We want to hear your road trip horror stories! (Inspired by the Nurburgring trip that made me despise the Audi RS7)
We want to hear your road trip horror stories! Whether it’s break downs, traffic, illness… whatever caused you to wish you’d never set off on your journey, we want to hear it! Hit the comments and we’ll round up the best. To inspire you, here’s a story I never thought I’d tell.
We want to hear your road trip horror stories! Whether it’s break downs, traffic, illness… whatever caused you to wish you’d never set off on your journey, we want to hear it! Hit the comments and we’ll round up the best. To inspire you, here’s a story I never thought I’d tell. It happened last year, and was supposed to form part of a feature about road tripping to the Nurburgring, but I was so thoroughly fed up when I returned that I never wrote it up and tried to forget it happened. So, in the spirit of sharing, here goes!
I get to do some pretty cool things in this job, and when Audi offered me the chance to drive an RS7 to the Nurburgring to watch the six hour World Endurance Championship race I was obviously pretty excited. I’d driven an RS6 shortly before that and absolutely adored it, so as I dropped behind the wheel to set off on the 400-mile journey to motorsport Mecca, with four countries and an ocean between me and my destination, I was in good spirits.
The first problem occurred when I got to the ferry terminal late due to some crazy traffic, and had to wait an extra hour to get on board a later boat. No biggie, I thought. Once in France it was all plain sailing, but then I hit Belgium, and tried to make my way around Brussels. My carefully laid plan to avoid the city during rush hour was now screwed thanks to my little ferry mishap, so I found myself stationary on Brussels’ ring road getting more and more fed up. Then the sat nav popped up saying there was traffic on my route, and asked if I’d like a diversion around it. Hell yeah, I would! So with my new route in place I skipped off the highway… and into the town centre. Yep, the Audi took me out of the frying pan and into the fire, so I spent the next three hours in stop start traffic trying to get out of the gridlocked city.
Speaking of stop start, the RS7’s stop start tech pushed me to boiling point until I dived into the menus to figure out how to turn it off. You see, in most cars the engine stops when you have your foot on the brake and are stationary, then starts again as soon as you lift off the brake. Same’s true of the Audi, but for some reason it also applies the handbrake when the engine turns off, and is slow to release it, so you lift off the brake, push the accelerator and nothing happens, so you push a bit harder and then the handbrake suddenly releases, catapulting you forward. It means you’re sat in a near-£100k car with everyone watching you kangaroo about. Not a cool look.
With Brussels finally behind me, I started to make some progress. As my destination grew ever closer, the fuel gauge was dropping closer and closer to empty, but I’d managed to keep the range above the remaining mileage, so my plan was to get near to the Nurburgring before filling up to avoid expensive highway fuel prices. Unfortunately, the Nurburgring is in the middle of nowhere, and none of the rural petrol stations were open late (yeah, it was past bed time by the time I even got close to the circuit), which left me on the orange light in a 550bhp car cruising through the Eifel forest well below the speed limit. Not cool and super stressful!
Once I finally made it to the circuit, my spirits were briefly lifted by the famous red Nurburgring sign, but that was short lived. I was staying in the hotel that’s attached to the circuit, but the sat nav was saying I’d already arrived, so I asked a car park attendant how to get to the hotel. Unfortunately, he didn’t speak very good English (better than my German, though), but from what I could gather he was saying I couldn’t park at the hotel and that I had to speak to some other guys. Well, I was more than annoyed as I’d been told I had parking, so I approached a group of other attendants further down the road. Again, none spoke English, so I was left standing in a field at midnight, unwittingly 100 yards from my destination, waiting for someone to help me. Eventually a bloke turns up and tries to make me give him €20 to park in his field. I politely declined and as Friday turned to Saturday I went crawling along looking for the hotel. I finally found it just next to where I’d been gormlessly standing for 15 minutes before, and a very polite hotel employee ushered me into the car park beside a Porsche 911 GT3 RS and Koenigsegg One:1. I was too exhausted to take a picture, and the latter was gone by morning, sorry!
Despite being shattered from what was ultimately a 12 hour journey (should’ve taken eight hours, tops) I had an utterly fantastic weekend watching the racing and mucking about on the Nordschleife with Boosted Boris. But the road trip from hell wasn’t finished with me yet.
The journey home was fairly uneventful, though the sports seats were giving me chronic back ache. I even managed to avoid Brussels city centre, and was treated to an incredible electrical storm as I left Belgium.
As I arrived at Calais, the border guard clocked me in and sent me on my merry way with a smile and a quick “by the way, the French ferry drivers are striking, no ships have left all night.” My heart sank, and as I eventually found where I was supposed to be going I joined a long queue of fed up holidaymakers in a torrential downpour. I also discovered that night that the RS7 does not make a comfortable bed.
After about 10 hours in the claustrophobic Audi, we were finally let onto a ferry as daylight broke, and a few hours later I parked the RS7 up outside my flat, stumbled into my flat and collapsed into bed. The whole experience gave me an utter hatred of the RS7, and whenever I see one I can’t help but recoil in disgust. It looks great and goes like stink, but I have too many bad memories…
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Once I was driving to the biggest town around where I live (I live 15 miles outside of a town with a population of 2,000 and was going into a city with 150,000 needless to say I’m not comfortable driving in the city) while in the bad part of town that I didn’t know how to avoid my car’s engine decided it would rather be a small bomb and catastrophically blew up and left me stranded in freezing rain in the bad part of town I called a tow truck who said he would be there in about 30 minutes he ended up getting there about 4 hours later…. I know it could have been worse but I still don’t have a car
I haven’t met horrors, but when i was 8 years old my grandpa was driving home with his Austin montego, it was late night and… Well the engine somehow started pouring smoke like hell, and then he found out that the last engine service he made was crappy… I feel bad for the mechanic who had to receive the shouting of my grandpa
This past October, a friend of mine and i were just west of Topeka Kansas, our destination on the trip. Around 2am on a highway with two lanes on each side, we passed a pickup pulling a trailer uphill, he was going maybe 50 and we were going closer to 80. Some reason we pissed him off, because when the hill leveled off he pulled up next to us and his passenger was waving a pistol around yelling with the window down. I pulled us off of the upcoming exit really quickly and we waited in a gas station to see if we would be followed, and if we saw the truck we’d tell the attendant to lock the doors and call the cops. Nothing happened after and we made it there OK.
