I’m not always sure how to handle things when some sort of social media something that involves cars goes viral. Sometimes, we just want to ignore it, but then again, our goal is to bring top-notch Brougham-grade quality automotive content to as many people as possible, even if those people didn’t realize how much they were craving and needing said car content. So, when something goes big and has a significant automotive angle, why not try to address it? So that’s what we’re doing now, as I invite you to join me in marveling at a TikTok video created by a person who slowly and destructively sideswiped a parking bollard, causing $30,000 worth of body damage to her new Cadillac Escalade. Over 3.7 million people watched this video, enrapt at a human being blaming an inert metal bollard that is sunk into the ground with concrete for being at fault in a wreck.
I wish I could definitively state why this video has captured the attention of so many; there’s some obvious things, of course. The person making it is conventionally attractive, there’s the undeniable draw of some nice, juicy schadenfreude, and it’s talking about something deeply familiar and relatable to many people: the fact that parking bollards exist. Beyond that I can’t really say, other than there really is something fascinating about watching someone in such complete denial about an event that happened.
The someone we’re talking about, by the way, is a – I guess you’d call them an influencer?– on social media, named Natalie Vacca, with over 270,000 followers on TikTok, and mostly seems to post videos of herself talking about stuff to the camera, with occasional cameos from dogs and kids. Looking at the environment and materials and locations of these videos, this person seems to be doing just fine, financially. They seem to be living a pretty cushy life, and part of that seems to include a recent-model Cadillac Escalade, which plays a crucial role in the video, which, here, you may as well just watch already:
@nat.vacca I cant be the only victim to yellow bank polls. #escalade #cadillac #autobody #crunch #matteblack #banks #cement #damage
I’m sure there’s like half a dozen things that you saw just now that are making you want to scream: someone not understanding the purpose of those bollards, saying “look what your metal pole did to my car” and then stating they don’t think it was their fault, and then calling a door handle a “handlebar” and saying “you hear a crunch and freeze, and then you keep going,” all of this, all of this, it almost feels like too much. Is it an act? Can this be serious? Are there people so clueless about the way Earth works that they believe all these things? And are allowed to drive a 5,600-pound SUV like an Escalade?
Of course, the comments are absolutely brutal. But it, somehow, gets even better, because ol’ Nat posted a response video where, bafflingly, she pretended to not be herself, and instead did the video as some other person “playing devil’s advocate about hitting bank poles” as though there’s two powerful and equal sides to the “should you grind your car into yellow parking bollards, causing lots of damage?” debate. Here, you have to watch this one, so you can enjoy that strangely satisfying feeling of wanting to scream about dumb things, yet again:
@nat.vacca Im just playing devils advocate #bollard #atm #followup #devilsadvocate #stlouis #escalade #cadillac #autobody #crunch #handlebar #satire
First of all, what the hell is the point of doing a response video as though you’re someone who is not you, but is also very clearly you? It feels absolutely unhinged. Why would you choose this? For objectivity? I don’t think objectivity works that way. I don’t think anything works that way?
The part where she’s defending the her-but-not-her for continuing to drive forward after hearing the crunch is particularly maddening. She notes, quite correctly, that her shifter only offers options for forward or reverse travel, and no sideways control. This checks out, because her Escalade (and most other automobiles made for the past century or so) have their “sideways” controls in the form of the fucking steering wheel, a cool little driving hack you in-the-know drivers should be aware of.
Of course, this was noted multiple times in the comments:
Plus, this one gets in the extra little dig with “wheelbar!” Gold! brutal, funny gold!
Look, just in general, I would have thought that most people, upon driving and hearing a loud crunching sound, would know to just stop, and ideally get out of the car and see what the hell is going on. Moving in the direction of travel you were going in when you hit the whatever, especially when you can still hear the sounds of bending metal, is generally a bad idea, at least if your goal is to have less damage to your car.
