One of the most unlikely joyrides in recent memory occurred earlier this month when an 11-year-old in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, stole a public school bus and led police on a crosstown chase. A cellphone video, which quickly went viral, captured footage of the bus speeding across an intersection, closely followed by no fewer than a dozen police vehicles. The 13-mile, 30-minute chase came to an abrupt end when the child crashed into a large tree next to a residence in central Baton Rouge.
Police quickly took the child into custody. The middle schooler-cum-thief-cum-bus driver was arrested as a juvenile on four charges, including aggravated assault. Police alleged the unnamed 11-year-old “intentionally tried to hit another driver in his path,” according to local reporting. Officers also reported that the child, who they surmised had to stand up while driving in order to reach the gas pedal, was seen flipping off police vehicles during the pursuit. (Thankfully, no one was hurt.)
For my money, the image of a devil-may-care youngster in a stolen school bus flipping the bird to cops goes right into the pantheon of great American car chases. It’s not quite at white Ford Bronco level, but I’d put it right alongside the escaped llama chase in Arizona that briefly captivated the internet’s attention in 2015.
The first true joyride, however, occurred not in America, but in Germany. Karl Friedrich Benz was a German mechanical engineer who is credited with the design and creation of the world’s first practical, internal-combustion engine automobile. He completed his vehicle, the three-wheeled Motorwagen, in 1885 and secured a patent for his motor car in January of 1886. Yet he still lacked a true proof of concept to convince the wider public that his car was reliable and capable of holding up over long distances.
Enter his wife, Bertha Benz. She recognized this problem, and the significance of her husband’s invention, and came up with a plan to “encourage” him as to the success of his Motorwagen. In August 1888, Bertha stole his car and drove it from their town of Mannheim across Germany to her hometown of Pforzheim, an 180-kilometer journey (there and back).
According to Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), Bertha, along with their two sons, “quietly pushed the vehicle out of the workshop and only started it once it was a safe distance away from the house — by turning the horizontal flywheel. As the story goes, she left a note on the kitchen table for Carl, who was still asleep, with an openly-worded message that she was on her way to Pforzheim — with not a word about the ‘test drive.’”
Only later did Karl Benz notice that his new car was missing and that his loved ones were not traveling cross-country by train. The three joyriders eventually kept him abreast of their progress via telegram. Sadly, none of those messages remain, but one can only imagine.
