Man Crashes Car in Church Attic

A German driver accidentally became a very good stunt man on Monday, when he managed to plunge his automobile into a church roof in the eastern part of the country. That's not to say the church was somehow buried and the Skoda vehicle simply rolled passed it. The roof was standing 7 meters (22 feet) tall, like a roof should, and at safe 35-meter (roughly 110 feet) distance away from the motorway. However, these distances, which would normally be enough to ensure that nothing bearing four wheels ends up in the attic, proved to be thoroughly insufficient yesterday.

According to the police, the car was going very fast on the highway, and at some point the driver simply missed a turn and ran out of the road. His car came across a bank, which acted like a catapult, and threw the still-fast-moving vehicle 7 meters high and 35 meters in length. Most likely, it took about two seconds for this “test flight” to complete, and the vehicle then thumped to a halt, jammed in the wood beams of the religious building.

The driver was extracted via crane, and transported to the nearest hospital. According to paramedics, he suffered multiple injuries, and no one would say what his chances were. The police managed to tear the car down from the church wall in the end, and is now conducting a thorough investigation, to figure out exactly what drove the vehicle so much distance in length, while in the air.

“We've never ever had a case of a car landing in a church before,” Frank Fischer, a spokesman for Chemnitz police in the German state of Saxony, overtly expressed his amazement. He added that initial damage estimates were somewhere around 10,000 euros ($13,000), but that the costs for fixing the church had not yet been thought through.

Road safety in Germany is very high, and authorities are usually going out of their way to ensure that routes are in impeccable condition. Accidents such as this one, where vehicles leave the road, are fairly rare and usually harmless. Most severe accidents on German roads occur due to high speeds, and are commonly accompanied by a large death toll.