Car Meets House

"There's a car in the kitchen!"

"You know, you never really know a car until you've driven it through a wall. This little baby did good!"

— Sam Axe, Burn Notice, "Devil You Know"

A comedy trope where someone drives a car straight into a building. It's usually designed to poke fun at the driver, either because they Drive Like Crazy, are too old or too young to drive, are driving The Alleged Car, have a wonky navigation system, or maybe just aren't paying attention. It doesn't always have to be a house, but it usually is, largely to get a comedic reaction out of the unfortunate inhabitants of said house.

It's almost always Played for Laughs, and more interestingly, with no lasting consequences; nobody gets hurt, nobody gets emotionally traumatized, the car usually stops right after crashing through the wall and thus minimizes the damage, and the house is usually right back to normal in the next episode. Compare this to Real Life, where driving a car into a building can cause serious and lasting damage to the driver, the car, the building's occupants, and the building itself. As always, Tropes Are Tools, and it can be Played for Drama with more realistic consequences, but unless it's done on purpose (and sometimes even then), it's usually difficult for the audience to take this trope seriously.

The trope was most pervasive in sitcoms in The '80s and '90s, but it's still common since then (if only because sitcoms have such a tendency to recycle each other's plotlines and tropes). That's another reason why it's so common to drive into a house — many sitcoms will mostly take place in such houses.

See also There Was a Door. If they hit people with the car, see Car Fu.

We need to start the Very Special Episode on drinking and driving, a common cause of Real Life cases where people drive their cars right into houses. It is also done by criminals who ram through the building they want to rob. To thwart this, some businesses with high-value merchandise set up strong concrete bollards in front.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A 2012-ish State Farm commercial features a former customer who has "just combined" his auto and home.
• One commercial shows a guy driving a Cool Car when his GPS tells him to turn right, and he does — plowing into a store. Only then does the GPS continue "...in 50 feet". This is why all Real Life GPS navigators tell you this distance first.
• The U.S. Department of Transport subverted this trope (and broke the fourth wall in the process) in a 1990s-era Public Service Announcement.

Anime & Manga

• Played With in Bleach's second chapter. Due to the unpredictable effects of Rukia's memory-eraser device, Ichigo's family thinks that the giant hole in their wall, which was put there by the Hollow Fishbone-D when it attacked them, was caused by a truck plowing into the house in the middle of the night:
  Isshin: What a miracle! A truck crashes into our house and nobody gets a scratch!
  Ichigo: (playing along) Double miracle, none of us even woke up!
  Karin: Some miracle. The jerk left us the repair bills. This family, geez...
• Played for Drama in Death Note, when Soichiro Yagami stops a TV station from broadcasting threats from the second Kira by driving a van through their front door. He had to do it that way, as the second Kira was watching the building and could kill Soichiro if he shows his face (which had already happened to the first guy to walk up to the building). There was remarkably little collateral damage, but the door was made of glass and he was driving a reinforced police van.
• Girls und Panzer: During the practice match against St Gloriana, one of Gloriana's Matilda II tanks crashes into a storefront after being outmaneuvered. In a twist, the shop owner is ecstatic about this outcome because it means he's going to be getting a big insurance payout for the damage.
• In GTO: The Early Years, Ryuji and Eikichi crash a car through the wall of Yokokawa's building to deliver the 100 million yen they owe him. They don't care about the Collateral Damage since they have an ace in the hole (an Embarrassing Old Photo).
• In Hetalia: Axis Powers, Germany did this once, according to Word of God, apparently because he is so confident in technology that he insisted on following the GPS instructions exactly.
• In Ino-Head Gargoyle, Shizuka drives a truck through the wall of Rin's office as part of her Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Lupin III:
  • In the Lupin III: Part II episode "Gorilla Tactics", Jigen and Goemon crash through a restaurant during a failed attempt to corral the gorilla's jeep.
  • In another Part II episode, "Zenigata Getcha into My Life", Zenigata crashes his jeep through Lupin's vacation home, leading to this gem in the English dub:
    Lupin: Uh, contrary to what you might've heard, my bedroom's NOT a drive-through.
  • In Lupin III: Crisis in Tokyo, Lupin crashes his car into the dentist's office where Jigen is having an appointment. They then proceed to drive the car out of the building, leaving through the front door.

