Royal Purple Winner: Four-Wheeling Windstar

When we asked about the worst thing you’ve ever done to a rental car, you guys certainly did step up with some shocking and outrageous tales. In the words of one scandalized reader, "Wow, obvious to see how many riff raff CRIMINAL LOSERS that hang out at thiswebsite. Will NEVER do business with your company BECAUSE OF THIS."  See?  You guys rock!

After much hysterical laughter, the CarDomain staff had to simmer down and pick a winner. Congratulations to Franki, whose tale of ill-fated all-night off-roading with his pops in a rental minivan has won him a hundred dollars’ worth of Royal Purple!  Heh, too bad he can’t use that gift certificate to buy some soap to wash his mouth out with:

Me and my parents rented a Ford Windstar back in 2003 in San Diego, Cali. It wassh***y to begin with, so when my mom went into a sleeping-aid-induced coma, meand dad decided to have a guys’ night out with the heap. We took it somewherenorth of our hotel and it took about 3 hours to get there…idk where the hellwe were. Well, there were some spots off the main "road" that looked like fun foroff-roading. My dad had the rental insurance, so we took it off one side ofthe road…and dropped off into a big-ass ditch. Somehow backed it out of there,drove back towards the hotel for 5 minutes, then found another goodspot…jumped the son of a bitch on about 10 giant-ass bumps. After doing that acouple times, we decided it was getting late…4:30 a.m. We start to head back,when we hear a weird noise coming from the undercarriage of the van…yea, hebent the steering column, completely f****d up the alignment, popped the driverside area of the bumper off enough to scrape the pavement, and lost the 2 fronthub caps. First off, how he bent the steering column I don’t know, but it was abitch to try and drive back to the hotel. After about half an hour struggling tokeep this f****r on the road, we call a tow truck. He gets to were we are…in 2hours. My dad was, of course, pissed as hell. We told the towing company that wewere ran off the road by a big-ass truck that crowded the road. We finally gotback to the hotel…at 11:30 a.m. My mom is waiting for us to walk through thedoor. When we enter, she asked if we had fun: we were covered in dirt from messing with the undercarriage to see what was totally wrong with it. We saidshe didn’t know what she was talking about…we got in an accident. She didn’tbelieve us…busted…my dad spilled the beans and she said we shoulda woke herup…lol