12 Signs You Should Pull Over..

[hamiltonau]

[hamiltonau]

oh and my own addition...

13.You hear thumping from the trunk which suggests the hooker is awake and working her way out of the bag.

and some from the comments bit..

Cool story, sis: I left my car in the garage w/the sunroof open overnight. Got in the next morning and the weather started to change during my commute--must have dropped a good 10 degrees in the hour I'd been driving. So, I closed up the sunroof. Not even a minute later, I see something moving to my right, just outside my field of vision. I look in the rear-view...and it's a HUGE F*CKING SPIDER. Right next to my head! To this day, I have no idea how I managed it, but I cut across all 5 lanes of the NJ Turnpike, onto the left shoulder, at the height of rush hour, without hitting anything. Jumped out of the car and killed the living bejeezus out of that damned thing.

Normally, I don't freak over spiders & bugs but this thing was mutant huge and literally breathing down my neck. I've never left the car with even a window cracked open since.

Me, in that situation (after shrieking like a girl where hopefully no one can hear):

No, seriously, fark bugs. I had a wasp land on my goddamn hand while I was steering. I missed an exit because I was psychologically incapable of moving that hand. I opened my window as it took off, and the vacuum sucked it out.

Hopefully to hell.

ImmaHoopyFrood

2011-04-25 04:53:44 PM I had a puke green 1970-something Fiat Brava. I start it up and get about 5 miles down I-70 when I hear something that sounded like a gunshot and all kinds of large metal parts bouncing on the road behind me. The starter solenoid never disengaged from the flywheel and the starter must have got red hot before exploding. Smoke starts coming in through the vents. The gas lines ran alongside the starter mount so the engine compartment was engulfed in fire. I lifted the hood, said OH FARK and walked away. I never did get the hoped for explosion though. It eventually burnt itself out after consuming all the rubber and plastic components under the hood. I bought it from some old lady for $500. Cost to fix would have been $1800. Had the scrapyard tow and take it for free. What a piece of crap. Like a cracker-box covered with mashed pea baby puke.

Edited April 26, 2011 by hamiltonau

[hamiltonau]

zorgon

2011-04-25 04:59:48 PM Chariset: 11. You hear thumping from the trunk which suggests the hooker is awake and working her way out of the bag.

I still love you.

[stig mick]

Who ever wrote this list is a wuss

1. Blue lights- that's when you plant your foot

2. Flames - keep driving it just means your cats blown or you had no cat to begin with

6. Sudden change in handling- um I did that on purpose...it's called drifting

8. Any sudden or loud noise - I would be pulling over evey time I changed gears, that would be a long and painfully annoying drive

[t_revz]

14 hot hitch hikers

[hamiltonau]

OwnTheRide

2011-04-25 05:15:52 PM Brool Story Co. time.

I was driving down the highway in the left lane when someone cut in front of me. I jammed the brakes and felt the pedal drop to the floor. All the way down to that last little bit where you have about 1/4" of movement for all of your brakes.

I absolutely could not pull over where I was, so used the brakes to give me as much space as possible between me and the nearest car and kept going along. I was 2 exits from my exit, with a 2-mile no-stoplight run to my house from there.

Fark it. You don't need brakes on the highway.

Made it home just fine, went inside. Looked outside and noticed smoke coming from under the hood.

I'll be honest, I really did consider ignoring it so that insurance would cover it. But I couldn't do it. Popped the hood and sure enough, I had a little fire. The brake fluid had sprayed all over some wire covers and also hit the exhaust manifold, creating a small but growing fire.

That's the only time I've arrived home on fire with no brakes. So far.

The Car Talk guys on NPR tell a story of how one of them forgot to tighten his lug nuts properly one night. I think it was Click. He's driving down the road and his tire goes flying off.

He tries to get as much control over the car as possible and manages to steer it to the side of the road, right in front of a gas station. Sparks are flying everywhere, it's making a horrendous screeching noise. Everyone from the gas station comes running out to watch.