There’s any number of ways she could have slowly and carefully backed away from the bollard, ideally utilizing some of that “sideways” control offered by the steering wheel, to minimize the damage, instead of raking the entire length of the side of the car against the bollard.
Then there’s the suggestion that, somehow, if these were red instead of yellow, they’d be much better? Was the color what confused her? It seems more like she didn’t see them at all, but if she saw them, saw that they were yellow and thought “Oh! yellow poles! There’s no way a yellow pole could cause any harm! Yellow is the color of bananas and twinkies, nature’s softest elements, so this yellow pole must be quite similar, quite similar indeed!”
Can this all be real? Is this person just trolling for engagement? Is it all a setup, designed to stir click-worthy and monetizible wrath in the minds of people? Is it just fuel for some misogynist’s future, mis-informed screed about gender and driving? Because I don’t want to hear that shit.
I mean, look, we’ve all fucked up while driving. An Escalade is huge and the visibility isn’t that great; I’m not necessarily immune from a similar sort of fuck-up. The actual driving into the bollard isn’t the issue. It’s the making the video about it, with the determined confidence of idiocy, but, then again, making these videos is what this woman does. Her life is content, and this is definitely content. I’m not so different, just, you know, homelier and drive much cheaper cars. If I did this, the only way I could cause $30,000 worth of damage is if I shredded $24,000 in cash against the bollard in the process.
I think this is real, at least in the sense that the event happened, and her reactions are real. But she’s also likely very aware of the engagement and reaction this will have.
But, here I am, talking about it. To you! Matt told me to, but I agreed without protest because I saw the damn videos and was as baffled and captivated as anyone. What does this say about us, all of us? I mean, there’s her, with these baffling decisions and what seems to be as many qualifications to drive an Escalade as your average land-squirrel, and then there’s me, watching it over and over and wondering how this can be and playing right smack dab into the whole internet economy of cultivated outrage.
But still, let’s recap: bollards are there to keep people from driving their Escalades into expensive buildings or over expensive people. If you hear a crunch while slowly driving in a parking lot just stop. See what’s going on before continuing to drive. And, yes, if you hit an inert, immobile object like a bollard or an obelisk or a tree stump, it is definitely, unquestionably your fault.
This Photo Of A Car Crashed Perfectly Into A Driving School Under A ‘Learn To Drive’ Sign Gets Better When You Find Out Who The Driver Was
The Car Crashes From The ’70s TV Show ‘CHiPS’ Are Dazzling Dances Of Car Chaos
That Viral Tweet About Truck Bed Sizes Over The Years Is Just Stupid
I Can’t Stop Watching This Driver Get Their Car Absolutely Wedged In A Sinkhole
Wow, her husband would probably either divorce her for her stupidity or buy her the smallest car still available in the United States. Perhaps, 2014 Chevrolet Spark would be better choice for her. If she couldn’t see the fucking out of the massive SUV, she shouldn’t be driving one.
She’s trying to blame the bank for her stupidity.
Life was so, so, so so much better before tik toc. A Chinese owned company. Tik Toc, just like a clock, slowly we will destroy your youth and take over.
Lets not blame the chinese for this one.We absolutely brought this on ourselves.
As if we weren’t already too far gone with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter …
Oh I hit one of those once, except this was a taller, skinnier one used to indicate the edge of a rather sketchy “road”. Caught it with my passenger side window, pushed it backward, then BANG! Huge dent in my passenger door, wouldn’t open anymore.
This was also at midnight, on a pitch black dirt “road” and in a hand-me-down Buick Electra station wagon which I was getting rid of in a few weeks anyway
I was shocked – by the amount of vocal fry in her video. Why couldn’t that be turned off? I think there should be a warning about vocal fry when I’m listening….
Hanlon’s Razor applies, -ish: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.“
Or as a friend would say “just assume everyone sucks and life starts making sense”
My guess is she is not faking. My partner and I are often amazed that both our ex’s can blame us for things they do. We both got divorced over a decade ago. Just last week one of them said a dumb thing they did was not their fault but ours.