Comic Books

• In The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Phineas builds a full-sized remote-control racing car and is running it through the city streets from the roof. Fat Freddy wants to play, but he crashes it straight through a bank. After Disney's Beagle Boys take the opportunity to ransack the place, the Freaks hide the car and leave town.
• In Superboy Volume 4, Knockout manages to throw a car at Silver Sword, miss, and have it crash right through the wall of the upper floor of the police station.
• Tintin:
  • In Tintin: Land of Black Gold, Thomson and Thompson accidentally crash a mosque's morning prayer service by driving their jeep through its wall while being asleep.
  • In Tintin: The Calculus Affair, Tintin drives a stolen tank to the Bordurian border, only to find the road blocked by heavy trucks and the border protected by anti-tank obstacles — so he drives the tank straight through the guardhouse.

Comic Strips

• At least one Garfield strip involved Odie driving Jon's car through his living room. Jon's chair (with Jon in it) ends up overturned.
• In one Zits strip, Jeremy manages to hydroplane the car while pulling it ten feet forward into the garage and puts it through the back wall of the garage.

Fan Works

• In the Discworld/The Big Bang Theory crossover The Many Worlds Interpretation, there is a scene where Sheldon, Penny, and supercomputer HEX (temporarily fritzed thanks to Sheldon) crash the Travelling Engine through the wall of a house in Lynwood, Long Island, in an almost exact replica of the trope's appearance on Everybody Loves Raymond (seen below). It turns out that HEX and Sheldon have interfered with the timeline, and when HEX fixes the timeline, only then do they find out that Frank and Marie would have crashed their own car through the wall anyway, a few minutes later. Hence the wall is a victim of the fate of Narrative Causality.
• Of Love and Bunnies has the Astro Megaship crashing into Adam and Tanya's front lawn during a Ranger Kegger. The space pirates who attack follow not long after (and proceed to get their butts kicked), while Andros begins to chase Zhane around (apparently he and Karone were, uh, "busy" when the pirates attacked).

Film — Animated

• Over the Hedge: As soon as Gladys thinks she's finally rid of the vermin that have ransacked her neighborhood, they return by hijacking the Verminator's van, ramping off a speed limit radar, and into her house.
• In Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay, Harley comes to the Squad's rescue by driving the RV through the wall of the strip club. Unfortunately for her, getting out is not quite so easy.
• Subverted in Turning Red. Ming pulls into the parking spot in front of the Daisy Mart so quickly, it appears for a moment that she's going to crash into it.

