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

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.