Ocean Destroys $82,000 Range Rover Sport After Stupid Tourists Get Stuck on Protected Beach
High tide takes no prisoners.
The Land Rover Range Rover is one of the most luxurious and capable vehicles you can buy today. Its off-road heritage means it can surmount just about any obstacle—that is, except for the folly of man. And now a rental company in England is down one $82,000 Range Rover after a group of tourists drove it onto a protected beach at a nature reserve, promptly got stuck, and abandoned the pricey SUV to be consumed by high tide.
It's normally illegal to even walk on the beach at the U.K.'s South Walney Nature Reserve, a resting stop for migratory birds and home to sensitive vegetation, but neither that nor physical signs and barriers stopped the three men from driving the brand new Range Rover Sport onto the sand on Sunday. After cruising around for a while, the 5,000-pound truck eventually got stuck below the high tide mark.
A member of the Cumbria Wildlife Trust told The Telegraph that he watched the men "remonstrating wildly" as their attempts to dig out the Range Rover sank it further into the muck.
"They'd definitely gone to great lengths to get on that beach. There are very clear posts up seeing 'do not go on the beach' and there are even wooden trunks acting as a barrier," Tony Jesson said. "We sat there for an hour watching them trying to drive it out, pull it out, dig it out. It was very much stuck."
With the sun setting and high tide coming in an hour, the group decided to cut their losses and walked back to higher ground. What happened overnight wasn't pretty; the expensive SUV was totally swamped by the ocean, with waves smashing several windows and flooding the interior with salt water.
The Range Rover was finally hauled off the beach on Tuesday by a tractor, and we can't imagine it's heading anywhere but the salvage yard. The Cumbria Wildlife Trust has lodged a formal complaint about the damage to the protected site from tire tracks and oil seepage, and police confirmed to The Telegraph that they're investigating the incident.