There you go, too long to fit in a comment.
https://www.carthrottle.com/post/w68og4x/
Well this story only was scary cause where i used to live is a 3rd world country….. thief/criminals/etc. in every corner. My brother in law decided that he wanted a Cherokee Laredo XJ but he only had a 4500 budget and in the city nothing was cheaper than 6K. So he found one in a town 250km away from ours (i told him… don’t, but he didn’t care) so we leave at 1pm that day to pick up the Jeep and when we got there we… I found a white giant rusted box with a 6 cylinder engine that worked only with gas cause the fuel lines were complete damage. The problem was that the gas tank only last 120km, because the tank was for a normal 4 cylinder engine..not for a 4 Litre 6 cylinder monster (there’s no such thing as MOT/TÜV or these things in this territory) and there were no stations in between them (is aaaall desert around)…. if only we knew that before…. the tank goes empty as you can imagine just in the middle of nowhere no lights at all and was uphill… so the Bora just wouldn’t make it by pulling. Happily a Mitsubishi L200 stopped and pulled as to the top and the rest drove it just by inertia..of course slowly cause of the lack of power of the brakes when off. By this time it was already 9pm of course it was dark, we were already by the end of downhill only 10km away from a station, so we left the Jeep standing by the side and went with the Bora… of course because of stress we forgot you can’t transport GAS so we gave it a go..the Bora was pulling already in flat land…. 3km the Jeep got a flat tire… no tools came with the XJ and the Bora stuff didn’t fit or was to weak for the weight. I kept pushing 7km with a flat tyre to the gas station…. we were in a really dangerous area in the North of Lima (Perú) and it was already 11pm. We finally fulled the tank….. and i was decided to run with a flat tyre till home………… it died, just didn’t start, no electrical life AT ALL.
Was already midnight by then, we called a platform and they said it was at least 2 hours….. they were 3…. and finally got home at 60 per hour cause the driver said it was to heavy for the platform.
And i said it was a bad idea from the beginning.
I can describe mine in two words and a number.
691 Horsepower. Traffic.
I was traveling to the Squash European Championships with my dad in our 2008 Audi S4, and we were on the highway next to Budapest when disaster struck.
It was raining sideways, like it was the end of humanity, and still, the S4 was happily sitting at a 100 mph, then suddenly the engine stopped putting out power and we slowly but patiently lost momentum.
Turns out a clever mechanic in the Audi service centre had no idea how to use an allen key, and ripped off the electric unit in the engine, and then just carelessly put it back on with duct tape (yeah I know it works for everything but still…).
Since it was doomsday, water started leaking into the engine bay, and got into the electric parts, due to the lack of sealing. The board computer suddenly decided to cut power, and limit us to about 8 mph, in the middle of the highway.
And ironically, we were traveling on that single highway in Hungary which practically has no hard shoulder. After 2 minutes of discussing around and preparing to die, we pulled over, praying not to get hit by trucks flying next to out side mirror (it was like 4-5 inches at some points, not even joking).
Finally after 30 minutes, a tow truck gave us a lift to the next gas station with our dear S5. We quickly rented a Fiat Punto to get to the Championship, and had our Audi trailered back to our town. (And also my father managed to not notice that the punto had a sixth gear and managed to drive 300 miles in fifth…)
Afterwards I arrived at my championship 6 hours late, but still managed to delay my first match, and successfully won later.
A roadtrip with a 10 year old Mercedes Vito, snowy, slippery, chain tracks and a 70 km journey in one day, only me driving. Got a huge slide I wasn’t able to straighten up, and ended in a rock wall with about 70 km/h on the speedo. You light say that SAS kind og painful. Luckily I walked out of the car myself, grabbed my bag full of clothes and a few beers for the night, and called an ambulance to go for a check before i sent home..
Went from the Netherlands to the UK to buy a Volvo. I bought it, insured it, drove to the nearest pub to have dinner.
After dinner i started the car and when we drove off the car sputtered a bit and after a few seconds big smoke and flames were coming from under the bonnet. In 20 minutes the glorious swede burnt to the ground, taking some of the pub with it.
Now THAT’S a story!
Something similar happened to my Dad and his volvo s40 t5
My worst trip would have to be my trip from Kansas to Pennsylvania that I (barely) made in my Geo metro. The Google Maps directions I printed off gave me different directions than what the map showed. Instead of just taking me through Wheeling, WV like the map showed it had me take the “scenic” route through the entire state of West Virginia. By the time I noticed the error it was to late and I had to fight my (way overloaded) Geo up and down. Hill after hill after hill. I was swerving all over the road trying to make the climbs less steep. (Side of road to side of road) even then I still barely made it up half the hills. I have no clue how I did not get pulled over but by the time I finished the part of the trip I had memorised all the vulgar words known to man… Probably the single most annoying trip I have ever taken.