Fess Up, first wrecks

17 years old. My 1965 Falcon needed paint and my brother backed it into a tree, bent the E36 M3 out of the rear bumper. So my dad got me in touch with a guy who did P&B in a shop behind his house, man it came out GREAT. Had a set of ET mags (Cragar knockoffs) it was a sweet lookin' ride. Maybe 3 months later, had a buddy come back into town who hadn't seen the car so we went for a cruise, I saw a patch of sand on the pavement so I decided to put it sideways, turned the wheel and poked the gas in 2nd gear, just showing my ass. I completely lost it, went down a small embankment and straight into a tree.

I drove it with the hood all hammered out and the grille missing until I could save up enough $ to fix it.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, my first 'real' crash was on a Honda SL70. I'd dropped it etc plenty of times (typical for anyone who rides dirt bikes) but this one day several of us were drag racing across this big open field which had this tall brown grass, maybe 2 feet tall. So I had the thing gapped wide open in 4th, this was maybe 50 MPH and suddenly I confront a drainage ditch. No time to even hit the brakes. I hit the opposite side so hard that it bent the forks and the frame, my knees hit the bars and flipped them all the way forward. Typical kid, I got up and walked away.

10 days after I got my license, I was backing out of a parking spot at my high school in my 79 Pontiac. As I started cutting the wheel, the guy in the Cavalier next to me opened his car door, which then hooked on the bumper of the Pontiac, and was peeled back.

To this day, most of the time, I try to park so I don't have to back out of a space.

17 years old in a Triumph Spitfire 1500. Went off a blind curve into a ditch after getting confused on which way the road went around sunset.

My mother had to come get me, as my dad was out of town. It didn't help that it was around 5 hours from home...

My parents bought a brand new '72 Le Mans. We all went out for a drive in the new car. I begged from the back seat to get to drive it. I had gotten my license about a month earlier. They relented an I drove it through an unfamiliar town. Nearly missed a turn and put on the brakes hard. The car in back slammed into the rear of the new car. "Technically" it wasn't my fault but the new car was bashed, everyone was sick about the damage, and the nice silver paint never really matched after that.

I've posted these before. 3 days after the cage was completed. Mt Philo hillclimb. They generally encourage you to stay on the road. The second picture is from the road I was suppose to be on. Thankfully a tree stopped me.

I hadn't had any at fault incidents. Keep in mind, I lost my license twice due to epilepsy. That one year out of ten, that I've been off the road.

How about stupid things I'd done to make things worse? Had a radio scanner on my visor, so when a guy in a Lincoln tried parking in the back of my Ranger, I took that scanner to the face at about 40 mph. I was lucky it didn't hit my eye. The blood spray was pretty cool...

EDIT: In addition, a flat push bumper CAN cut open a cars trunk.

18, on a gravel road outside of Elko MN in my 1993 Corolla. I thought I was Tommi Makkinen, so I decided to try the old Scandanavian flick around a decreasing radius right hander. I forgot that I had a pile of stuff in the trunk. Car came around beautifully, but... I overcorrected. Fishtailed it back and forth about 4 times before it ended up pointing solidly left, perpendicular to the road. Down into a ravine I went. Didn't realize how deep I was in, or how bad it was, until I threw it in reverse and tried to back it out. Front end started sinking. Turns out I was 2 feet from submerging the car, and had missed a pair of trees by about an equal distance. Even the tow truck driver said "How the hell did you do THAT?".

My first accident wasn't my fault. Driving my friend's father's van to go get some supplies for a project, and an 82-year-old guy made a left directly across in front of me. Spiked the brakes, but still hit him.

First real my-fault accident was in my dad's '81 Civic, which was about 16 months old at the time (and my license was about 11 months old). Fell asleep on the two-lane blacktop on my way home to the boonies. Heard the passenger side wheels hit the gravel and opened my eyes looking at a phone pole and a ditch. Yanked hard left, the right front dug in and tripped, and I rolled it diagonally about 2-1/2 flips. Ended up on the roof in the ditch.

Getting driven home by a cop in the middle of the nights to tell your sleeping parents that you just totaled their car sucks. Insurance paid to fix it, though, and we put about 200k more miles on it after that.

Rear-ended a classmate in the parking lot while leaving high-school. The pointy front bumper of a '71 Comet will do quite a bit of damage to the rear panel of a Dodge Omni, even at 5 mph...

