A Columbus, Ohio, dentist writes to me that he heard of an accident on the Autobahn (the German freeway system) when he was stationed at a military dental clinic in Germany in 1976. The horrible details that came to him via oral tradition were never confirmed by any press reports he saw.
“Whadaya think?” wrote the dentist, a specialist in prosthodontics. (There may be something about urban legends that makes even highly trained professionals adopt a folksy tone.) Here’s his story:
Late one night, two tractor trailers collided head on at a very high speed. Nobody witnessed the collision. The force of the impact welded or fused the two cabs together, killing the drivers. After the bodies were pried out, the wrecks were towed away in one piece to a wrecking yard.
A couple of weeks later, the cabs were pulled apart to salvage the scrap metal. Between them, they found a very thin Volkswagen Bug, flattened by the force of the collision, as well as the unrecognizable remains of what was assumed to be the driver of the car
.
This certainly sounds like an urban legend, because I have three other versions of it, with significant variations. One sent to me from Arizona says that the accident occurred on the Interstate between Phoenix and Los Angeles. A terrible smell at the wrecking yard some weeks after the accident led salvagers to separate the fused cabs, using four huge tow trucks. Between the cabs, they found a VW Bug with four corpses crushed inside.
Another smashed-Bug story from San Francisco says that the two trucks were in the mountains, one going up and the other down. The accident occurred when the downward-moving vehicle began to pass a car.
These trucks, after the collision, were left by the side of the road, still fused together, until local residents complained of a smell. After bulldozers separate the cabs, a VW Bug with—count them if you can—five
corpses was found flattened between them.
This is probably as great as the tragedy can become, since I doubt that more than five people can be squeezed into a Beetle that is actually driven on a highway, even in a legend. Funny that nobody hearing the stories ever seems to question the idea that four or five motorists are missing and not searched for sooner along their route of travel.
Incidentally, I’ve heard another, slightly different story about a horrible VW accident. An Iowa resident told me that on a narrow, foggy road, a trucker driving a giant eighteen-wheeler stopped for coffee and walked around his rig to check the tires. To his shock, he discovered a VW Bug stuck to his right front fender; the occupants inside the Bug were dead. Apparently, he hadn’t even noticed the accident while driving. This one, it seems to me, is related to another story (discussed in the following section) about a small child that a drunken motorist finds embedded in the grill of his car.
I have sent accounts of these smashed-bug stories to
several government and private traffic safety and accident offices. While safety officials say they have heard similar stories, they have been unable to confirm that any of them actually occurred. The accidents in which smaller cars were crushed by collisions with trucks, say officials, never involve the wreckage of the vehicles being left for days or weeks before being checked for human remains.
Gruesome automobile accidents surely do happen, and the larger vehicles nearly always suffer less damage than smaller ones. Yet—up to now—I have found no verifiable accounts of crushed VW Bugs like the ones in these stories. The smashed-Bug legends seem to be exaggerated tales about the general dangers of driving—especially in compact cars. They put particular emphasis on the car model whose nicknames derive from the creatures that commonly are crushed on car windshields and radiators—“bugs” and “beetles.”