It doesn’t matter whether your car is a $500 beater or a brand new $500,000 supercar, if you’ve ever had to hand your keys over to a valet to be parked, you’ll have felt that slightly uneasy feeling. Will it come back in one piece, you ask yourself? And in truth, they usually, though not always, do.
But we know one driver in Atlanta, GA, will be parking his own car from now on even if it means a 30 minute walk back to his hotel or restaurant after a disastrous experience with a valet who wrecked his new Cadillac only 42 seconds after pulling away.
Video footage captured on the Performance Data Recorder fitted to Joe Luck’s 2022 Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing shows how the valet decided to take a sneaky but very brief drive in the hot sedan with the intention of taking it safely back to the lot before anyone noticed. But it could hardly have gone more wrong.
After traveling barely 175 yards (160 m), during which he briefly manages to hook third gear and only fleetingly exceeds 40 mph (64 km/h), the driver attempts to make a U-turn in the three-lane road, swerving from the left lane, across the right lane and even into the cycle lane to give himself enough room to make the turn in one bite.
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But that erratic bit of driving has obviously confused the driver of a Dodge Challenger approaching from behind, and as the Caddy swings back into the road it gets smacked in the side by the two-door muscle car, sending the Blackwing spinning round.
It’s hard to tell how damaged the car is as we listen to driver’s beeped expletives, moans of pain and call to his office to explain that he’d been T-boned (we imagine they had to wait a while for the bigger picture), but then the video cuts to exterior footage showing that both side airbags in the front have gone off and the rear driver’s side door and quarter panel are in a bad way.
The joyriding driver was fired by his employer National Parking, the organization told 11Alive, but Luck said National Parking hadn’t yet come up with a solution to both the financial and four-wheeled messes the valet has left behind. And what makes the whole saga frustrating is that the valet drove the car such a short distance and at such low speeds that he would have gained almost nothing meaningful from the journey even if he had managed to bring it back to the parking area in one piece. What a waste.