Films — Live-Action

• One of the earliest examples on film was 1924's Kid Speed, featuring Oliver Hardy. The title character accidentally reverses his racing car out of a garage and into the local sheriff's home.
• In The Three Stooges' Yes We Have No Bonanza from 1939, the title characters drive a car into a police station.
  • Later on, The Three Stooges Go Round the World in a Daze ends with the Stooges driving a police van through the wall of the Reform Club.
• Subverted in 28 Days, where a drunk Gwen does this and almost kills a child, leading to her being forced into rehab.
• A famous scene in 2012 has the protagonists drive a limo through a collapsing office building.
• In The A-Team, the interns of a mental institution are watching a 3-D Movie and see a humvee going into the camera — just as a real humvee crashes through the wall to rescue Murdock.
• In Airplane!, a miscommunication with an airport ground worker causes a Boeing 747 to wander straight into the terminal.
• In The Art of War, Neil Shaw realises a bomb has been planted in a cafeteria by someone who's just walked out. He drives his vehicle straight into it rather than waste time jumping out of his car.
• Ask a Policeman: When Dudfoot attempts the damage the Chief Constable's car so it will look like he's been in an accident, he starts the car, only to discover it is still in gear, and drives it straight through the window of Harbottle's shop.
• In Bank Shot, Ballentine drives the scraper into a barn in order to hide it. However, El has selected the wrong barn, and it is too small for the scraper. As a result, Ballentine demolishes the entire structure.
• In The Blues Brothers, the police chase the eponymous duo through a mall. Both the Brothers themselves and the police repeatedly drive into shops.
  Elwood: The new Oldsmobiles are in early this year!
• The Cannonball Run:
  • In the first movie, Mad Dog and Batman end up parking their truck in the hotel lobby, in the first instance of their "no brakes" Running Gag.
  • In the sequel, an old woman driving a car waves at the chimpanzee driving the limo. When the chimp flips her the bird in response, she does an insulting gesture with her arms, which causes her to lose control of her car as she takes both hands off the wheel, and it crashes into the shop of a gas station.
• The horror film The Car plays this trope straight, with the eponymous driverless Satanic vehicle plowing through a woman's house and killing her to avenge her earlier taunting it.
• In Cop or Hood, Cowboy Cop Stan Borowitz enters the house of Commissioner Bertrand's widowed wife by deliberately ramming his car (a Caterham Super Seven) into the living room's terrace doors.
• In the opening scene of The Dark Knight, the Joker orders his driver to crash the getaway bus through the front entrance of the bank (in reverse, no less), with the specific intent of killing off the last of the other robbers. It works, and the bus is somehow still in good enough condition after this to drive away from the scene of the crime.
• In Death Machines, the assassination of one of Mr. Gioletti's men involves smashing a truck right into the restaurant where he's eating.
• Dick Tracy vs. Cueball: While chasing Cueball from The Dripping Dagger, Pat—who is recovering from yet another Tap on the Head—drives his police car into a shopfront.
• In Eyes of Laura Mars, Laura drives into a warehouse in a failed attempt to stop Donald's murder.
• Freebie and the Bean: One Chase Scene ends with Freebie and Bean's car flying off the Embarcadero Freeway and smashing into the apartment of a very confused elderly couple.
• An extreme example occurs in Galaxy Quest, where the detached bridge of the NSEA Protector, arriving from space, crashes through a convention center parking lot and stops right on the stage of the ongoing Galaxy Quest convention. True to form, nobody is hurt.
• The Great Muppet Caper, Beauregard the cab driver plows into the lobby of the Happiness Hotel. Although in this case, it was purely intentional. And his idea of a U-turn is going straight through into the kitchen.
  Beauregard: What's your room number?
  Kermit: What?
  Fozzie: I don't know, but we're on the second floor.
  Beauregard: Oh, I'm sorry. I can only take you as far as the lobby.
• In High School U.S.A., when J.J.'s crew are preparing to modify J.J.'s car, they are waiting for Crazy Leo to arrive with a big engine. Leo arrives by driving a bus through the wall of the warehouse.
• Seen with a small plane and a restaurant in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
• James Bond:
  • In The Spy Who Loved Me, the car carrying Jaws and his goons in hot pursuit of Bond's Lotus Esprit ends up down a cliff and crashing through the roof of a small house. The car explodes, but Jaws just walks out through the door, dusting himself off.
  • In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond returns a rental car by driving it by remote control through the windows of the storefront.
