The US is a country dominated by cars so there is always plenty of road rage to go around. These drivers share the crazy ways they’ve gotten instant revenge on motorists who wronged them on the road.
What’s That Poking Out Of The Window?
“Alright, so I am driving down I-24 in Kentucky several years back. I like to take it easy when on long road trips so I usually drive close to the speed limit and just cruise in the right lane without having to deal with passing people all the time. So there’s this semi-truck in front of me that is constantly lane changing and adjusting speeds, which is kind of messing with my rhythm. Seconds before I put on my turn signal to blow by him, the SUV behind me has had enough, beats me to the punch, and goes for it. I guess the semi decides this just isn’t going to happen and literally lane changes just enough to straddle both lanes and block the pass.
The dude in the SUV loses. his. mind. He rolls up on the shoulder, and you can see him roll down his window and start screaming at the truck driver. As I watch in a kind of mesmerizing amazement of this unfolding right in front of me in the idyllic green woods of Kentucky, I see a double-barrel poke out of the trucker’s window and blast out the back passenger window of the SUV. Brakes screech, vehicles swerve and the SUV disappears off the road and down the nearest exit, assuming to call the cops and change his pants. The trucker rolls up his window, moves back into the right lane, and continues on as if nothing happened.
I ride in silence for several more miles before exiting to get gas and to put a healthy distance between myself and the trucker because I’m sure as heck not going to pass him now.”
Well, That’s A Football Game They’ll Never Forget
“Sitting in traffic outside the stadium of a Georgia versus GA Tech football game. I’m in the passenger seat. My friend is driving and our other buddy is in the back. We ask the car in the lane next to us (five dudes, one girl) if they will let us in so we can take a left. They say they’ll let us in for a cig. I’m reaching in my pocket for it when the light changes and my buddy gets over in front of them.
They start throwing empty cans and trash at the car and hollering at us and whatnot when we pull up to the next red light. My friend gets about halfway out of the car and yells back at them saying something like ‘If you throw one more thing at my car I am going to beat the lights out of you.’
I should note at this point that the three of us all played football & worked out extensively for years, and I had been a highly ranked wrestler in high school.
Traffic starts moving again and we pull up to the next light, the first car in the lane. They pull up next to us on my side and start taunting us, etc. I still have not said a word to anybody. My buddy that’s driving leans over me and starts talking some smack back to them through my open window.
I’m sitting there wishing they would just bug off when BAM a full bottle hits me in the side of the head. It rocks me a little bit and in my head, I’m saying ‘I can’t believe that freakin’ prick just hit me!’ I’m still silent as I look down at my lap and watch the drink pouring out into my lap. I am so furious that I am literally seeing red at this point.
In silence, I unbuckle my seatbelt and get out of the car. I stalk straight up to the driver’s side of the other car and the guy is staring at me, shocked that I have actually gotten out of the car. He knows what’s coming. He tries to open his door. I kick that thing shut on him and reach through his window, grab him by the shirt with my left hand and start wailing on his face/head. I hit him at least six or seven times before everyone in his car understands what’s going on and they start to pile out. Now my buddies get out of the car and things are going down.
This is how I find myself standing in the middle of a very busy four lane intersection, blocking all traffic with what is now a three-on-five brawl. For a minute I’m in full fight mode and we are beating the lights out of these kids. An important side note: They were wasted, we were not. I come to my senses and realize what we’re involved in and it dawns on me that there are cops everywhere. I start yelling for everybody to just get back in their respective cars and get the heck out of there before everyone goes to jail.
In slow motion, I watch this sloshed idiot square up with my buddy. My friend takes one clean swing and knocks the guy out cold. He crumples to the ground and I realize now that we are all in deep trouble. The cops show up, handcuff everybody and start asking questions. They quickly realize that we were defending ourselves and ask if we want to press charges. I say that there is no need, as two of the other kids are in the hospital and the rest are bloodied. That should be punishment enough, right?
