There Was Only Ever One Recorded Wreck Between A Car And A Submarine

I’ll admit, I’m by no means the first to talk about this; in fact, for whatever reason, this story seems to have gotten a bit more traction lately, showing up on Instagram posts and Facebook feeds in the past couple weeks though I have no idea exactly why. I suspect that one of these accounts found it from one of the many other times it has been posted and re-posted it, and, really, am I doing anything that different? I’m not.

But, somehow I’d never heard of this event, which leads me to think that perhaps there’s other people out there who have also been in the dark about this remarkable event, so why not do a Cold Start about it? It’s just one of those things that’s fun to know. So, with that in mind, here’s what you should know:

On August 19, 1961, in Lysekil, Sweden, a harbor town, a driver of a Volvo PV544 parked in a slightly inclined parking lot and underestimated the incline. This underestimation led to an act of angular and gravitational hubris, not setting the parking brake. As a result, the Volvo began to roll down the parking lot towards the harbor, where it eventually rolled off the edge of the harbor and crashed into the bow of the HSwMS Bävern (that means “beaver” in Swedish), a Hajen-class submarine.

That’s how the only car-submarine wreck in history happened.

Interestingly, the Bävern was built by Saab Kockums AB (part of Saab AB) which is, as you may have guessed, part of the company that once built Saab cars, so in some ways this was just another Volvo/Saab wreck, which happened all the time in Sweden.

The reason there’s such a great picture of the wreck is because Hans Johansson, the editor of a newspaper called Kuriren, just happened to be there to see it, and happened to have a camera with him, which is why we have this fantastic photograph of the wreck:

As you can see, that un-piloted Volvo smacked pretty hard into that submarine, which, I should add, was legally parked. The Volvo appears to have taken damage to its bumper, fenders, grille, and probably lost a headlight and indicator on the side we can’t see, too. There may have been radiator damage, even.

The submarine suffered a broken lower railing. It’s not mentioned how insurance handled this? Did the Swedish Navy file a claim with the Volvo owner’s insurance? Was the harbor on the hook for their clearly inadequate protections against rolling cars?

As an aside, I’ve always liked the Volvo 444/544 series. They were interestingly archaic-looking cars, at least in their later years, built between 1947 and 1965. They were rugged and surprisingly engaging to drive, and even had a good bit of motorsports successes, and defined a lot about what we think of Volvo to this day.

I always had thought the template for the 444/544 was something like a later-’40s Ford, but the car that Volvo got to study before building their first unibody car was a bit more unexpected: the Hanomag 1.3.

This was actually Hanomag’s last car, and was reasonably successful, introduced in 1939 as a pre-emptive competitor to the upcoming KdF-Wagen, which we know as the Volkswagen Beetle. Soon Hanomag had to convert to wartime production, and never made it back to building passenger cars after the war.

But, they did inspire Volvo when they were designing the 444/544, so that’s something!