Man, those teenage years; bad skin, bad mental health, and bad decision making skills. Yet somehow, it’s supposed to be the best time of your life. I asked you for your youthful automotive indiscretions, and you delivered. Some of you treated the comments section like a confessional and dished out truly crazy stories.
We’re lucky to be here to tell these stories, as so many of our cohort are taken by auto crashes every year. So never forget – it’s real sweet to grow old.
Every snowy morning I would pull into my HS parking lot, crank the wheel, and pull the e-brake to do a donut.
It was dumb. I’m glad I didn’t kill one of my classmates.
A friend of mine bought a new Neon in HS and would drive pretty dang fast all of time. One day we were heading to a concert (this was rural Minnesota, so think old dudes playing in a cover band). A rabbit ran out in front of the car. He swerved. To hit the bunny. About a month later he wrapped that car around a tree and ended up in a coma for a month.
From Wierdisgood
As a 16 year-old, fresh with my driver’s license, I took the old man’s car for a spin. It was a former cop car, a white Plymouth Fury, with a 383 under the hood.
The incident took place in Iowa, so all the flat straight roads there definitely worked in my favor. The Plymouth had regular tires shod—no high speed rating for the rubber the old man bought. There was no way in hell he’d pop for such an expense.
I drove the Fury to this one truly long straight stretch and put my foot in it and didn’t let up. The speedometer kept climbing. The car roared as it went past 90, 100, 110, and I topped out at 125mph. My heart was in my throat as a curve in the road was approaching really fast. I let off the gas and the car’s poor aerodynamics quickly dragged the car down to a more reasonable 90mph. I touched the brakes and went through the curve at a sane 70mph. To say I was breathing hard and my heart felt like it was ready to burst out of my chest is the understatement of the year. Hands shook too, but yeah, truly the adrenaline rush of adrenaline rushes.
My teenage car had 85 horsepower. I hated it at the time, but credit my continued existence to that low power.
From Sam Bankman-Incarcerated, sklooner and others
Car Tag.
The idea wasn’t to actually hit the other person’s car, but to get “close enough” that everyone would agree it was a tag.
We played it maybe 2 or 3 times when we finally realized how incredibly stupid it was - especially considering one of the “players” didn’t even have his license yet and was sneaking his sister’s car out. We were playing it late at night in our suburban neighborhood which was full of hills and sharp turns.
Two crazy things happened that put and end to it. I was being pursued both times. The first was when I saw the car that was It coming down the street towards me. I reversed and was flying backwards probably 30 or 45 mph and I could see the driver and his navigator looming ever closer. At the last second, I realized that there was a parked car behind me, and as I saw their navigator hanging out the window yelling that they had me, I had to swing out to avoid the car behind me just as the guy tagging me had to swerve as well since they were over taking me. I remember my friend hanging out of the passenger window as he realized we were likely going to hit and he was going to get crushed between our two cars. Some how, we passed by with inches to spare.
Second one was the final straw. It involved two cars chasing me (one had been tagged by the other so they were both it) in the neighborhood next to hours which had a lot of contruction. I had one car coming towards me, and another I had lost, but they figured out where I was going so they were going around to cut me off. I was approaching a sharp curve at the bottom of a hill, with one car behind me I was keeping at distance, but then I saw the other car coming down the hill around the curve. I was either going to hit them, or get rear-ended by the car behind me. Since I was going too fast to take the curve without swinging into the other side of the road, I just locked my arms on the wheel, locked up the brakes, and slid right over the curb and right between two under-construction houses. I some how managed to not hit anything - passing between a house, piles of building materials, and the standing post of a future street light. The two cars chasing me also managed to avoid hitting each other.