• Johnny English parodies the scene from The Spy Who Loved Me with a car chase featuring a Lotus. In this case, they barrel through a department store, leading to some visual gags as many fragile things are knocked over and bystanders jump out of the way. And it finishes the same way, but the goon drivers are not so resilient.
• Jumanji: Alan drives Carl's police cruiser into the Sir Sav-a-Lot to save Sarah, Judy and Peter from Van Pelt. It's not his fault though — the car had been damaged earlier and is shown to have been leaking brake fluid.
• Last Action Hero has Jack Slater driving a huge 4x4 truck into the Big Bad's ocean-view mansion.
• In the first Lethal Weapon movie, Joshua drives a car through Murtaugh's front window in an attempt on his life. Played for Drama, in that the repairs are going on for the rest of the movie, and later movies reference how much work had to be done.
• Seen in The Lost Boys as part of a Big Damn Heroes moment, heralded by the car's horn playing "La Cucaracha".
• Happens twice with one house in Malibu's Most Wanted:
  Tec: Doesn't anyone know where the goddamn driveway is!?
• In Money Movers, Eric surprises a group of car thieves in a car showroom by driving the patrol car through the plate glass window and onto the showroom floor.
• The climax of Mr. Nice Guy has Jackie Chan's character, finally fed up with everything, drive a vehicle through the villain's house. Given that the house was made largely of glass and the vehicle in question was an enormous earth mover, the "car" won that fight.
• In Once Upon a Spy, Valorium's minions gain access to the NASA lab to steal the X-2 supercomputer by driving a semi-trailer straight through the wall.
• In One Week, Buster Keaton and his wife build a house from a kit, then learn it's on the wrong lot, so they tow it with their car. It gets stuck over a railroad track as a train is approaching — they duck for cover and watch as the train goes over a switch and runs past the house. Just as they're sighing with relief, another train coming the other way plows through it.
• Seen in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, with a burned-out car and a motel room.
• In Pulp Fiction, Vincent drives straight into Lance's house, as a result of his panic over Mia being about to die.
• Black Comedy movie Rough Night has this happen in the climax, with one of the protagonist's boyfriends doing this to meet his girlfriend who he thought was planning to dump him, as a gesture of true love which came upon him while high as a kite. It also results in an Accidental Hero moment when he runs over a gunman who was going to kill his girlfriend and co.
• Scavenger Hunt (1979): During the car chase, Jackson misses a turn the other vehicles make and instead drives the limo through the glass window of a showroom, and then out the window on the other side to rejoin the chase.
• Silver Streak climaxes with a train crashing into Chicago's Union Station.
• Sunburn (1979) opens with Thoren's blackmailers in a restaurant, wondering when he'll show up and pay them. Suddenly Thoren's car smashes into the restaurant and bursts into flame, killing him.
• Seen in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, when Ricky Bobby is re-learning how to drive.
• In Taxi, Emilien keeps failing his driving test because he does this every time.
• Terminator:
  • In The Terminator, the Terminator starts his epic rampage through the police station by crashing a car through the front desk.
  • It seems to be a Running Gag that Once an Episode, whoever says "I'll be back" will come back by driving a vehicle into the relevant building. Crashing through the structure is optional. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, after telling Sarah and John Connor, "Stay here, I'll be back", he proceeds to walk past a SWAT team, procure a van, and drive right to where he had left the Connors, before telling them to get in.
• Twister:
  • The two main characters drive their truck through a house during the climactic storm chase. They had little choice, though, what with the tornado dragging the house out onto the road right in front of them.
  • One of the tornadoes also picks up a station wagon and slams it into the side of a service garage where the protagonists are taking cover.
• Played with in When in Rome: In one key scene, several men are driving in a tiny car and drive into a museum, straight through the front door, drive around inside, and even go up in the elevator, while not damaging anything at all.
• Whitewash: Six months ago, Bruce drunkenly crashed his snowplow into a Chicken King, resulting in him losing his license for three years. He is now broke, as snowplow driving was his livelihood.
• In The World According to Garp, as Garp and his wife are being shown a prospective house by a realtor, they notice a Cessna-style plane heading towards them, barely clearing the other houses in the neighborhood, before it slams into the house they're in. After they check that the pilot was all right, Garp immediately wants to buy the place. His wife starts to object, but he says that the odds of a second plane hitting the house are astronomical and that they'd be safe there.

