Vehicular tetris plan foiled by German policeman with tragic lack of imagination

This tetris of vehicles was constructed by a Polish truck driver, who conceived of it as a clever means of transporting several trucks and a car in one go. His plan was foiled by a spoilsport German cop, who made him destack it. I say that if there was a problem with this construction, it was in its lack of ambition: why not a motorcycle atop the car? Why not a bicycle atop the motorcycle? Why not a strapping lad in rollerskates on a pogo-stick bouncing on the bicycle?

On the road, the officers stopped the breakdown field daredevil transport (on the way to Belgium). On the Iveco car carrier (1) there was a large truck (2, on the deck again, a smaller VW MAN truck (3 And on the deck one Mercedes (4)!
Police spokesman Acor Kniely: "This tower contradicted all road traffic legislation. Especially as he to make matters worse the trailer still wanted to charge another truck! "

So was hatte Krefelds Polizei noch nicht gesehen: Hochstapler-Laster gestoppt! - Düsseldorf [Ulrich Altmann/Bild.de/Google Translate] (via Neatorama)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: automotive • germany • happy mutants • poland • safety third

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Philboyd Studge

No doubt traveling to Bremen Town to become musicians.
Scratcheee

The car should have been rotated one step and inserted between the red and white truck cabs.
- Felton / Moderator
  
  Then the entire stack would have disappeared.
blendergasket

Is it just me or is he bottomed out a tad.
- xian
  
  Yeah I can’t tell if it’s just the angle we’re looking at, but the bottom trailer looks like it’s buckled under all the weight. Plus that center tire doesn’t look all that healthy. Plus the ramp at the tail end looks like it would be sparking. Other than that… looks good!
  - Preston Sturges
    
    Good spot. I think the middle tire blew, which led to an inevitable visit from the police.
  - http://about.me/BrettKnoss BrettKnoss
    
    I think the bed’s made like that. Look at the shape of the fuel tank. Yes he is overweight though.
http://www.facebook.com/julianreischl Julian Reischl

You can be damn sure this crappy contraption has been pulled off the road before it can damage anything or hurt anyone. Sorry guys, but “no speed limit” comes with a price. You just can’t have any shenanigans whatsoever on roads where you can also drive any sports car to the max. Imagine that truck stack swaying to and fro while you come along on the next lane like a bullet. A wandering circus like that has no place on German roads.

(I strongly sympathize with the owner’s ingenuity and his desire to transport all those vehicles as efficiently and cheaply as possible, though, but no. Just no.)
- bunnyvision
  
  I feel weird that in your story you present the reader as the person in an expensive sports car going “to the max”.
  
  i kind of feel more like someone driving a truck pile, most days
  - John Geoffrey
    
    As a German living in Poland I can say this: most likely the truck driver both drove a truck pile and to the max. Polish drivers seem to think that speed is the same as driving skills. Every time we do a longer cross country trip there is at least one crashed/toppled/burning truck every 200 km.
- niktemadur
  
  Several years ago on a Mexican road, I drove up to an old, beat up pickup truck that was “transporting” a hill of used tires, seemingly unsecured to anything at all. Tires were spilling all over the road in all directions, the driver oblivious to the fact, some of the most terrifying driving of my life.
  There were tires all over the place for at least a kilometer, the asshole went into brain-dead mode behind the wheel, he could have killed people.
  
  Therefore, I can’t even sympathize with the owner’s ingenuity. Warsaw to Brussels is approximately 12 hours, much more so when carrying a large load. Truck drivers are notorious for pulling all-nighters in driving marathons, aren’t they? So factor in diminished mental functions while transporting stresses the equipment was not designed for. “Clever” and “intelligent” are not synonyms, “thrift” can be the mortal enemy of “safety”.
  - http://twitter.com/justonemoregame Gabe McGrath
    
    Michael Bay was driving that truck in Mexico.
  - denis gallagher
    
    you make a lot of assumptions there about truck drivers.
    - niktemadur
      
      No doubt a majority of truck drivers are also responsible drivers, but I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve seen trucks driving way over the speed limit and even recklessly, I’ve seen it even in passenger buses. The size and weight of the vehicle, plus the load, therefore the inertia, makes for a much higher level of responsibility on a trucker’s side of things.
      
      One night, a truck with no load entered the highway at an intersection in front of me at full speed, I had to violently swerve to prevent ramming into it. Once ahead of him, I slowed down to try and get behind him and write down the license plate to report him to his bosses, but he caught on to my intentions and slowed down at my pace, so I couldn’t do it.
      
      Maybe this happens more often in countries where truckers don’t earn as much, where more loads transported = more salary.
    - http://twitter.com/InnerPartisan Sebastian Spinczyk
      
      Believe me, on European roads, those are not assumptions. And it’s not the truck drivers who are at fault, but the shipping companies.
- gibbon1
  
  Germans don’t have respect for other peoples cultural traditions.
  