We all got out to admire/exclaim about where my car ended up without having hit anything (or even damaged the wheels going over the curb). That was the last time we played.
and
I played that too but we actually would touch bumpers driving around in an underpowered fox body Mustang and a matching Capri
From Matt and sklooner
Pass on a two-lane country road, and the asshole I was passing sped up. I floored it, and finally passed him at 100, missing an oncoming vehicle by what felt like only a few feet. After that I learned to only do that when absolutely clear
From RedRaiderEducator
When I was 16, I let my unlicensed 15-year-old friend drive my brand new 1995 Dodge Neon, because kids are dumb. With him driving and me in the passenger seat, he decided to “give it the business” by going roughly 60 MPH in a 25 MPH residential neighborhood. Needless to say, when we hit the first corner, physics then gave us the business right back and things didn’t go too well.
We hit one tree and knocked it completely over, then sent a guy checking his mail at the end of the driveway flying 50 feet through the air, and finally wrapped the car around an oak tree nice and tidy like a Christmas present. Somehow everyone lived, which is especially miraculous considering mid-90's Chrysler products weren’t exactly known for their crash worthiness.
The Jaws of Life were needed to pry us out of there, and we didn’t walk away completely unscathed. My buddy shattered his femur, I broke my damn back (not high enough to cause paralysis, but enough to be really, really painful), and that poor dude walking down his driveway somehow managed to only have minor injuries. By all accounts we shouldn’t have survived, and you better believe it has made me a cautious driver ever since.
From paradsecar
My buddy Paul owned a hand-me-down 1968 Chrysler Newport that was nigh indestructible.
Drive for a week with the low oil light on? No problem.
Spring a leak in the lower radiator hose in the middle of nowhere? Meh, just drive it 2o miles to the nearest K-mart, buy a roll of duct tape of $0.79, wrap the hose with said duct tape, fill the radiator with the hose in the garden center then drive like nothing’s wrong until the repair finally fails in Dad’s driveway three months later.
Drive past a freshly harvested tomato field at 3am?
“HEY, LET’S GO MUDDIN!”
And with those words, Paul throws the Newport into a sharp right and we go bouncing through the field, the rear wheels throwing up rooster tails of mud and the remains of that season’s tomato plants.
This goes on for several minutes, the two of us laughing and whooping like idiots.
Then, Paul runs the car into a ditch.
Picture if you will a faded burgundy Newport, grille-first at a 20 degree angle in the South Jersey mud, the rear wheels uselessly 8 inches above the ground and two suburban Jersey boys looking at the result of their stupidity, all illuminated by a full moon on a chilly September night. The only sound, aside from the croaking of the bullfrogs and the ‘tick-tick-tick’ of the cooling engine were the hushed whispers of me and Paul trying to formulate a plan to extract the car from the muddy field, punctuated by the occasional obscenity.
After much trial and effort, we hit upon the idea of putting the car in reverse, jamming a tire iron between the front seat and gas pedal, with me sitting on the edge of the open trunk to weigh down the rear end and Paul pushing from the front until the rear wheels could get a grip. This continued for maybe 10 to 15 minutes until the rear wheels had finally made contact with the ground again. Then, with one final, mighty push from both me and Paul, the Newport pulled itself from the dirt and rolled slowly backwards until Paul jumped in the driver’s seat and put the car in neutral.
We slowly exited the field and drove to a nearby 24 hour gas station to examine the damage. Most of the Newport’s grille was gone, buried in the mud, along with the lenses of the two right headlights and turn signal. Paul and I were caked in mud and i had dried blood on my face from a cut above my right eye. Paul was missing his left shoe and the Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt I had been wearing was nowhere to be found.
We washed off as much of the mud from the car as we could with the hose on the side of the gas station. The cashier in the gas station barely raised an eyebrow at the two muddy kids who walked in his store for a late night snack of microwaved burritos, Funyuns and Dr. Pepper.
We pulled into my driveway just before 6am. Paul dropped me off and headed home with the Newport, bent but unbowed. I walked into the back yard, stripped down to my Jockeys, hosed myself off then took a dip in the pool before quietly sneaking into the back door and slipping into bed.
