership
Wild Ride
A four-year-old child was caught on camera riding on top of the roof rack of his parent’s vehicle. The mother claims that she had no idea he was up there and that he must have climbed up there when they weren’t looking. While they were driving around with their son on the roof, other drivers were honking and flashing their lights at her. After she was alerted from the drivers on the road she pulled over and placed her child in the car right away. The mother is now facing a charge of dangerous driving of $3,000.
https://www.9news.com.au/2019/01/05/21/35/perth-child-on-roof-racks-harrisdale-video-mum-unaware
From a rear-end collision that ending up wrecking a whole Honda to a chain-reaction crash the resulted in one epic dive, Collision Repair has your top three weirdest and wildest industry headlines.
Double Whammy
A Raleigh woman is recovering from one truly strange collision after a car that rear-ended her car came back for vengeance.
Earlier this week, Jenny Garcia was driving home from work when a car rear-ended her Honda.
When both Garcia and the driver of the car pulled to a roadside to address the collision, the driver dismissed the incident, insisting there was no damage and drove off. But that wasn’t good enough for Garcia.
Following the car so that she could relay the car’s information and license plate number to the 911 operator, both Garcia and her runaway-rammer ended up on a street blocked heavy with construction.
That’s when the driver decided to match his wrong with another and backed into a driveway before ramming into Garcia’s car, over and over again.
“He proceeds to go down to the end of the cul-de-sac, pull into a driveway, turn around, and next thing I know comes flying back down the road and starts hitting my car to try and get out,” reported Garcia. “I’m screaming on 911 – ‘he’s hitting me! He’s hitting me!”
The driver of the car then decided he had enough and sped off, leaving a confused Garcia in his dust – and her bumper.
Thankfully, Garcia is facing just minor injuries and is just happy bad luck doesn’t come in threes.
Little Red Cadillac
A man leaped from his sunroof unscathed in Philadelphia this week after a chain-reaction collision almost cost him his life and his low insurance rates.
At around 6:50 p.m., a driver of a Red Cadillac wasn’t keeping his eyes on the road, and without noticing the other three cars in front of him were stopped, rammed into the rear of the car in front of him, causing a domino-effect collision.
Fearing trouble he would get in for causing not one, not two, but three other collisions, the man opened his sunroof and jumped while his car continued moving.
The man then realized he had forgotten something in his car, ran back to grab it, then dashed away, losing his flip flops in the mad dash.
But don’t worry, the Cadillac driver returned to the scene 44 minutes later, this time in the back of a police cruiser.
You can’t leap from a car in cuffs.
There’s a Snake in My Buick
What do you get when you combine a rattlesnake, a shotgun, and a can of uranium? Sounds like the beginning of a bizarre joke, but it wasn’t funny to the Guthrie Police Department when they had to handle this exact situation just last June.
When the Oklahoma-based police department pulled over Stephen Jennings at around 11 a.m. on June 26, the first thing they discovered about this strange situation was that in fact, the car he was driving was not his at all.
The next thing they found – a rattlesnake.
Disturbed by the bizarre pet riding in the back of Jennings stolen vehicle, the Guthrie Police decided to further investigate and found an open bottle of whiskey, a gun in the console, and a canister of powdered uranium.
“He’s got a rattlesnake, a stolen vehicle, firearm, and somebody under arrest,” stated Guthrie Police Sgt. Anthony Gibbs. “The uranium is the wild card in that situation.”
Although facing charges for having open alcohol in a stolen vehicle, Jennings is off the hook for having uranium in his possession.
From vehicles ramming into buildings to objects flying all over the highway, here are the crazies automotive stories of the week!
Same Incident Different Year.
A house in Ottawa is undergoing some major repairs from having a vehicle ram into it–the second one to collide with the home in as many years! The first incident happened in 2016, when a truck plunged into the house. The second incident occurred just last week, when police put their sirens on to pull over a vehicle but the driver attempted to escape and ended up crashing into the house. The man was taken into the hospital but is now in custody.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/vanier-roads-closed-because-of-a-police-operation
Grab and Go
Early in the morning on January 1, police in London, Ontario were called to an LCBO because a pair of thieves drove their car numerous times into the side of the building, breaking the windows and overall creating a hole in the store. They entered the store and stole an unknown amount of liquor. The thieves then abandoned the vehicle in the store and took off, causing roughly $100,000 worth of damage to the building.
Highway Horrors
A couple driving on Highway 410 in Brampton, Ontario are lucky to be alive, after a sheet of plywood flew off an unsecured vehicle and smashed into their windshield on Wednesday. The couple suffered from some injuries including cuts to their faces. Ontario provincial police officer, Sgt. Kerry Schmidt tweeted about the accident, stating that they are still investigating whose vehicle the wood came from. He also tweeted warning the public to make sure that any loads strapped to the back of vehicles should be properly secured.
