It's true that if you go by movies, you'd think that it happens every time, but it doesn't. Often a car will go off a cliff, roll over and then nothing will happen except for maybe some smoking and steaming. It absolutely can and does happen that a car will explode into flames, but more often it won't. That wouldn't make for an exciting movie though.
It's funny because I started this post a good while back and I'm just now getting back to it. Last night my mom was watching some old TV show that had a car-goes-over-cliff-and-bursts-into-flames scene, and I had to grin. Anyway, I had an experience with a car going over a cliff, and I was in it. The "movie mindset" led to me having a true adrenaline rush, and it was wild.
Back in high school my grandmother gave me a Plymouth Belvedere. It was a fairly badass car but the tires were bald. I drove it for several days before I could take it to the tire place on Saturday. Friday night I took it out for a drive. It had just started to rain after being dry for a while, and the roads were slick as owl shit. I had some fun making the tires spin on wet pavement by barely tapping the gas, but that was on level road.
I was on South Brookwood Road coming from Brookwood Road. It goes down and then back up steep hills, with a bit of a curve, and it's very narrow, or at least it was back then. They've smoothed it a bit since, but back then it was gnarly even when it was dry. It was fun to haul ass on when it was dry, but I was only going 15mph. I gave it a touch of gas to get up the hill and the wheels slipped. There was zero traction.
I was heading for the side of the road, and the cliff. It wasn't like a huge cliff, maybe 75' or so, but it dropped almost straight down, and was best avoided. They say that with things like crashes, things seem to move in slow motion even though they don't, but this really happened in slow motion.
The car was just creeping along but it wasn't stopping. Now they have a proper rail but back then there were 10" square concrete posts maybe three feet apart, with a cable in between. I was headed straight for one of the posts, and I was going so slowly that I thought it would stop me. I was wrong.
The Belvey was a heavy car, and it slowly pushed the post down and ran right over it. It also pulled the posts on either side out of the ground. I was probably thinking "Oh, shit" as the car went over the edge and down the cliff. I was maybe going 5mph at that point and I kept thinking the car would stop, but it slowly rolled down the cliff and flipped over two or three times. It came to rest on its side with the driver's side up. I put my foot on the steering wheel and climbed out.
It was nowhere near as spectacular as the crashes in the movies, where they'd go flying off the cliff at 70mph, get airborne, flip over ten times and of course burst into flames. I went off the edge of the cliff at 5mph and rolled over rather slowly, but the fact remained that I had indeed driven my car off a cliff and rolled it.
I saw smoke coming from underneath the hood. My rational brain told me that the car probably wasn't going to explode, but the programming from "movie mind" kicked in, and so did adrenaline, before I knew what was happening. I've had adrenaline rushes plenty of times but not like that. That was a true, life-or-death release of adrenaline...the maximum dose.
The brain will always choose "safe" over "sorry." My fight-or-flight response was definitely set to flight. My brain just doinged-out and I took off automatically." I got so high all of the sudden that it was almost like an out-of-body experience, except that I was hyper-focused. If anything, I was probably thinking: "Car goes over cliff...rolls...BOOM! Move ass!" I was gone.
I climbed up a 50' cliff in about ten seconds...in the rain and in the dark, and that's no joke. The cliff was steep and slippery and it was pitch dark, but I managed to get to the top in a big hurry, almost without being able to see where I was going. I was just grabbing at what I could, and my legs were literally spinning around just like in a cartoon. I'm surprised it didn't make that classic Flintstones sound.
My legs were propelling me up the cliff, and my hands were almost secondary. It was unreal. When I got to the top of the cliff I still had so much momentum that I just kept going and jumped almost three feet into the air, which flipped me out. That would've been impossible without a true adrenaline rush.
I stood on the edge of the cliff, in the rain, and I felt like the Incredible Hulk. I even pumped my fists into the air and slammed them down just like the Hulk used to do, but it was totally a reflex. I had all that energy and nowhere for it to go. I could literally feel it flowing through my veins. It was almost like I was looking around for something to knock over. If there had been houses right there I might have punched a mailbox or two, and I'm the biggest pacifist you could ever meet.
I started to go to one of the nearby houses to call my folks, but I had so much crazy energy that I didn't want them to see me right away because I thought I must look as high as I felt, and I didn't want them to see me like that, even though except for the adrenaline I was completely sober. I was still pretty jacked after I walked the short mile or so to the house, but the superhuman thing was gone. What a buzz it was.
I called the cops and a tow truck. Dad and I went back to see them pull the Belvedere up. They had to call another tow truck to hold the first truck in place but they finally got it out. I didn't get into any trouble, and the Belvey came through it like a champ. A 5" layer of Bondo on the roof, a paint job, four Pirellis and a kiss on the hood and she was good as new.
I'm glad I can say that I experienced a true adrenaline rush. Again, I've had them before many times, and maybe I can play the drums half-again as fast or whatever, but they're nothing at all compared to what I experienced that night, thanks largely to Hollywood. I could've lifted the car if I'd needed to, and that's the only time in my life I've been able to say that and not have it be a joke. It was a trip how I scurried up that cliff like it was nothing, and launched three feet into the air when I got to the top, again just like in a cartoon.
There was a classic scene in the original Incredible Hulk TV series, where Bill Bixby turned into Lou Ferrigno, aka the Incredible Hulk, and he broke out of a laboratory during a storm, stood out in the pouring rain, looked up to the sky, let out a heartfelt roar, pumped his fists and slammed them down. That was me.
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