The last time I spoke to Paul was around 2007 and of course we regaled the crowd with the story of night we we a-muddin’ with a Chrysler Newport in a South Jersey tomato field.
From Earthbound Misfit I
Not really dangerous but just after getting my license, my buddy and I decided it would be hilarious to fly a kite from my Celica convertible... it was.
From Traecraes
Well this is probably going to be a common response, but driving over 100 mph on the highway when I was like 16 “racing” a Mitsubishi Eclipse in my 1990 Olds Cutlass Supreme lol.
From liffie420
Everything. I literally don’t know how I survived my first year or two of driving. Highlights, all in a hand-me-down ‘82 Subaru GL 4dr with a stick, front-wheel-drive:
1. Trying to do handbrake turns in the first snowstorm with my license, slid the car into a granite curb and bent the hell out of the rear suspension. Dumbass 16yo me didn’t know that Subaru put the handbrake on the FRONT wheels. I did get really good at reverse donuts though. Another quirk of the ‘82 Subaru - the tach didn’t have a redline. I used to rev that thing up just as high as it would go, probably valves floating. I don’t know how the poor thing survived. Tough cars, mechanically anyway. Rust resistant - not-so-much.
2. Tried to pass a bunch of cars on a two-lane in patchy fog when an oncoming car came out of the fog with no headlights on. Dove it into the ditch at warp speed, got sideways, damned near flipped the thing but somehow didn’t. Had to dig the dirt packed into the wheels out with the ice scraper. Thank God for that low Subaru CoG, and sliding passenger side first because that bitch REALLY wanted to roll.
3. Driving down the road when one of my dipshit friends lit up a cigarette - I HATE cigarettes, and he did it to piss me off. I pitched him out of the car without stopping first (he was a scrawny little dude, and I was not). That could have ended very badly.
4. Bombing down an unknown backroad in Maine waaaaay too fast. Said backroad suddenly dead-ended. I went off the end, bounced over some logs and got hung up on a stump. Was able to use the jack to get the car off the stump. No damage by some miracle, but if there had been TREES at the end of the road I would have been screwed.
5. Two speeding tickets in less than 24hrs in my first few months licensed. 62 in a 35 in the next town over (65 would have been cuff-and-stuff criminal speed), 70 in a 55 on the Maine Turnpike. Lost my license for 30 days. Didn’t really slow me down much, many more over the next few years. Should have lost it again, but Maine revamped the BMV computer system and had to zero out everybody’s points just as I got the one that put me over. Lucked out again.
I could go on for pages and pages. Thankfully by the time I got a decently quick car a few years later, my ‘84 Jetta GLI, I had calmed down considerably and figured out how not to kill myself or others. Thankfully, that Subaru was SLOW. In the 15 or so years I had the GLI, only one speeding ticket and it was a legit small-town speed trap for 35 in a 25 at the edge of town. I have now had only one speeding ticket this century, in middle-of-nowhere Montana. $40, paid on the spot, no record on my record. 88 in a 70 in a Renta-Taurus in 2005.
From krhodes1
After putting winter tires on my AWD Eagle Talon I thought I was Colin McRae after a heavy snow back in 2003. After ripping around some country roads for a bit I had the bright idea to take it on to the farm “paths” of a buddies property. After getting it pulled out by a tractor I finally realized how stupid I was
From SoupFarts
My first car was a 2003 Suburban Z71 that I started driving at 15. This is relatively mundane vehicle. But to a teenager who had been power-sliding ATV’s and go karts for years, this was practically a stunt vehicle.
Living out on gravel roads, I quickly mastered power sliding, the long wheel base allowed for a good amount of control. If there was snow on the ground every turn was drifted. On school nights where we got so much snowfall, school was already canceled for the next day, my friends and I would load up in that Suburban and turn everything from the school parking lot to a friends farm fields into huge donut lots.