Cops ask us to come to the station ‘to give a statement.’ We get there and find out that the one guy is still unconscious (one hour after the fight) and that we could be facing very serious charges if he doesn’t recover. To sum up the rest of it, he recovers and we all sit in jail for the day watching all the games on the four TVs in the jail. We go to court and all of the charges are dismissed.”
If You’re In Detroit…Don’t Mess With This Guy
“So I was driving up I-75 in Detroit, coming back from the bar at around 3 am when this idiot comes flying up on my rear and plants himself about a foot off my rear bumper. Now I’m not in the left lane or anything so I lightly take my foot off the gas. He honks at me. Seriously, dude? It’s 3 am and I’m not in the left lane with plenty of room both right and left and you’re going to honk at me? Okay, whatever. So I’m a little buzzed and now really ticked off at this loser.
So I tape my brake and he starts swerving all over the road (I didn’t hit the brakes that hard) and he comes around on my left honking, swerving at my car, flipping me off, etc. Well, this goes on for about 10 minutes. All the while I’m reducing speed and we’re now going about 40 mph in a 70 zone. People are passing us, I’m tempted to get off the free way at this point. Finally, the guy pulls around on my right for the third or fourth time and he throws a bottle out of his window and cracks my windshield…
THAT’S IT.
So I slam my brakes on and slow to about 10 mph. Then I speed back up and tap his rear bumper… I continue to follow him. We get up to about 90mph at places and he can barely keep his car on the road.
I have no idea how the cops never stumbled across us while I followed him all the way to his house… he tried to lose me a bunch of times but I managed to keep up. So I come flying up across his driveway and onto his lawn and come out of my car screaming that I’m about to shoot that idiot and leave him dead in his driveway. I’m screaming about he doesn’t know who I am and he just crossed with the wrong guy from Detroit.
Needless to say, the guy started backpedaling pretty fast as I had my hand up under my jacket behind my back. The loser starts apologizing and stuff. Finally, I just told him to get the heck into his house and slashed his tires.”
Bye, Idiot!
“So we’re 18 and we’d just done the paintball thing (it was the early 90s, OK?) and then run to the paintball shop for supplies. We are on our way home, the four of us have had a nice summer weekend afternoon shooting our friends with little exploding red, blue, and green blobs.
The route home is along this two-lane highway from the nearest paintball shop to my friend’s folk’s place in a very affluent suburb. Traffic was pretty heavy as it was evening and people were going out for dinner and all the other things people do on weekends. We passed a few intersections when this dude pulled out behind us.
Keep in mind this is a two-lane highway in bumper-to-bumper traffic going, at most 20 mph.
The dude that got behind us is flipping the heck out. I’m in the back and I turn around to ensure he’s not escorting his pregnant wife to the hospital (seriously – I was in HS, I watched a lot of TV, cut me some slack). He’s not. We ignore him and drive another minute or two.
He’s still flipping out. Honking, flashing the lights. There’s no place for us to go other than pull off into the ditch or rear-end the car in front of us. So my friend, Skippy (yeah, that’s what we called him – not his real name. You guessed, did you? Good job) has had enough. Next time we’re at a full stop, he sticks his head out the window and shouts, ‘Where exactly do you want me to go, idiot?!’
This guy loses it. He’s not a big guy, but he gets out of the car and starts … yes, chasing us on foot. Mind you, we’re still IN the car. The light turns green, and we creep ahead, but in one of those moments of realization, we come to understand that ‘crawling’ in a car is still pretty much top speed in a foot race. So this deranged idiot is chasing after us. We turn on Skippy’s road. Still back there. Still running.
Skippy slams on the brakes. Our pursuer hilariously face plants into the back of the car (which is a hatchback – so we get the full effect) and falls to the pavement.
At which point we speed home uphill on the side street, never to see Mr. Road Rage ever again.”
Hey, It Was Her Fault, Not His!
“I used to be quite the rageaholic in my youth. Not that the people I would rage at didn’t deserve scorn, but perhaps not quite so much as I gave it. Mostly I kept it tempered to screaming at them when there’s no way though could hear me (windows up, etc, etc.)