  Friend of mine was Austrian living in Germany. Germans are very particular about things, Austrians are very particular about being not being Germans. When was visiting a friend in the US a car drove down the street with no hood. Mind Blown. He said that convinced him to move to the US.
  - John Geoffrey
    
    To be fair, the thing about Austrians not being Germans only really came up when people were looking for those responsible for WWII. All of a sudden Austria went: “Oh, no! We were the first ones to be invaded by Hitler! We valiantly fought back by throwing flowers at the evil, evil invaders!”
    - TheMudshark
      
      All part of the complex we´ve had ever since the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire crumbled and suddenly made Austria a small-timer beside its despised and envied big brother Germany. I mean seriously, Vienna had more inhabitants over 100 years ago than it has now, and let´s not even talk about the rest of Austria.
    - http://twitter.com/InnerPartisan Sebastian Spinczyk
      
      “Hitler was German, Mozart was Austrian!”, as they say.
pasq242

I am pretty sure this is in Richard Scarry’s “Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.”
pjcamp

It would have been ever so much better if each one had a driver and they alternated directions.
niktemadur

• Kentucky!
• Honorary member of the Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things.
Chandler Lewis

I’m just grateful to whoever helpfully numbered the vehicles.
- for_SCIENCE
  
  THERE… ARE… FOUR… ̶L̶I̶G̶H̶T̶S̶ VEHICLES!
- numfar
  
  The numbers were probably added by BILD, a German tabloid whose readers aren’t exactly known to be capable of counting to 4 by themselves.
http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith

On a different note I am going to send in a picture one day of the truck chassis which are ferried along Malaysian freeways which no cabin, just a motorcycle helmet.
- CCinBmore
  
  Yes, please!
http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

He’s Polish. He was driving the one on top.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1606613036 Michael Manchester

If this is considered tragic, I wonder how it would be described if an accident occurred seriously injuring or killing someone.
Brainspore

This really seems like something you’d see in Russia.
Preston Sturges

I saw a stack corresponding to vehicles 2, 3, and 4 pulled over by state trooper on the shoulder of the Washington beltway. The cop had the driver out and the cop was pointing, gesturing, and appeared to be yelling. It was pretty clear what he was saying.
Antinous / Moderator

18 comments and not a single yo dawg?
me d

Motor home owners seem to have a mania for clamping vehicles together. Once I saw a motor home as big as a fullsize Greyhound bus zipping down the interstate. It had two bicycles on the front, a kayak on top, and it was pulling a trailer. On the trailer were a motorcycle and a golf cart.
- ImmutableMichael
  
  Wings?
- http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns
  
  Them Oakies were headin’ to cali-fro-nie-yay!
http://www.facebook.com/roger.brumlow Roger Brumlow

Yo dawg, I like how the description in the paragraph corresponded to the convenient numbering on the picture. It helped alot yo.
Gotanda

Saw plenty of nested vehicle stacks on the roads in Cambodia between Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville but they would have squeezed in a small dump truck at 1.5, filled the cabs of all the passenger trucks with dry goods, and maybe packed some livestock in around the edges.
http://profile.yahoo.com/QCGOSVXBEAG7HHTZ5MNMYTZ2HM Cleo

It’s flatbed trucks all the way down.
Kibo

Zounds! A Tachypomp!

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602521h.html
cavalrysword

I am pretty sure all that weight exceeded the rating for the tires.

Then you have all the inertia of 4 vehicles, and all the brakes of one.

Unsafe load is an understatement.

Makes a nice picture, I might put something together like that in the company yard for a funny photo. But take it on the road?

No, no, a thousand times no!
http://twitter.com/twistmeyer Mike Meyer

It’s like Turducken on Wheels.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  Dang, you beat me to it, but you misnamed it…
  
  Turtrucken!
http://twitter.com/almien OJW

Looks like a test script for Rigs of Rods…
https://launchpad.net/~zak-mckracken Zak McKracken

First, I’m not very happy to see Boingboing take stories from Bild (which is known for pretty manipulative stories and not caring too much about truth, ethics and that)
Second, I thought this site deserves better than a Google translated version of that quote (which I myself had trouble understanding):
“Especially as he still wanted to load another truck onto the trailer, to make matters worse!”

You can often see larger trucks with smaller trucks on the back going west on the A2 (Germany main northern east-west Autobahn connecting Poland and the Netherlands) because there’s a lot of used cars bought west and sold in the east. So they stack the trucks on the way west and have them all loaded up with used cars going east again. This guy had just bought a bunch of used trucks…
Mary Carpenter

Is that Mitt Romneys dog in top?
duncancreamer

Why not cover it with a tarp?
Sparg

An appropriately Slavic solution à la матрёшки (matryoshki).
jimh

I’d like to see it with two smart cars instead of the benz.