Literature

• In Animorphs, Marco steals a tank and doesn't know what to do with it after he's done, so he parks it in the space of the enemy Chapman's house. Chapman had gotten to be something of a Butt-Monkey by this point.
  Marco: You know Chapman's house? Nice two-story.
  Jake: (sighs) How many stories is it now?
  Marco: Uh, zero?
• Played for horror in Stephen King's Christine, as the title car kills a character in this manner. It helps that Christine has the machine version of a Healing Factor.
• In Eye of a Fly, a car smashes into a corner pet store, destroying the cheaply-made building and killing a family that lives on the second floor.
• In Save the Enemy, Zoey fails to break into a house through the window, so she instead drives a car through the locked door.

Live-Action TV

• Happens on 2 Broke Girls to Max and Caroline's cupcake shop, right after they sold it.
• The A-Team episode "Pros and Cons" has Hannibal, BA, and Murdock drive a car into a police station as part of a plan to get themselves arrested.
• Done intentionally at least twice in Burn Notice:
  • The season 1 finale has Michael crash his brother's truck through a warehouse wall in order to rescue Fiona from drug smugglers. Michael narrates that when doing this, you should aim for an area with windows because there aren't any load-bearing beams there.
  • The season 3 finale has Fiona drive her car through a small-time arms dealer's wall into his living room with the express intent of scaring the shit out of him.
• Seen in Chuck, complete with Chuck comprehensively mocking Casey's one-liner.
• In the pilot of Common Law, Wes drives his car through the window of a gas station where his partner is having a shoot-out with some robbers.
• This has happened multiple times on Coronation Street, including a broken-down lorry crashing into a recently converted garage (and exposing a dead body hidden in the concrete), and a Metrolink tram falling off a viaduct and into the local corner shop.
• In an episode of Cougar Town, a car goes through Jules' office.
• Has happened in the past in Coupling:
  Steve: What, in a relationship, is the worst thing to come through your front door?
  Patrick: A Volkswagen.
• CSI featured a variant where the car crashed into a restaurant and killed several people.
• On DIY Network's Disaster House, a show all about doing horrible damage to a house before showing how to repair it, their last stunt saw them try to damage the house by placing a garbage truck on the roof. The truck weighed about 20 tons, and despite being lowered slowly on the roof by a crane, it fell clean through. Then an insurance agent told them the damage was so severe that it would be cheaper to just bulldoze the house and build a new one. This basically was the end of the series.
• In the Doctor Who minisode "Space", when Rory explains how bad a driver Amy is:
  Rory: I let her drive my car once.
  Amy: Yeah, to the end of the road.
  Rory: Where, according to Amy, there was an unexpected house.
• In Dog, a burning car once drove into a cafe with a decapitated corpse inside in the main character's eyes.
• An episode of Emergency! involved a car driving through the front wall of a restaurant.
• In Entourage, Andrew Klein pulls the rarer "on purpose" scenario to get back at his wife after she burned the notes he needed for an important business meeting.
• On ER, not two seconds after a pizza delivery guy calls the hospital to inform them that he's been shot and is driving himself in, his car crashes through the front doors of the hospital.
  Tag: Did somebody order a pizza?
  (Opening credits)
  Doug: [(To the desk clerk) Jerry, call security. Someone's in my spot.
• Seen in Everybody Loves Raymond, as an aging Frank and Marie crash their car into Ray and Debra's living room, with the rest of the episode discussing how old is too old to still be driving. Fridge Horror sets in when you realize that the car flattened their couch — where they had been sitting just seconds earlier.
• On an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition the group helps rebuild and repair the home of a family that had the living room and the front of the house destroyed after a drunk driver crashed into it. Ty's "special project" for the episode was to rebuild and restore an antique curio cabinet on the far side of the living room that was smashed by the car.
• Seen in Family Matters, after Eddie fails his driving test but takes a girl out for a drive anyway. A bread truck comes into his view, he panics, and he swerves right into his own house.
  Carl: Harriette, THERE IS A CAR IN THE LIVING ROOM!!!
• On Full House:
  • In "Honey, I Broke the House", a grade-school-age Stephanie drives Joey's car into the kitchen after deducing that the "R" on the gearshift must mean "Radio":
    Michelle: There's a car in the kitchen!
  • "The Apartment" has a cement truck backing up, again into the kitchen, spilling the wet cement all over.
  • In Fuller House a now adult Stephanie drives Joey's (lookalike replacement) car into the kitchen. Her youngest nephew then caps off this riotous callback by delivering Michelle's line. Joey states he already has a third identical car waiting at home for him in Vegas, which he will not be bringing to San Francisco any time soon.
• On the The Good Guys, Dan drives a car through a wall in two episodes. Both times it was not going very fast, and the first time he placed a weight on the gas pedal so he would not be behind the wheel. He also only did it because Jack was about to get killed inside and he needed a big distraction fast.
• A Happy Days episode has Marion forgetting to set her car's parking brake, causing it to roll down a hill and crash into Arnold's diner.
• The Season 7 finale of House has House driving his car into his ex-girlfriend/boss's house, all because of a bad breakup. Very definitely Played for Drama, and leads to Cuddy's permanent departure from the show and House going to prison. The fallout from this stunt has a massive negative impact on House for the rest of the series.
• In Knight Rider, Michael uses KITT's Turbo boost to jump into an apartment building.
• In an episode of London's Burning, Vaseline is more interested in the couple kissing in his back seat than driving, and promptly crashes the car into someone's lounge.
  Vaseline: Did the earth move for you, too?!
• In Miami Vice, Tubbs busts a televangelist's wife as she's trying to buy drugs. She tries to drive away but smashes her Mercedes into a TV shop, where Tubbs sees her singing on TV.
• A skit on the '50s comedy show My Favorite Year sees a car crash deliberately through a paper wall.
• Played for Drama in NCIS: Los Angeles, where the Victim of the Week is a soldier who was killed when someone deliberately drove his car into a nightclub.
• In the The New Avengers episode "Three-Handed Game", an amnesiac agent desperate to find his way back to Steep crashes his motorbike through the window of Steed's living room.
• Night Court: In a first season episode, a tabloid reporter tried to find some dirt on Judge Harry Stone and uncovered evidence that he had a police record. Stone admitted that once as a teen he "knocked over a liquor store."
  Liz Williams: You mean armed robbery?
  Harry: No, I knocked it over. With a car.
• In the Odd Squad episode "Undercover Olive", Otto and Oscar, with the help of Orson (the driver), come to Olive's rescue by driving an ice cream van through the wall of the warehouse where the villains' Rock–Paper–Scissors competition is being held.
• In Passions, Ivy Crane drives her car through the front doors of the church to stop the double wedding of Ethan, Theresa, Luis, and Sheridan.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch: The first episode of Season 2 ends with Sabrina diverting a pair of trains to prevent them from colliding- only for one of them to end up crashing through the wall into the Spellman family living room, destroying the piano in the process.
• A subversion on Seinfeld, as Estelle is pulling the car into the garage, where it belongs. But seeing as how Frank has set up his office there to sell computers, it has the same effect.
• A Silver Spoons episode had Ricky crash into the mansion when his grandfather, played by John Houseman, gave him an illicit driving lesson. Houseman then had to explain himself to his horrified son.
  Edward Stratton II: Those who can't do, teach. I can't... I taught... we crashed.
• Technically hotel instead of house, but done in The Suite Life of Zack & Cody with new driver London.
• In the pilot episode of Supernatural, Sam rams the Impala into the abandoned home of the Woman In White. Dean was not pleased.
• One Thank God You're Here scenario had the stand-up parachuted in as a yobbish driver who had just crashed through the wall of a house. This was the first episode where the contestant had to enter through somewhere other than the side doors; the catchphrase for that episode became "Thank God you're alive!" The flat he'd crashed into was supposed to be on the third floor — sadly, the British version omitted this line from the broadcast, but the Australian version kept it intact.
• Top Gear, being about idiots driving cars, has seen this happen on occasion:
  • Jeremy Clarkson once did this without even driving — he lost control of a car he was pushing and sent it into a small shed. No lasting harm was done, though Richard Hammond may have sprained something laughing.
  • In another episode, they deliberately drove a Toyota Hilux through a shed as part of a series of tests to see how much abuse the truck could take before it stopped working. The collision didn't do any significant amount of damage.
• Two and a Half Men has Walden's ex-wife Bridget drive into his living room after she finds out he's seeing someone new.
• In Wings, Helen does this deliberately to Joe's office — twice.
• Several such clips are featured on World's Dumbest..., usually a result of the offender being drunk or fleeing from the police. Or both.