The one thing that REALLY cured (or at least tempered) my road rage was going from being strapped inside a two-ton vehicle with airbags to riding on a quarter ton with nothing but a helmet and some leather protecting me.
Learn to let things go really fast once you realize that if you rage you’ll be a dent in someone else’s vehicle.
Okay, so I’ve finally given up on the rage thing. I’m on a bike, and I’m just trying to keep cagers from killing me. I’m headed to work and some dumb female in a large SUV comes into my lane with no signal. I bang on my horn, swerve close to the shoulder straighten up, brake, and manage to avoid becoming a smear on the highway.
When I recover I’m right behind this particular woman. She happens to get off at my exit. So I’m still behind her. She happens to take my next turn, so I’m still behind her. So from her point of view, she had just cut off a large biker in black leather who was now following her.
I was cracking up to myself ’cause I’m just glad I’m alive and just heading to my parking deck to go to work. But I can see her staring at me in the review mirror and decided I just had to mess with her. The next section of the road is terribly timed and you end up from red light to red light, never more than a block or two at a time. So I start revving my engine really loud right before the light turns green, and each time she shoots forward to the next light. Just before my parking deck, I revved my engine about two seconds before the light was going to change and like Pavlov’s dog, she goes shooting through the light only to get pulled over by a sheriff on the corner. Hilarious.”
It’s Just A Chevy. Geez!
“I’ve had a lot of people cut me off for no reason at all, and then give me the finger or similar after doing it. There are a lot of aggressors out there. And I don’t know if it’s because I drive a large truck or what, but it seems like smaller vehicles do it a lot more than others. They must have a death wish, or hate my more gas-consuming vehicle? Who knows.
The most memorable one though was the day a guy in a Prius cut me off pretty hard to make an exit in front of me (I was taking the exit as well). He about took off the exit sign in the gore point to get in as well. I’m wondering about the guy because I’m driving a Silverado 1500 and had I not backed down when I saw him coming, I would have knocked him and sent him flying.
Anyway, I honk at the guy, but that’s about it and stop thinking about it since I have other things on my mind. I pull into a gas station about a mile up the road to fuel up, and I didn’t realize it, but the same guy had pulled into the same station, and for reasons unknown to me, I guess he thought I was following him, so he called the cops. I didn’t even know he was there until the police car pulled in and the cop rolled down his window (I had finished pumping gas) and asked me what the issue was. I told him I hadn’t called, then he explained to me, which caused me to look around and I finally spotted the guy. I told him that I was getting gas, didn’t even know he had pulled in here, and I hadn’t said a word to him. The cop went over to him for a minute, talked to him, and drove away.
I guess the guy thought I was following him and was going to do something, though if I was I would have walked right over to him I would think….”
This Van Was On A Spree
“I was in high school driving to my fast food job at Chick-Fil-A. I was at a light turning left onto a four-lane highway. As I look to my left I see two Mormons biking. All of a sudden out of nowhere I see a van almost hit them burnout and run the left turn arrow around two lanes of oncoming traffic. The van jumped the median and hit three cars in the left turn lane across the street from me. The van continued. It hit a fire hydrant and then a telephone pole before he was stopped.
Immediately after this happened my left turn arrow changed to green. After seeing this van hit three cars and almost kill the two Mormons I thought ‘should I go?’ I decided to go for it and passed the van while turning left. About a quarter-mile down the road I am still looking in my rearview. The van freed itself from the pole and was headed my way. I started to freak out. I was on a four-lane highway with a concrete median to my left and a ditch to my right. I had already passed the only turnoff for about two more miles.
I was going about 75 mph (the speed limit was 55). The van was going way faster and gaining on me. I passed an elderly couple who had no idea what was going on. Thirty seconds later I saw the van rear-end them in my rearview. I saw a hud cap fly and the couple swerved into the ditch.
