It's clear man, keep going!

September 6, 2017 9:36 AM

9 years ago last week, my all-time favorite video of amateur strength, courage, and stupidity was posted by user carjumper2008 to the video-sharing website YouTube. I present it here without further commentary. "Insane Jump by a Buick La sabre".
posted by stinkfoot (33 comments total)

And the Oscar for best jump by a Buick LaSabre goes to...
posted by Naberius at 9:41 AM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

Thank you. This is a balm for these troubled times.
posted by The Man from Lardfork at 9:44 AM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: Did I miss a memo or something?
posted by humboldt32 at 9:58 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Let's see how those Hazard boys get out of this one
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:59 AM on September 6, 2017 [7 favorites]

That's a pretty sweet jump.
posted by bondcliff at 10:02 AM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

Those LaSabres sure could jump. LeSabres, on the other hand, couldn't jump for shit.
posted by scruss at 10:06 AM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

This is my favorite jump. reverse angle

They are lucky to have survived. They destroyed a 50k truck and got an ambulance ride.

I may have participated in such stupidity in my misspent youth. Alas, there are no videos.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 10:07 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Somehow I parsed the preposition "by" as meaning "near" or "next to."

I was not expecting the contents of this video.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:10 AM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

fucking gahahahad!
posted by dismas at 10:13 AM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think the Mythbusters did a show on The Dukes of Hazard or Chips or something where they jumped some cars and basically showed how doing jumps like that destroys the car and would kill or injure most drivers.
posted by bondcliff at 10:20 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

jumps like that destroys the car and would kill or injure most drivers.

But those boys from hazard and Ponch are GODZZZ
posted by Annika Cicada at 10:24 AM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

Ok, fine. They'd have killed Cooter and Jon.
posted by bondcliff at 10:27 AM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

That jump wouldn't have cleared a pyramid made out of the beer cans that those guys emptied in the half-hour prior. We had a higher standard for dumb stunts in my day. If you're gonna jump something, jump Snake River Canyon, or keep it to yourself.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 10:35 AM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

My favorite is the Suzuki Sidekick. Starts with "hold my beer" and ends with appropriately loud profanity.
posted by cyclopticgaze at 10:36 AM on September 6, 2017 [14 favorites]

I've played enough Driver to know that it's not the jump that kills you, but the subsequent swarm of crazed cop cars.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:37 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

At least the guys in the Buick knew enough to find a roughly parabolic curved hill. From skiing a (dinky) jump on to a slope the right angle with a runout is smooth, otherwise jarring at best, life changing in a bad way at worst.
posted by sammyo at 10:44 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Shit. LeSabre. Not LaSabre.

This is like that time I ran a red light because I was behind a box truck and couldn't actually see the light. And for some reason I still can't fathom, the truck just took off and went through the intersection while the light was still totally red - the other direction wasn't even yellow yet - but I figured the light had changed and went right on through behind him and didn't realize what had happened until I was through.

Damn it, Stinkfoot! I could have gotten killed.
posted by Naberius at 11:22 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

> I think the Mythbusters did a show on The Dukes of Hazard or Chips or something where they jumped some cars and basically showed how doing jumps like that destroys the car and would kill or injure most drivers.

Yeah, when I was watching those a little boy because I thought those shows were the schiz, it was really all about watching cars get big air and destruct, because the damage was usually obvious. For that matter, there are some episodes of CHiPs where the car shown plummeting over the cliff is entirely unlike the car shown charging towards the clip before the change of camera angle, I guess because they couldn't find a sacrificial junker of the same model to pack with explosives and shove off.
posted by ardgedee at 12:07 PM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

I assume by the scraping noises that the LeSabre has its original suspension system. Nothing absorbs shock like pavement.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:09 PM on September 6, 2017

That Raptor video is a pitch pervert metaphor for Trumpistan
posted by Senor Cardgage at 12:16 PM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

The spooky tracking error at the forty-second mark has me worried I just watched the hillbilly version of the video from The Ring
posted by wreckingball at 1:59 PM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

An '83 LeSabre, pretty close to the one in the video, was my first car. I never jumped it, though.
posted by mrbill at 2:29 PM on September 6, 2017

Jeezus, it's not about the jump it's about those trees lining the road at the far end...
posted by OHenryPacey at 2:46 PM on September 6, 2017

Oh man this takes me back. There were several farm roads near my home town that went directly across low rolling hills with great visibility. You'd want to go fast enough to repeatedly get your heart up into your throat, but not fast enough to bottom out and ruin your suspension. The best roads hit the hills at a constant interval so you'd just go whoa...whoa....whooaaaa!

