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Man Drives Toyota Off the Roof of a Parking Garage, Lives to Tell the Tale

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Toyota 4Runner dangles off parking garage

The afternoon could have gone better
Photo: Caroline Sprague / Twitter

Usually, when driving through a parking garage, the chief point of concern is avoiding the big concrete pillars or not scraping the other cars while squeezing into a tight parking spot.

But as his Toyota 4Runner SUV dangled from the roof of the nine-story Littlefield Garage in downtown Austin, bumping into pillars and cars was the last thing on the mind of the Texas man behind the wheel, who wished to remain unnamed.

According to Zachary Cayson and his two friends, who witnessed the event, the Toyota 4Runner was pulling into an outward-facing parking spot when it simply did not stop and instead rolled off the edge of the structure.

The wire safety barrier did little to stop the SUV at first, instead becoming entangled in its front axle, causing it to flip over, fall, and finally come to a stop midair. Fortunately for the driver, one of the wires had wrapped itself around one of the wheels, both of which were sturdy enough to hold the 5,000-pound SUV afloat.

“I sprinted up the stairwell and I was the first one to get there,” said Cayson, who had started talking to the driver, still buckled in, to try to calm him down. “I introduced myself and we had a quick little chat about what we should do, whether we should stay there and wait for the police and the fire department or we should try to get him out of there.”

In the heat of the moment, they decided they should try to get the driver out. “We unbuckled the seat belt, and I took one arm and then he kind of swung his legs over to the side and there was a tiny little ledge there right on the other side of the barrier,” said Cayson. “He managed to plant his feet on that and I picked him up.”

It’s still unclear why the driver drove off the side of the parking garage. There have been suggestions that the Toyota simply failed to stop even when the brake pedal was applied, but as we’ve seen before, almost any time an incident of this kind occurs, it is caused by an accidental application of the wrong pedal.

Reasons notwithstanding, the Texas driver made it out alive, safe and sound, and AFD Battalion Chief Palmer Buck confirmed that despite a nearby electrical conduit and water line, nothing was damaged as they got the car down. Happy endings all around!