Sort of makes you wonder about popular people.
Speaking as someone who has hit…. um… 4 poles in my driving career, I feel like I have experience I can bring to this situation that most can’t. Because of this, I can say with confidence that you do indeed hear a crunch, and you do indeed get out and wonder WTF is going on. A bit of horror hits here when the crunch you heard actually translates to more damage than it sounded like. I find that this is a good time to start thinking about excuses.
Once the excuses are covered, the shame sets in for hitting something that was completely visible and stationary.
Again.
I will own up to making some embarrassing scrapes and boops in my day. It happens. Getting out when you hear the scrape, assessing the situation and trying to back out of it in a way that minimizes damage is what you do. It’s fine to ask people to spot you. I’ll even say it’s fine to screw up. People can learn from their mistakes and do better! It’s part of being human.
It’s not fine to just like, keep going when you hear a scratch and then make a dumb TikTok about it. That’s just irresponsible, and your friends are a lot more understanding about an oops than the wider internet.
Oh sweaty the bollards are to protect the bank from you.
I drive a 20′ long pickup and I avoid the bollards in rhe 45 degree angle in the McDonald’s drive through, although full disclosure I try to only visit that one in my car
Part of what makes this so fucking infuriating is that parking bollards are so fucking mundane. (My apologies to the bollard enthusiasts among us.)
If she had gotten pole-vaulted by one of those controllable bollards going off at the wrong (right?) time, then it would be interesting. But driving into a bollard? That’s fucking bollocks, man.
The store i get my coffee (convenience/package store) has 4 bollards out front protecting a propane tank holding pen I have backed into each one in my plumbing van I always admitted it and the lady says “ohhhh don’t worry honey, thats what they’re for”
I’m assuming she did this on purpose for the clicks/the lulz/ whatever it is these “influencers” are after. There’s also the chance that she’s astronomically dense (“bank poles”???)…some people are just plain stupid.
To you and others thinking along the conspiracy/on purpose lines: never underestimate the bottom, it’ll always let you down.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
― George Carlin
This was a real eye-opener. Now I realize that when I backed into a bollard with my old wagon, I should have sued the NY DOT for putting in bollards to protect the hydrant. And the NYFD for putting the hydrant there.
And Hyundai for not giving me transparent rear seats and a sighting window in my hatch all the way down to the bumper.
Oh yeah, And Pizza Garden, for building their building too close to the bollards.
I don’t have a TikTok account because I am older than 30, so I was not sure what all the fuss was about banning it.
But now that I see the kind of hilarious shit that get posted there, there is no way we should ban it! It looks fantastic.
LOL that’s an expensive Altima 😛
I guarantee you it’s fake (well, not the hitting the bollard part, but her reaction to it). Creating videos with headlines/topics that infuriate people is an easy way to get views, she knew exactly what she was doing
Creating videos with headlines/topics that infuriate people is an easy way to get views, she knew exactly what she was doing
And to get insurance to pay for it.
…not when they see the video, that’s for sure.
I had one try to argue that a years-old photo of me crammed in a Cayman frunk that I posted to Oppo was proof that I hadn’t been injured by their driver, for Pete’s sake. They dig. And a viral video ain’t hard to find.
That was the other thing I found shocking here: why would you post this? It’s like begging for your insurance rates to go up.
Depends on coverage. That she hit a stationary object isn’t in question. The question is whether she did it intentionally or “accidentally”. The former isn’t covered, the latter might be depending on her policy and whether the company thinks a fight is worth the effort.
Of course this is speculation on my part. I haven’t even watched the video as I don’t want to be an enabler.
Insurance, by default, doesn’t wanna pay. Having (unfortunately) watched it, you betcha they’re going to argue this was intentional or find some other piece in the video to try to deny the claim.
YMMY. I’m sure if she’s denied she’ll be posting all about it. More clicks for her.