Music

• C. W. McCall: The last verse of "Wolf Creek Pass" ends when the flatbed truck that McCall's character is a passenger in, and which the driver has lost control of, crashes into the side of a feed store.
• In the Garth Brooks song "Papa Loved Mama", this is how Papa killed Mama and her lover:
  The picture in the paper showed the scene real well;
  Papa's rig was buried in the local motel.
  The desk clerk said he saw it all real clear;
  He never hit the brakes and he was shifting gears!
• The Magnetic Fields song "Irma" ends with the title character's father driving his Jeep through the wall.
• Happens in the Slugbug song Australia (Land of Magnets):
  When I tried to drive my car to get some food I backed into my living room, I'm in Australia!

Music Video

• In P!nk's "There You Go", the climax features her jumping off her motorcycle as it crashes into her ex-boyfriend's window, then she flips him off and rides away with her new man. It was her debut and successfully got the point across that she was not your older sister's pop star.

Puppet Shows

• Sesame Street:
  • One old Muppet skit has Cookie Monster as a contestant on the game show "Beat the Time", where if he can think of three things that rhyme with "rain", he wins a cookie. It culminates in a train plowing right into the studio.
  • In one "Kermit at Home" sketch, Oscar the Grouch installs a "Bus Stop" sign in Kermit the Frog's living room, which results in the Grouch Bus plowing its way to the newly minted bus stop.

Radio

• In the 25th anniversary episode of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, in a spot intended to make fun of Tim Brooke-Taylor's sitcom career, Graeme and Bill drive straight into Tim's house in their efforts to recruit him.
  "Funny! I never noticed that car before."

Video Games

• One of the pre-release videos for Cyberpunk 2077 features a flying garbage truck that crashed into the upper floor of a suburban house.
• World of Tanks has small buildings on many maps that you can drive straight through. Subverted on some maps, though, which mix them with indestructible buildings — and there are no significant visual cues to let you distinguish between the two until you drive into or shoot one.

Webcomics

• In Think Before You Think, Julia drives a car into building in a flashback.