We put that beast through it’s share of offroading abuse as well. On more than one occasion we jumped terraces in it (yes, we got a Suburban air borne), on the friends farm land. As well as the occasional ‘mudding’ runs.
But the luckiest event we had was late on a icy night. Myself and a friend decided we needed to run into town for some snacks. Thinking the roads were just snow covered I had it in 2wd but was traveling slowly, around 25-30 mph. We crested a hill and the rpm went up and we started this long slow powerslide toward the ditch. I managed to get the back end under control just as we left the road. We went down into the ditch (a steep country road ditch), up into the field, then quickly back down into the ditch and back on to the road, sliding to a stop. We both sat in silence for a moment then got out and looked the car over. Not a single bit of damage, despite smashing through a ditch that should have rolled the vehicle. On the way back home we pulled a neighbor out of that same ditch.
That Suburban went on to survive 3 years of my abuse, followed by similar abuse by both of my brothers. Somehow my dad sold it at 240k miles and it had only ever had the AC compressor replaced.
From Reasonablepushrod
When I was in HS I worked at a crappy local restaurant. One of the coworkers owned a Pontiac 6000LE with the infamous “ Iron Duke”. One day it threw a rod and you could hear the dead cylinder rattling away, beating itself to death. He drove it like that for months. Eventually he got something else but left the car in the back parking lot. After work we would routinely take said car out into the neighboring field and do donuts.
Another friend of mine bought a used Toyota pickup. One of the small ones. He drove it like a fucking idiot all the time. And I was dumb enough to go riding around with him. One night it was raining hard and we were on some narrow country road and he’s doing at least 60-70 MPH. The truck weighed hardly anything and the back end broke free and we did a perfect 360 in the middle of the road. Scared the shit out of me.Last stupid thing I remember was another friend of mine in middle school lived on a farm and out back was a shit ton of old cars and trucks that had been abandoned in a field. One was some late 60's Cadillac. It was roached. The rear window had been removed. The interior was trashed. We went and got a battery from one of the tractors and some gas, managed to get it running and proceeded to drive around the farm. Got to the gravel driveway and realized the brakes don’t work and do we rolled down the driveway and onto the street. Ran it into a ditch to stop it. His parents were pretty mad at us.
From ROBOT TURDS
I could literally write a book, but I don’t want to do that so I’ll pick one thing
I lived close to a wealthy suburb (typical kid lives in a mansion on 5 acre minimum lot, has at least one horse, complains when dad buys them a new 335i at 16 because it’s not what they asked for - and this isn’t out in the country, it’s all within the three-digit interstate highway around the city) that had some really good driving roads. The terrain was primarily wooded and hilly
One particular street had a long straight stretch with lots of small hills - the kind where you can get a moment of weightlessness if you go 45 instead of 35 - and nowhere for cops to hide. We would take turns climbing onto the roof of my friend’s beater 626 and holding onto the two front window openings while someone else drove 45-50 down said street. Let go and throw your arms up at the right time for a second of true freefall at speed before slamming back down on the roof of the car. This was called “flying”
Incredibly dumb, but quite exhilarating
From TheSpeedAddict
June 83 I get my license. Buddy gets his a week later. The 2 of us plus another friend all jump on the Palisaides parkway and proceed to race each other. I’m following my friend driving his 75 Firebird, I’m in my 76 Capri and my newly minted driver buddy is in his 6cyl Maverick following me. We hit nearly a hundred and then have to dip back so we take the left hand u turn exit at high speed. Firebird, no issues, me no issues, I look in the rear view and Maverick is in full oppo with a hub cap shooting off into the night.
This was the start of our semi ritual game of “tag” or “can you keep up”. Maverick lost many a hubcap....another dude lost it and slammed sideways into a tree... many a shaken fist was thrown at as us as we delinquently raced through our neighborhoods.
There were other egregious acts throughout my teens but that always sticks in my mind as the stupidest.
From Monsterajr