These photos of a woman in a Lexus jumping a curb into a classic Pontiac Lemans and '40 Ford Roadster during a Southern California car show prove one thing definitively: your car is never truly safe from the beige plague. But what exactly happened here?
When these photos popped up on the forums a week ago we took out our detective kit to track down the source. Surely, if someone had actually done this we'd have seen a YouTube video, a few tweets, and a million Facebooks posts.
Nothing. Nada. Radio silence.
Eventually we tracked down the owner of the Picasa account where these photos were taken from. He admitted he didn't shoot the photos and had only a limited understanding of where they came from when he posted them.
We think the photos may be a couple of years old and predate the modern automotive web with all of its instant access to car destruction, based partially on the fact that this was shot with an older HP Photosmart M540 camera according to the image's EXIF data.
Anyone know what actually happened? When this happened? What's the story?
UPDATE: A reader who was there chimes in on what happened:
I was actually there when this happened on Wednesday, June 8, 2011. I work for an ambulance company & we were posted in the same parking lot, maybe 200 feet from where this happened. From what we could gather, the driver was exiting off of Alondra Blvd (a busy street), accelerated up the driveway into the lot, most likely was surprised by the fact that there was a CLASSIC CAR SHOW IN A PARKING LOT and confused the gas for the brake (or her foot slipped off the brake onto the gas). She jammed the accelerator, drove through a planter box & BOOM. My partner & I had a pretty great laugh at the sheer stupidity of the whole situation, as well as a moment of silence for Lemans and '40 Roadster.
(Thanks to everyone for the tip and Ankur for the photos)