Western Animation

• The first episode of Alf Tales has Alf crash his car through Orbit Guard Headquarters.
  Sergeant Staff: Look what you did to my building!
  Alf: Look what your building did to my car!
• In the Chowder episode "Gazpacho!", Lemon drives a snail bus through the wall of an arboretum.
• Darkwing Duck:
  • In one episode, Gosalyn and Darkwing switching bodies leads to this happening.
  • In "Darkly Dawns the Duck", Launchpad crashes the Ratcatcher and a car through the walls of the prison and Gosalyn's orphanage, respectively.
• Fairly OddParents:
  • In one episode, Timmy wishes to be the most wanted boy in the world, only for the bus driver to crash into his kitchen in a desperate bid for his attention.
  • In another episode, Timmy's dad drives the station wagon into the living room:
    "Hey, who moved the couch into the garage?"
• Family Guy:
  • In one episode, a drunken Stewie crashes Brian's car into the front of The Drunken Clam.
  • In "Chick Cancer", a car crashes into the Kool-Aid Man's house, and the Kool-Aid Man suddenly realizes how annoying that is.
  • In "To Love and Die In Dixie", Peter and Brian crash their General Lee-ized station wagon into the house provided by the Witness Protection Program.
  • In "Da Boom", Peter comments that he loves going to parties at other people's houses because he doesn't have to clean up after himself there. Cut to Peter driving intentionally into someone's house.
  • In "Not All Dogs Go To Heaven", when word gets out that Brian is an atheist, he gets a brick through the window — followed by a car.
    Brian: I thought only he without sin could cast the first Prius.
• Futurama:
  • A de-aged Leela and Fry get into a hoverboat drag race with some mutants. Leela wins, but because of her small size, she can't reach the handbrake and ends up crashing into the mutant high school.
    Teacher: (unperturbed) That's detention.
  • In one episode, Leela flies the Planet Express ship directly into a giant advertising screen — exactly like she does in the show's opening credits. Fry comments that this is the second time this week she's done that.
• In The Powerpuff Girls (1998) episode "Just Desserts" The Smith family do this with their mini-van-turned-supervillain-mobile chasing the girls and the professor throughout the Utonium house.
• In the Regular Show "Benson Be Gone", Mordecai and Rigby do this with a limo, on the second story of the house, without a ramp.
• In the Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated episode "Mystery Solvers Club State Finals", Principal Quinlan gets into her office by driving Speed Buggy through the wall. Fortunately for her, it's a Fever Dream Episode.
• Happens a few times in The Simpsons:
  • In "Rosebud", Homer refuses to return Mr. Burns' long-lost teddy bear and comments that they don't need Burns' money anymore, because they're already financially sound. Cue Abe driving the car into their house.
  • In "Baby You Can't Drive My Car", Homer accidentally crashes his car into Burns' office.
  • In "Mr. Spritz Goes To Washington", a plane crashes into the Simpsons' house.
  • In "To Surveil With Love", as Lisa preaches that no one should give in to stereotypes like "old people can't drive", Abe crashes into the school.
    Abe: This building got in my way!
  • A flashback in "The Old Man and the Key" shows that Abe lost his license when he drove into a whale's tank at a marine theme park.
    Abe: Is this the Dairy Queen?
  • In one of the show's Crossover Punchline Couch Gags, Rick and Morty's spaceship crashes into the Simpsons household, killing the family in the process.
  • In "Realty Bites", Snake fights Homer to retake his car after it got auctioned off, and they lose track of where they are before they crash into the "Murder House", with Chief Wiggum, who was pursuing them, also crashing into it, destroying the house in the process.
• The South Park episode "Grey Dawn" was about the danger of elderly drivers and saw the boys chased through a house, serial-killer style, by a barrage of old people crashing their cars into the building. One of them shows up on the second floor.
• In SpongeBob SquarePants, SpongeBob does this practically every time he drives a boat outside the confines of the boating school. In one episode, when all the citizens of Bikini Bottom mysteriously disappear, SpongeBob makes his own driver's license and starts driving, crashing his boat into his own house several times.
• Thomas & Friends did this, naturally, with trains:
  • In "A Close Shave", the troublesome trucks push Duck and cause him to crash into a barber shop.
  • In "Thomas Comes To Breakfast", Thomas crashes into the stationmaster's house:
    The stationmaster's wife: You miserable engine! Just look what you've done to our breakfast! Now I shall have to cook some more!
• Brock Sampson from The Venture Brothers has done this intentionally on more than one occasion. Hank did it once by accident, but while driving Brock's car.