I think the real question is how much her rates get jacked from this if she’s not simply dropped altogether.
People like this driving cars like this are why I only want to put my kid in Volvos….
TikTok? Really? Are there really idiots using the ChiComms favorite infiltration tool? Good Lord how incredibly vapid and moronic can someone be? Using a degenerate app from the most degenerate people in the world….the Chinese Communist Party.
Time to screw that aluminum hat a little tighter. Wouldn’t want them to see you’re on to them, you know.
ROFL, that all you got? Yeah, the CCP is really a sweeet outfit after all and they are only out to spread sweetness and light all over the world!
It ain’t the Chinese Communist Party operating the NSA’s Utah Data Center:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
And that’s the one they let us know about…
So you think the CCP, who killed from the 1950s to now, is in the same league with the NSA? Please go stand in the corner, you are to fucking dumb for words.
Ooh snap! There goes your social credit score!
Just ask the Uyghurs how cool the CCP is……just the latest victims of a systems that has murdered MILLIONS since the 1950s.
China had a population of 550M when the CCP was founded. Now it has a population of over 1.4B. That system you so decry has created a LOT more people than it’s killed.
But sure I’ll ask an Uyghur, just as soon as you ask a Native American how well life in the USA is working out for them.
Got it, the 90 MILLION people that have been murdered under communism are not worth shit. What an incredibly racist thing to say. You are proving the fact that Marxists are either liars or morons, which are you? Well I guess you could qualify as a degenerate socialist. Using the Native Americans as a moral equivalence is very “Rules For Radicals” but does not fly. I imaging you think Hamas are just really mis-understood as well.
Red bait much?
“90 million murdered under communism”? You SURE about that number?
Even the Black Book of Communism *only* lists the death toll under communism in China at 65M and even then “Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, contributing authors to the book, criticized Courtois as obsessed with reaching a 100 million overall (all communism) total”.
Historian Andrzej Paczkowski wrote that “[s]ome critics complained that Courtois was ‘hunting’ for the highest possible number of victims, which led him, as J. Arch Getty wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, to include ‘every possible death just to run up the score.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
Not a ringing endorsement of accuracy.
So where DID you get that number?
That bollard just jumped outta nowhere, I’m certain.
Amateur. You can’t expect to win driving by hitting bollards.
I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. Can’t she just have her sugar daddy buy her a new one?
:HAIR TOSS:
There is only one thing worse thnt the current young people: old people pretending to be young. TikTok should have age verification: above 13, below 20.
I have already hit a bollard, and that was not that long ago, but I admit that was my and car’s huge blindspot fault.
Whether this is genuine or just an attention hungry person fishing for clout, this woman needs to put down her phone and never share any video with her in it again for the good of humanity overall, because she’s failed at life one way or another.
Everyday I come closer and closer to the conclusion the passenger car may have been a mistake. Let me tell you about a similar yellow pole. The Scourge of Central Maine: Auburn Walmart Pole. It’s a statewide meme about hitting this one specific pole in this one specific Walmart. Everyone with a Maine drivers license knows its there and people still hit the damn thing like every months. Its claimed an estimated 54-100 plus accidents. Walmart had to put up Jeresy Barriers to protect their bollard.
https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/local/lewiston-auburn/whats-up-with-the-auburn-walmart-pole-traffic/97-fec51927-bb20-4979-9e86-a2e7ad20faf3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY2maDmo8Kw
My conclusion is that the internet should never been released into the wild world thereby allowing it’s use by the vapid masses. It used to be restricted to universities and research establishments where equally moronic ‘professional’ pissing matches would occur. The difference was, it wasn’t published to billions as some sort of status and influence game.
Maybe this is the feminine version of that guy who destroys things for clicks. What’s his name? DumbassDiesel?
He should change it. Truth in advertising and all that.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
Huxley 4
Orwell 0
This is a very good, existentially awful, distressingly correct comment.
I fear that you’ve described a political tiktoker as clearly on display for the last decade or so.