I've never been in a wreck. Some close calls but never a wreck.

My dads jeep sitting at stopsign looking a 2 girls then pulling out hitting back bumper of a cavalier sending it sideways n to a tree. No one went to hospital. I was 17.

I Had just purchased my Malibu and didnt have plates. My dad found a guy to fix the jeep but took 5 months while he drove my car and I rode my bike or walked.

I was 19 years old in 1977, driving a '73 Mazda RX-2 with snow tires on the back only. The right rear had a slow leak that made it perpetually underinflated. I was showing off for a friend and threw it into a corner to get the back end out, which it did, but more than I was expecting. I then overcorrected, snapping it back the other way and sliding it sideways into a phone pole (sound familiar?). Rolled it up on its side in the process, completely destroying the bodywork. That was just the beginning of the worst year of my life, which included almost flunking out of college, working in a factory and going to school at night, and wrecking two cars. I still run car number 77 to remind me what could have been. Amazingly enough, I've never had another accident on the street since then.

I was driving a company truck, on top of a hill about to turn into a shop to deliver some gaskets. With no one coming, I turned into a spot right off the road only to find I wasn't going to fit. I looked, backed up, and got blindsided by a speeding mustang. She hit the back of the Ranger at 60 miles and hour, and the guys in the shop said the truck did a complete 90 degree turn before the rear end came back down. She bounced off me and sideswiped a lady driving a Toyota Corolla, who turned out to be five months pregnant. I've had neck issues ever since.

Oh, and it wasn't my fault.

15 years old - illegally driving a 1967/1968 plumbers GMC pickup truck (nobody is around on Saturdays - hot wired) around the new subdivision cleaning out the new homes under construction and was tired of wheel barrowing garbage down the street. I forgot the tailgate was down and backed up and punched a hole in some dudes Sirocco. Didn't go over well with dad.

Driving my dads 1968 Oldsmobile "98" 2-door 455cid, 4 barrel accelerating quickly towards a stop sign only to throw on the power drum brakes to find that a brake line was rotten leaving me with no brakes. So I figure I can take the corner. I slide the rear into the side of another car ripping it up. The Olds had a minor 8" dent near the bumper that we never fixed since it was hard to see. Dad was pissed and wanted to know why the power attenna was fully extended (looked cooler). I still made it to the spring dance I was headed to. (Next time pump the brakes)

My first really memorable incident was leaving the community college when I was 20ish one evening, after it had been raining all day. There was a fun 270-degree right onto the main road, curling from passing underneath it.

It wasn't raining as I was leaving, and in the twilight it looked like there was significant drying in the tire tracks, and I chose an "appropriate" speed.

It turned out the lighter color was gravel/grit for the winter.

The headlights lit up the hill on the inside of the curve, then the woods on the outside of the curve, then back to the inside, and I backed it off the road on the outside. Fortunately, I'd scrubbed almost all my speed and didn't go down the embankment and was able to drive away with no damage.

At the other end of the spectrum, I've had three cars totalled by people driving into me from behind; once while waiting for someone ahead to turn left (my sister's '69 Dart), once while waiting to turn left myself (my '71 2002), and once when traffic stacked up on the highway (my M52-swapped '87 325is).

I don't stop and wait to turn left on motorcycles.

Haha I will admit my first wreck was quite idiotic. In my 95 legend coupe about a week after I bought it, which was also about 2 weeks after I got my license on my 16th birthday. Oregon had just made a law where you cannot have other kids in the car for the first 6 months. I was parking and turned in too sharp and hit an SUV that was parked on the right hand side of the parking spot. I was carrying too much speed and the bumper on the SUV made a large continuous dent from mid door all the way back to the taillight. I drove off...there was no damage to the other car at all(metal tube type bumper) and I didn't want to get in trouble. Told my parents what happened except instead of me driving off I told them that the guy didn't care because there was no damage and let me go. Didn't report that one to insurance, ended up working off the approx $3,000 it took to fix the car.

All of my accidents have been as a passenger. My car control skills are legendary, but apparently I suck as a passenger.

I get hit in the side by a Foxbody Mustang making a left turn at an intersection. The first thing I heard the man say was, "Give me my glasses so I can see what's happened." I never fixed the Cavalier and just drove it the way it was for a few months.