Not knowing what else to do, he gets out of the car and walks up to them and throws them his keys and says, "Fill her up, unleaded, don't top it off."

sk8r

2011-04-25 05:59:59 PM Burning car expert here. Used to have a 66-71 VW Bug. We lived in the country and would just pop the trunk, throw dirt on the flames, restart the engine and go on our merry way. It was years after junking that car that I appreciated the danger of driving a car that caught on fire 5 times a year.

It was really cool to see my friends' reactions- one guy screamed like a 90 pound girl, ripped the front passenger seat off its rails (he was sitting in the back) and took off running down the road as if he were being shot at. He was still running after we had the fire out. How much explosive potential did he think that VW had? Mushroom cloud?

When I was 17 I was driving my Dad's brand new Camry (less than 1500 miles) after getting an oil change from Wal-Mart. Somehow the oil filter hadn't been fastened properly, so the thing popped of going 45mph down the road and it lost all oil almost instantly. It took me on the order of ~2-3 minutes to reach a safe spot to pull over, and in that short time the engine was completely totaled. The mechanics said that the engine was essentially a solid block of metal at that point... once it stopped moving after I pulled over there was no way it could possibly function again.

Wal-Mart did replace it with a brand new engine, to their credit. The repair cost was essentially the cost of a nice, new car (~$17,000).

SkerriNinja

2011-04-25 07:06:28 PM I pulled over because my car made a wonky sound. The front right tire sounded like a dinner plate spinning on its edge. So I pulled into the nearest service place and asked them to check it out.

The mechanic pulled me into the bay and said, "look at this!"

He then grabbed either side of the tire, gave it a good hard shake, and pulled it right off the damn car.

He said if I had hit one more pothole on the way there, I'd have been headed for the ER. Apparently it was a tie-rod issue? I dunno. I don't know anything about cars, but I do know that my best friend had wrecked my car in Savannah the summer before. She turned left onto a one-way street, turned too wide, hit a drainage cover on the corner of the curb, and drove my front passenger tire up into the wheel well. It cost her $1500 to fix on a Sunday, and then it cost me another $450 to fix a year later.

She is no longer my friend, and that car went to the Shiatty-Ford-Escort Heaven about 2 years later.

[hamiltonau]

ha Trevs., i trump you...

[hamiltonau]

ban_sidhe

2011-04-25 07:30:43 PM I was driving on an overpass one evening, on my way home from work. It was quite dark and the lighting on the overpass was piss-poor, but I kept feeling like there was something - I wasn't sure what - right in front of my face. Squinting, I could just make out a dark shape about three inches from my nose.

Finally I drove under one of the few streetlights in that area and with the help of that flash of light, was able to make out what the black shape was. It was a giant farking Black Widow spider.

I'm not arachnophobic or anything - in fact I like most spiders - but Widows creep me out. Having one swinging from the sun visor three inches from my face was just about panic-inducing. There wasn't any way to pull over for quite a long time, so I just tried not to move or breathe or become hysterical and drive off the side of the overpass.

After what seemed like hours, I pulled off at the first opportunity and escorted the spider out of the car, then sat there, dazed and jittery, for a few minutes before I was able to drive again.

/ CSB(iatch)

// Several years later, I was bitten by a Black Widow.

davidphogan: ByOwlLight: Random wtf objects on the freeway are the bane of my existence. When I was 18, driving my van in heavy but fast traffic in LA, the car in front of me swerved out at the last second because a farking full stove was in the lane. I still don't know how I managed to get around it without hitting it or another car.

Driving from San Diego to LA on a rare raining evening I had to swerve to avoid a farking hot tub on the 163 and a black couch on the 101. Both in the same night.

I was following a truck that was towing and ice cream truck on a flatbed trailer on the 101 just off the Conejo Grade in Camarillo when it his a bump and a stepladder flew off the back of the thing right in front of me. I found out how fast my car could safely change lanes that day (about two car length at 65)

I had a neighbor that wasn't so lucky. He was driving in LA when he got a metal hook from a tow truck though his windshield and right in the face. He couldn't remember the accident, but he did manage to pull off to the side of the road before he passed out. He woke up days later with his nasal cavities completely caved in. He spend months getting fixed up, but he was eventually OK.

They never did find the truck that dropped the hook.

ok thats the last CSB from the comments, up to you guys to carry the torch now.