Crashing Out At The Detroit Airport Is Understandable, But Actually Crashing Into It Is Still Inadvisable

Air travel can be incredibly stressful, and it's understandable that you might get frustrated, but no matter how close you are to missing your flight, Jalopnik's official position is that you should not crash your car into the airport. Sure, you might be tempted, but you should resist that temptation. We'd also like to think that would be obvious, but ClickOnDetroit reports someone did exactly that on Friday night at the Detroit airport. 

While airports usually place bollards to prevent something like this from happening, the driver reportedly crashed through the front doors and into the area that Delta Air Lines uses for check-ins and bag checks. Thankfully, the driver didn't kill anyone when they crashed their car into the airport, but the Wayne County Airport Authority did say in a statement that the fire department treated six people at the scene of the crash. According to a statement from the WCAA, authorities also arrested the driver but still had yet to determine the cause of the crash. 

Even though the crash happened several days ago, information remains limited. The Detroit Free Press reports that several videos posted on social media appear to show a man wearing a Detroit Lions jersey being taken into custody, but it can't confirm whether he was the driver who crashed into the airport. Hopefully, we'll learn more in the next couple of days. 

Initial reports also described the driver's car as a Mercedes-Benz S-Class, but upon closer inspection, it appears to instead be a much less expensive C-Class. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't even a particularly fancy C-Class and would be willing to bet it's nothing more than a C300. If you're scrambling to escape a car crashing into the building you assumed you'd be safe inside, that probably doesn't matter to you all that much, at least in the moment, but as a transportation site, it's still important for us to point out. The facts matter, you know? 

Also, while I can't imagine anyone at Mercedes is thrilled to see one of its cars in the news after someone drove it into an airport, on a certain level, you have to imagine the design team is pleased a C-Class got confused with an S-Class. After all, that's the whole reason the C-Class looks like a smaller S-Class, right? Same sausage, different length? It's not like a car with a roughly $40,000 base price could ever be considered cheap, but at the time, a new S-Class cost more than twice as much as a base C-Class, and people don't usually confuse a $40,000 car with one that cost more than $90,000 when it was new.

Still, that's far from the biggest issue here. Why didn't the Detroit airport have bollards in place to prevent a car from crashing into the terminal? It's entirely possible there's a reason, but that also seems like pretty basic airport security stuff. Whether this was an intentional attack, or the driver simply experienced a medical emergency, you'd think there would be measures in place to stop something like this from happening.