What do you get when you cross a Lada, a flatbed tow truck, and a bunch of Russian smart alecks with too much time on their hands? You get this latest video from Garage 54, of course!
This time, however, the fellas aren’t creating some automotive monstrosity out in the shed. You know how, in Mother Russia, traffic laws are largely what you make them? The Garage 54 team recently saw a video that’s sort of the platonic ideal of that. It seems an unnamed Russian motorist did something that ended up with his car being towed by the authorities. Before the tow truck driver could lash the car down, the driver hopped in, threw it in reverse, and powered off the flatbed to everyone’s astonishment. Despite mangling his front clip in the process, and apparently damaging his radiator, he then slammed it in drive and sped away.
Now, of course, you and I watching that would have said, “Wow, that’s crazy,” and gone on about our days. That’s because we lack vision. The Garage 54 team saw that and said, “Oh, man, we should do that with one of our disposable Ladas to see what happens!” So they did!
No tie-downs? No problem!
The thesis behind this video is very simple—How many times can we pull this Lada off a flatbed before it disintegrates? To get things started, the boys get the Lada up on the flatbed, hook a tow strap onto the car’s aft tow hook, then hook the other end to an SUV. Vlad mentions that they wanted to put someone in the car and have them drive it off instead of pulling it off, but the car doesn’t run so they have to make do. The first attempt at pulling the car off the flatbed ends with very little drama — a few scuffs on the car’s rockers but nothing else. Vlad figures they pulled too quickly and thus the car didn’t have many opportunities to really hurt itself coming off the flatbed. He decides to have another go, more slowly this time, and back up on the truck goes the Lada.
Look, I’m not going to spoil the video for you, but if you’ve ever seen “Top Gear’s” legendary Hilux episode, you kinda already know where this is going. They try various angles on dumping the car, with the flatbed both moving and still, with hilarious results. Go ahead and give the video a watch, it’s good clean fun wrecking a car in very creative ways.
Garage 54 is one of our favorite YouTube channels. It features a bunch of Russian hoons performing mad science experiments on a wide array of road-going equipment. They’re the guys who created the cordless drill-powered Lada, the only ICE to EV conversion that matters and, of course, there was my favorite—adding more wheels than necessary to a Ural to see what happens.