The van was probably 300 yards behind me and gaining. There was a turnoff for an apartment complex about a quarter-mile away. I went like 95 and turned off a few seconds ahead of the van. I thought for sure it was going to follow me but it didn’t. After calling 911 I waited for about five minutes before getting back on the road. I hit traffic a few lights before my job. It looked like there was a wreck.
I saw the van along with two other cars in the ditch. The van had hit six cars total and had totaled at least three. The lousiest part of the story is that I was late for work and my boss did not believe me. The story didn’t make the news and the police never asked me to testify. I never found out what the driver’s deal was.”
Hothead On A Bike vs. Hothead In A Car
“I was on an ’85 Honda VFR700 heading north on Tropicana from the Long 15 when a red sedan blows by me hitting close to 100 on the speedometer. I, being my natural young and stupid self, think ‘Hey, all right!’ and speed up to follow. He jukes through traffic, and I take the hole he leaves so I can keep up.
As a reminder, this is a city street in downtown Vegas we’re pulling this nonsense on. We get up about four or five streets when he decides he’s had enough, and he brake-checks me at a green light we both could’ve gone through, which then goes yellow and red. I had plenty of space so I make it to a stop with no issue, but I raise my hands in a shrug as if to communicate ‘C’mon, man, we could’ve made that one!’
Moron gives me the finger. I split the lane on the right after that little display, and give him a mirror tap on the way through while I get in front of him since he was being the aforementioned prick. Light turns green, and I head on up the road at a sedate pace, which was a(or another) mistake on my part.
He catches up to me at the next light, jumps out of his car, and comes up to me screaming about me following him and busting up his mirror. He’s close enough that his spittle is flecking the visor on my helmet, and there is about 1200 pounds worth of muscular dudes at the nearby bus stop that are starting to take interest in the situation.
My fight or flight response isn’t very refined at this point, and I standby waiting for the light to go green. I’m going to dust this guy and get out of the situation, but he’ll have none of it. With me sitting on my bike, he starts taking swings at me and I nearly lose the bike since it’s in gear – I just have the clutch in.
Light goes green, and at the same time, those muscular dudes who were taking an interest start charging in to mess this guy up. Regardless, I vanish; I’m having none of this, so I’m pulling triple-digits on Trop once more trying to get away.
He catches up. Not only that, he tries to swerve into me to wreck me on this road, so I stand on the brakes down to 20 to let him in front. He brakes check about four more times, continually giving me the finger until I pull to the side of the road to grab my phone.
Prick vanishes. Survived, just a few bruises, but part of me thinks I should’ve just dropped the bike, ripped the helmet off, and beaten the dude down with it.”
A Tense Drive Home
“My wife. She is absolutely terrible at road rage. I had met her, my daughter and son for dinner at a restaurant one night. We leave and I was following her home in my car. She had our kids in hers. She turns left at a green light when the guy on the other side turns right. Almost hits her. She throws her hands up at him. The idiot guy immediately hit his brakes and I knew what was happening. He stopped in front of her, put his car in park and got out. I didn’t hesitate to throw my car in park, jumped out and ran to her door right as he got there. I put my hand on her door and told him to get in his car. He asked what I was going to do. I td him nothing but that’s my family and there is nothing that’s going to happen to them with me there either. I told him once more to get back in his car but he said ‘she cut me off’. I told him he was right and she didn’t see him and I would talk to her about it later but for now he needed to go. He stood there looking at me. I didn’t have a weapon on me but I stuck my hand in my pocket and said ‘buddy, I don’t want this to end badly so let’s just let lave before somebody gets hurt. This is the last time I ask’. He slowly backed up to his car. Got in and left.
Half a mile down the road was a sheriff car. He pulled in and said something. Sheriff comes flying out after me. Pulls me over gets on the horn to put my hands out the window, then instructed me on how to get out of the car and slowly back towards him. I did all this and I asked him what was going on. He told me the guy said I pulled a weapon on him. The officer searched me and the car and found nothing. Went back to get the guy for filing false report but he left.”
