A 63-year old driver failed her driver’s license test in spectacular fashion after jumping the curb more than once and crashing a Volkswagen Polo into a lamp post at full speed. The driver was OK following the incident, which happened on a closed course overseen by the municipality of Lanús in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It goes without saying that the 63-year old woman did not pass her driver’s test.
The driver was renewing her license after it expired during the global pandemic, according to Paola Fagundez, director of the local department of traffic safety in Lanús, as El País reports. It seems the 63-year old driver was either really nervous, or she really hated that lamp post. In any case, she may have failed her test either way due to not coming to a full stop and jumping the curb multiple times, as the video from C5N shows:
Separate accounts claim that the accident was the result of the woman stepping on the accelerator pedal, rather than the brakes, while others report the driver wrongly pressed the accelerator rather than the clutch pedal.
That’s certainly possible given the prevalence of manual transmission-equipped vehicles in Latin America’s so-called emerging markets. But given the increased distance between the gas and clutch, it’s more likely that the 63-year old meant to slam on the brakes but gunned it on the gas instead.
Her mistake made the Volkswagen Polo surge ahead with all the fury that the compact’s three-cylinder engine could muster — about 76 horsepower and 70 lb-ft of torque. That doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to make the thin lamp post snap, and flip the little car onto its side.
The driver then apparently tried to find some traction by hitting the accelerator once more, causing the Polo to shoot a puff of smoke out of its exhaust pipe. The debacle, however, hardly ended at that point. Lanús emergency services and first responders were dispatched to the test track to rescue the 63-year old driver, who’d become stuck in the overturned Polo.
Lanús volunteer firefighters managed to pull the driver out of the car with the help of local Civil Defense members. There was no instructor in the car at the time since it’s not mandatory in Argentina for an instructor to be in the car during such tests. Once the firefighters extricated the driver, they rushed her to a local hospital where she was treated for minor injuries. The driver is fine, but she was unable to renew her driver’s license in the end. Better luck next time.