I had my license about 2 years and was volunteering with a race team. Memorial day weekend we had two races, friday night at Apple Valley Speedway just past Rochester NY and then saturday in Holland NY near Buffalo. I had to work thursday so I was going to meet everyone at Apple Valley friday. I left Long Island in the morning in mom's 91 Escort wagon. The race finished about 11. We drove to Buffalo and hit a friend's bar until they close at about 4, then unloaded the car at a gas station and preped it for saturday night. It needed a bit of body work, some paint, cleaning, new fluids and set it up for the next track, springs weigh ect. We finished, for of us took a quick nap in the Escort under an overpass and went got to Holland when the gates opened at noon.

One of my friends had to be back on Long Island for a wedding on sunday so we left Holland about midnight to drive home. About 2 am I was pulling off Rt 17 for a quick brake when I saw something on the ramp and swerved (it turned out to be a shadow from a road sign). We sailed across a ditch and back on the road knocking the radiator back to the engine and tweeking the unibody. The car was still drivable but packed with mud and we had to keep moving because the cooling fan wasn't working. We found a self serve car wash, powerwashed most of the mud out, taped the rear bumper to the roof and got home in time for the wedding.

When I woke up a few days later I got to straighten and rebuild it in my parent's driveway the following week.

I was driving a Chevy Cavalier that I had been trying unsuccessfully to sell for months. It was January, cold and dark, as I was getting ready to exit one highway and enter another. As I approached the narrow exit ramp/bridge, I could see that there were two cars that had already been in a wreck. As I slowed down, I discovered that the entire bridge was black ice. I started to slide, somehow avoided the other drivers who were standing next to their cars and realized that there was a pair of headlights getting very large in my rearview mirror.

The guy hit me pretty hard from behind and pushed the front of my car into the Jersey barrier that I was probably going to hit anyway. My car was totaled.

After sliding to a stop at the bottom of the long ramp, I see the driver walking up to me. He reaches out to shake my hand and passes me his license and insurance card with the other. He said, "Look, I'm pretty drunk, can we just take care of this without the police?". Before I could answer, a state trooper who was responding to the first wreck pulled up along side us.

As it turns out, he was an illegal immigrant from Albania, who was wanted for murdering hookers and dumping their bodies along side the highway.

At least he had insurance.

petegossett wrote: Had another friend in the back seat turn around & say "nothing behind you".

Yeah, don't you love those helpful observations? I have a relative who has become famous for "Clear on the right...WHOA, Waitwaitwait..."

Mine was watching a drive-in movie while driving past. Victim was stopped to turn left. This was pre-seatbelt days. Dates me a bit.

Woody wrote: As it turns out, he was an illegal immigrant from Albania, who was wanted for murdering hookers and dumping their bodies along side the highway. At least he had insurance.

I believe we have a winner.

Yeah, don't you love those helpful observations? I have a relative who has become famous for "Clear on the right...WHOA, Waitwaitwait..."

I learned long ago not to trust my kids giving me advice on how to back up.

I had a 73 Beetle with the clutchless stick, and had been driving to and from school (about a mile) with my little brother for about 2 weeks. The car was had painfully slow acceleration in stop and go traffic. This got me started on trying to keep the gas pedal down as much as possible to avoid getting caught in and holding up traffic. So after about two weeks of building up courage/stupidity I decided to start going around corners without lifting from the gas. This got the rear end coming around a little and was a new kind of tire squealing scary fun. Right up until I chickened out and lifted pulling on to my parents' house street. I slid the car into the dirt and did the slowest roll over ever, on to the roof.

After getting the car towed home and putting a new windshield in and pounding the roof out with a baseball bat it was back on the road. I painted it like the local police got on the news and was the school hero for what that was worth

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Was backed into by the captain of the cheerleading squad.....jumps out screaming "Why didn't you see me backing up?" Then tells the cop who took the report(my s10 wasn't drivable) that she was driving down the aisle already.....

Needless to say, I was threatened with jail for taking pictures, but they won the case for me and the b*tch became a felon........for insurance fraud. Evidientally they had smashed the back of her vehicle where as the pictures at the accident showed only a scuff and reflector of damage....She missed the last half of her senior year due to being in the county pen. The school was a better place.