Old Buick's were awesome. My friend's retired police Ford was double awesome. Still had the spotlight on the door!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:45 PM on September 6, 2017

That Suzuki thing is incredible.

I love the last bit of dialogue I could make out before it went dark: "how do you spell video?"
posted by jamjam at 3:55 PM on September 6, 2017

This road, California Highway 120 north of Lee Vining, going toward Yosemite, I got on this road a couple of years ago, and remembered it from my childhood, my parents jumping the car with glee, and me screaming in the back seat. Here is a video. A great American Road.
posted by Oyéah at 4:37 PM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

Hey look it's My Summer Car the movie!

I claim no knowledge getting a 1996 Town and Country to 110 mph on a private road when my parents were on vacation.
posted by The Power Nap at 4:45 PM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Clark street just south of downtown Chicago used to have a set of train tracks and slope such that it was hard not to catch air.... you might have seen in in Ferris Bueller's day off... but, allas, it's gone now and there's a Marianos entrance instead.
posted by MikeWarot at 5:18 PM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

That was an amazing jump. @Sammyo, it made me think of skiing as well. Nothing worse than trying to jump a flat top and landing on the flat top instead of the descending slope!
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:27 PM on September 6, 2017

They are lucky to have survived. They destroyed a 50k truck and got an ambulance ride.

Just from this description I knew exactly which video this was. They would have done better if they had picked the ramp angle or speed correctly to not land so much nose-down, but as it was the front end dug in and they pretty much had a head-on collision with the dirt at 50 mph.

My favorite is the Suzuki Sidekick . Starts with "hold my beer" and ends with appropriately loud profanity.

It's hard to imagine something more backwoods than this. I mean, his prep is drinking his beer and throwing empty tanks or buckets out the window. Oh, and a helmet. The Suzuki was still driveable after the impact, too.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:34 PM on September 6, 2017

My buddy and I still laugh about the one time we actually caught air... he was driving my stepmother's late 80's Nissan Sentra down a country road that featured a banked-up railroad crossing. On a whim I said "Hey, I bet you can't jump those tracks!"

He just looked at me for a second, with a shit-eating grin slowly spreading across his face, and floored the bastard. I should have known better, he's not the kind of guy you tease about anything like that, because he'll do anything for a laugh.

Car came off the tracks clean, slammed down hard, I don't know how we avoided major damage... to the car or ourselves. I mean, it was a Sentra, it's not like flooring it would push the speed TOO high, but... still, it was touch and go as to whether my stepmom would notice the poor car was driving funny after that incident.

My younger brother and then-girlfriend (now wife) were in the back seat; they both remember the incident well. "Bet you can't jump those tracks" is definitely a part of our family lexicon.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:07 AM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Ah, youth.

I pulled a jump in high school with a weirdly-graded intersecting road and my dad's Cutlass Cierra, an car of equal craptacularness. Fishtailed a bit after bottoming out . I thought for sure I was going to fishtail into oncoming traffic. Ended up doing a head-on with a Mustang II (good riddance) about two minutes later when I was looking in the rear-view to see the inevitable sad head-shake from the driver behind me while taking weird y-turn wide. I'd had my license for like two months.

Bonus points: had a car full of fellow band geeks on the way to pregame dinner. Had a few weeks previous finished awesome gravel lot donut to see mom of front-seat passenger glaring at me through the settling dust. Parents disallowed children from riding with me at that point.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:31 PM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Oh my god Ogre
posted by stinkfoot at 9:52 PM on September 16, 2017