Grand Cherokee

Make
Jeep
Segment
SUV

As someone who has knocked a shifter out of park and rolled helplessly into the street as a boy, I sympathize with the driver of this Jeep Grand Cherokee that crashed into a building in Wisconsin. Sturgeon Bay Police responded to the crash on Wednesday at the Pearl of Door County art museum. The driver was a dog.

The vehicle's owner claims that he parked his Jeep at the gas station while he went across the street to the bakery. When he returned, his car was already crashed into the building. It was Callie, his 5-year-old Australian shepherd.

Our first thought is that the car was obviously left running. Old cars and manual cars can be knocked out of gear with the ignition off, but modern cars cannot. They have a shifter lock for just such a thing. They also have special procedures, should you need to get your car out of park if you're unable to start it. On the Jeep, for instance, there's a little spot in the armrest box that you have to jam a screwdriver into. Additionally, the off-roader company should be especially cognizant of that considering it changed all of its shifters after the tragic death of actor Anton Yelchin.

Even when the car is running, you usually have to press a button to move the gear selector (or the brake) so either this dog has grown opposable thumbs, or he's just a really smart pup.

"It's not every day that a dog drives a Jeep across traffic and right into your business!" Pearl of Door County said in a Facebook post. No one was injured in the crash, thankfully, and we're guessing Callie will have to do one of those driver improvement classes to get her license back.

The damage doesn't look bad, and luckily this happened here in the US, where Jeeps have reasonable prices. Side note to that, we wonder if insurance will cover this?

This was certainly an accident, unlike our story from last year, early in the pandemic, where a man taught his pit bull how to drive during a high-speed police chase. We're guessing the cops and the county weren't as jovial in that accident.