If you’ve got a truck or a van, you can carry just about anything without too much fuss. Those of us with regular cars, though? Suddenly, when it’s time to haul lumber or shift mulch, we have to get creative. So I ask you—what’s the weirdest load you’ve hauled in a regular car?
I’m not talking folding chairs in the back of a Honda Accord, or a couple of coolers in the trunk of a Camry. I’m talking oddball, offbeat, strange—the kind thing that has the State Trooper pulling you over for a summons and an ear-bashing.
This question was spawned by the erudite Peter Viera, who spotted a great example online. I think we can all agree this was the result of a timber purchase gone duly awry. Who amongst us hasn’t been there?
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When Peter floated this idea, it appealed to me directly. Why? Because I’ve been in this exact situation, except a little stupider. Because I’m a car enthusiast.
See, once upon a time, I had my very own art studio. It was really cool! We were building our own stage, and it was my job to pick up the timber cladding. Surely enough, I popped into Bunnings (Home Depot but green), and laid down the cash for the boards. Only, when I got to the parking lot, I realized my mistake. I’d pulled up in my Miata, and there was no way they’d fit in the trunk.
I was on a deadline, and besides, I’m stubborn. If a job can be done, I’m gonna do it. Sketchiness be damned. I ended up going back inside. I had the boards cut in half, I bought a bunch of string, and I figured out a way to lash everything to the car with the roof down.
It was stupid in the extreme. The biggest problem was the taut strings running back and forth through the cabin, right in front of the driver’s seat. I had to thread myself in beneath the tangle, and I could barely shift for the ropes impeding my arms and legs. It was all a bit Entrapment, though I looked nothing like Catherine Zeta Jones.
It was like this.Â
What made it even sillier was that weeks before, I had a far better car to do the job. I’d used my Volvo 740 Turbo to pick up all the rest of the timber with ease. It even had a tow ball! Sadly, I’d sold it, so my roadster was forced into lumber duty.
Ultimately, I got away with my little gambit. I probably wouldn’t have tried it, but I was only going 3 miles down the road and it seemed like it would work. These days, I’m more reluctant to go for such Rube Goldberg antics.
That’s my silly story. Now it’s time to share yours. I’m disappointed we don’t have pictures in the comments, but I’ll ask nonetheless—what’s the weirdest load you’ve hauled in a regular car? Odder the better.
Image credits: author
The classic tale of plywood from Car Talk, the tappet brothers: https://youtu.be/Nnj6eu_LiuY?si=7L_4JAuxA3gK5gku
Things I carried in my 84 Camaro back in the day:
All four members of our string quartet, two violins, viola, cello, four music stands, four folding chairs.
Six dining chairs.
A load of 2x4s
A sheet of plywood cut in half and stacked.
Six people. Don’t ask about seat belts or legality….
I bought a steel garage workstation off Craigslist and got the whole shebang home in my 80-series Land Cruiser. The five smaller central cabinets and the workbench went on the floor of the truck, topped by one of the closet-sized end units poking about a foot and an half out of the lashed-down hatch. The other large end cabinet got strapped to the roof rack. Many, many ratchet straps and moving blankets were used that day.
I crammed some big stuff into my 93 Prelude when I moved into my first apartment. The most questionable was when I bought a few deck chairs and had to point the tops out the window while the legs crossed over the cabin and blocked the lower half of the shift pattern. Thankfully it was a short trip.
Restored, complete 1958 Lambretta 150cc Lambretta motor scooter in the back of a Toyota Tercel 4wd Wagon.
I treated my ’95 Corolla Wagon like a truck, hauling all the wood to resurface my front porch, a 10′ sugar maple tree, and the chopped up steel metal siding from my entire house that I tore down to the suds to insulate and rewindow.
My 2010 Honda Insight (think 2nd gen Prius in size and shape,) has only been treated a little better, including the time a shoved a mid-size upright freezer back there. Sure, I had to tie-down the hatch, but we made it.
My city offers free bark much, you haul. Not owning a pickup or a utility trailer, I couldn’t partake. But I had a Subaru- so I laid down the seats and tarped the whole rear interior of my Forester, tucking the tarp ends into the rear windows to form a bathub shape. Then I started shoveling in till it was almost full and drove slowly to home. The experiment worked. I only spent a half hour vacuuming dust out of the interior. This was the most Subaru thing I ever did with my Subaru – once.
A 4 post mahogany pineapple bed. Twin size. In my 1971 Alfa Spider. Same car that I skied with. I had snow tires and had to put the roof down to get my 205cm skis in it. Put it back up to drive.
I have a buddy that owns a funeral home he has several older Merc and BMW wagons and SUVs along with some Escalades. I know he used a lexas sedan once by using the trunk and folding down the seats. Several of them he accrued from his buddy who owns a pawn shop. He uses these to pick up the bodies. I once strapped a recliner on a roof of a early 00s mini that was fairly funny. The same mini we attached a futon to the roof at a different time. But I’ve been involved with the loading of some vehicles that you just have to laugh and say Ihope it holds after pleading them to stop loading stuff. Like full modern equivalent of Beverly hillbillies in a GMT800.
One of those quality table tennis (ping pong) tables that when folded up had a large space between the sides. I found a cardboard box that fit between them to not break the assembly and put the whole thing on top of my ’06 Prius sans a roof rack. I stuffed towels and whatnot to level out the load and proceeded to drive over two hours over some very twisty turny roads to the destination.
I have carried some very odd things on top of cars and trucks as well.
Not strange, but we did haul three 26 foot 8x8s on top of our ’64 F100 crewcab from Sacramento up to Lake Tahoe. I know I loaded a full yard of sand in that 5.5 fot bed at another time, but these were just overloads, not weird loads.
I had to get eight bales of hay from Tractor Supply to the movie theater I managed in my early twenties. This was before I had my pickup. What I did have was a 1997 Isuzu Rodeo. I folded down the rear seats, filled the interior with hay. The rest got stacked in the roof basket I had on top.
I trailed hay the whole way back downtown to the theater. I found hay in that damn thing for years.
A few years back, I needed a laundry drying rack for my new flat.
Surely that would fit in the Z4 trunk.
After failing to get my purchase in the back of the car, I tuened to the infinite cargo space that is a roof less passenger compartment.
It must have been looking weird to see a convertible with the top down and a drying rack poking above the top of the windshield by two feet.
A 7 1/2′ Flemish double harpsichord, with stand, in a Prius. Drove it to a city an hour and a half from here for rehearsals and a concert, then back.
We got an 8ft Christmas tree in the back, middle and front of my E90 330i. Back seats were folded down and the top of the tree poked through to the front between the driver and passenger. When we got it home and erected it we found it almost touched the ceiling. The car smelled nice for weeks after that.
I used to work for a sports store selling exercise equipment and table tennis tables. We sold one such table to a guy with a Volvo wagon. We wrestled the thing out to his car and noticed he didn’t have any roof racks – and there was no way he’d get it in the back (you couldn’t even get these things in the back of a large SUV). Not to worry, he said, he had these surfboard carrying things that sort of rested on the roof of the car. Despite our warnings, he insisted we slide the table up and *whump* the entire roof inverted. He didn’t seem worried at all though, just tied the table down and off he went. I sometimes wonder what happened when he got home and if he did any lasting damage to a $50,000 car in order to save on a $50 delivery fee.