Did this Romanian driver have his seat in the full, upright position (and seatbelt fastened) before his vehicle hit cruising altitude?
The brief blip that showed up on radar screens earlier this month turned out to be a compact hatchback making a Dukes of Hazzard-worthy leap over a roundabout.
Traffic camera footage released by Romanian police and posted by the BBC shows the epic launch, graceful flight, and buttoned-up landing of the hatchback, whose 22-year-old male driver walked away relatively unscathed.
His brake lights come on immediately after the landing, and the hatchback comes to a halt in short order. It’s probably the last time the vehicle moves under its own power.
The report doesn’t say what state the driver was in before briefly leaving Earth, but the footage shows him travelling in a straight line and connecting with a median right before impacting the roundabout.
“His licence has since been suspended,” the report states. “It is not clear whether the stunt was accidental or deliberate.”
Regardless of the reason, top marks goes to the driver, his vehicle, and the laws of physics and gravity for keeping the car upright and in the same lane.
Did TTAC get purchased by Gawker?
Impressive, I give it a 9.5 with style points.
License suspended for a single incident? How come this never happened to Bo and Luke?
For the same reason the professor, the millionaire, etc. never just ate Gilligan.
I thought the professor ate Maryanne.
@VoGo, is that why he generally kept a sunny disposition?
Skipper
Gilligan
Secret lovers
They didn’t eat Gilligan because he was too skinny. Skipper, on the on the other hand, was never heard from again.
“Just Eat Gilligan” is a trope meaning that a show, movie, etc. has a character whose main trait is their incompetence, and that incompetence is so severe that audience members wonder why the other islanders didn’t “just eat Gilligan.” The answer to that wondering is “because then there’d be no show.” In this case, Bo and Luke were never actually apprehended by Roscoe P. Coltrane (gygh-gygh-gygh!) because then there’d be no show.
I would deduct points for the large splash.
I was surprised it stayed upright hitting it at that angle.
I wonder if alcohol had anything to do with this?
Maybe that splash was due to the liquid produced when he realized he was in flight mode.
Good thing that “FIDO” didn’t show up until after the landing !
Spectacular!
How do you say “Yeeeeeeee-Haaaaawwwwwww” in Romanian?
This guy is lucky the inner edge of the apron wasn’t a vertical wall.
A friend told me about a similar incident more than 60 years ago south of Ottawa, Canada. A drunk crashed straight through a roundabout that had been built out of flower pots. My friend, who was a passenger in the car, asked the driver if he realized what he had hit. The driver replied, “Some old lady’s flower garden.”
I had a buddy in college who used to assault those huge snow piles at the mall in his massive old Ford.
It all made for great theater. Too bad one had the concrete base of a light pole hiding in it…so much for the Ford.
I participated in such an exercise some 40 years ago riding in the load bed of a ’73 Ford Ranchero under a bed-topper with a crazed Navy nuclear operator driving from Seal Beach back to Long Beach. I cannot remember clearly where the roundabout was (I believe it was 7th Street at Bellflower Blvd. but Google Maps don’t show one there now). Old Bruce hit it at 75 – 80 mph. We in the load bed were weightless for about 3 seconds before returning to 1+ G’s. It was a longer jump than the guy in this video but not with that large a ramp. There was, in our case, some alcohol involved.
It looks like his hazard lights went on right after he came to a stop. Are those somehow automatic? Flipping on the 4-ways probably wouldn’t be as high on my to do list after completing a stunt like that.
Most cars do it automatically at full brake application or airbag deployment
More than likely, yes. Most European cars turn on the hazard lights after an airbag deployment.
Got it. Now I know why they call it an airbag.
The Rumanian version of the General Lee?
Exactly. It’s the Chairman Ceaușescu.
(Golf clap)
Dem Ceaușescu boys are at it again.
Waiting for the Romanian translation…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f3CFzahrRs
Probably a rental. “You DID check the undercarriage?”
Too bad he wasn’t in the Mach 5. Could have made that cool “cha cha cha…” sound when he did the jump.
Spritle and Chim-Chim rolling out of the car as it stops, in a haze of smoke, giggling uncontrollably.
That’ll buff right out of the wheel bearings.
A roundabout was fairly recently built in my area, and a lot of the drivers here are still confused and often stop in the middle of it. This driver presents an option I hadn’t previously considered. I’ll have to wait until after a solid rain, though.
Dang .
.
-Nate