Real Life

• It's Truth in Television, but only to a point — when this happens in Real Life, the consequences are serious and often deadly:
  • In 2009, a driver in Nevada got drunk and tried to kill his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend this way. Unfortunately for him, he got the wrong house and landed his car on top of a couple who were sleeping in bed. Miraculously enough, the mattress was able to keep the car from crushing them, and their only injuries were burns from the engine.
  • San Diego socialite Betty Broderick, after a bitter fight with her estranged husband — who had sold their home without her knowledge or consent — drove her car through the front door of the new home that he shared with his mistress. They wound up uninjured.
  • Ram raiding is a weaponized form of this trope where a robber deliberately crashes their car into a storefront, steals the merchandise, and drives right back out. Some storefronts have put up short concrete barricades or bollards on the sidewalk to prevent this from happening.
  • An elderly woman in Northern Ireland had a van plow into her kitchen window. She luckily escaped with only minor glass injuries.
  • In 2018, a man in Dallas drove his truck into the local Fox affiliate's building, having previously loaded his truck with flyers detailing the conspiracy theories he wanted the media to share. Mercifully, no one was injured, and he was swiftly arrested.
• It can be even worse when it happens to trains:
  • The 1895 Montparnasse crash saw a steam locomotive plow into the main concourse of the Gare de Montparnasse in Paris.
  • The 1953 Pennsylvania Railroad trainwreck happened when a locomotive plowed into the main concourse of Union Station in Washington, D.C.. Fortunately, no one was killed, although 43 people were injured (six seriously).
  • In 1982, some teenagers threw a switch in New Jersey, sending a Conrail commuter train crashing into a factory, killing the engineer.
  • The 2016 Hoboken train crash saw a New Jersey Transit train, whose driver was asleep at the controls, back into the concourse of the Hoboken Terminal.
• But sometimes, when people don't get hurt (and sometimes even when they do), it's just funny enough to be News of the Weird:
  • Older Than Radio: This was how Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot's prototype steam-driven car was involved in the very first recorded automobile accident in 1771. Despite the car's top speed being a whopping two miles per hour, it was also big and unwieldy and managed to seriously damage a wall when it crashed through a French military building. The damage was probably even worse to Cugnot's reputation — the French army declined to commission the prototype, and Cugnot eventually died broke and in exile.
  • One car in Saxony, Germany crashed through the roof of a church, seven meters above the ground, after flying for 37 meters.
  • A 44-ton truck crashed into a house in Missoula, Montana, but no one was injured. The clip was shown in Britain on Police Stop! 7.
  • The Jordan's Furniture store in Natick, Massachusetts parodies the Blues Brothers example with a large animatronic Mardi Gras attraction that includes a car popping through the wall.
  • Subverted in a particularly strange example emanating from Fresno, California, in which a car gets involved in a wreck and winds up landing perfectly on the roof of an apartment building. Fresno being Fresno, the first question the locals had was whether the car was stolen. (It was.)
  • This once happened to The White House itself — in spite of the government having long since put up barricades to prevent this from happening, someone managed to do this anyway, drunkenly arriving from a late-night party. It happened to be the Secret Service.
  • The driver of a flatbed truck with a car on it was messing around with cell phones and drove off the road, sideswiped a house, and ended up in the backyard pool, as described here.
  • In 2008, after being told to turn down his music (and, he later claimed, hearing voices in his head), a man told police in Wichita, Kansas that he was going to drive his car into City Hall. Several hours later, he made good on his threat, making it all the way through the building, ending up (fittingly) in the building's parking garage, where he was arrested. No one was injured.
• During a tour of England with The Who, Keith Moon and his driver arrived at a hotel in his Rolls Royce. They stopped out front and were unloading their bags when they were told they couldn't park there. Keith then drove the car right through the front of the hotel, up to the front desk. He then got out, tossed the keys to the shocked desk clerk, and asked "Could you have somebody park that, please?"
• One of the families who appeared on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition had their old house crashed into by a car.
• Such stories appear on occasion on the web series What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?. In fact, there was a time when "Car Meets Pizza Parlor" was common enough to inspire running gags and conspiracy theories.
• When Citytv Toronto was based at 299 Queen Street West in the early '90s, they embedded their original CityPulse LiveEye news truck (which at that point had been retired, then rescued after being accidentally sent to a scrapyard) into a wall (making it appear as though it was bursting out of the wall) as a work of art dubbed "Breaking News". They even rigged it so the front wheels still spun. It's still there even today, though Bell Media redecoed it to bear CP24 insignia (CP24 being a 24-hour local news channel; CTV/Bell had to sell Citytv to Rogers but kept the rest of CHUM Limited, so they had to redeco it).
• The dramatic bus crash in Shipley, West Yorkshire in 2018. Just after noon, a First bus crashed full-on into an optician's shop front, to the point where it was over halfway inside. Amazingly the shopkeeper had gone out to lunch five minutes earlier and those on board the bus were unharmed (albeit shaken up). Naturally, once the shock had gone, it led to a lot of "Should have gone to Specsavers" jokes.
• In Airborne Armour, about the glider-borne 6th Airborne Armour Regiment which fought in Normandy and the Rhine crossings, author Keith Flint writes of a case in 1943 when a glider carrying a (very small) tank crashed, hurling the tank into a house a hundred yards away. The tank - and its crew, riding inside! - survived.
• This is the reason why some people will hang a ball from a string attached to their garage's ceiling right over where their car's windshield will be in order to avert this trope.

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