We tend to make fun of situations in which we can't remember having locked the front door, turned off the kettle, or where we parked the car, and we often chalk them up to exhaustion. But these things happen to the best – or the richest – of us, being one of the few common denominators.
A 1-of-60, $3.6+ million Bugatti has nothing in common with a beat-up Honda older than the older kid in the family, except for the fact that both their drivers might have at one point forgotten to remove the gas nozzle before driving off from the gas station. Case in point, the latest viral video to make headlines.
The incident itself isn't new, as evidenced by the 2022 timestamp in a corner of the video being captured on a surveillance camera. But it's new in terms of the date it's been made public, which was earlier this week. It went down at a Shell fueling station in Costa Mesa, California, with a man driving a Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport too distracted to remember removing the nozzle before driving off.
As noted above, it happens to the best of us. Certain things that are part of the daily routine have become automatic, as our bodies (and brains) try to adjust and cope with the influx of stimuli bombarding them every hour. This is the most likely explanation for doing stuff that hardly registers anymore, like locking the front door, only to wonder later if we did it because we have no recollection of it.
Photo: TikTok/SouthCoastShellOC
This probably happened here, as well. A man pulls into the gas station at the wheel of a black Chiron Pur Sport, puts the nozzle in, and then steps inside the shop. He emerges later carrying a couple of bags, casually gets into the car, and pulls away at a crawl. Before he realizes that anything is amiss, the gas line snaps and is left hanging from the car.
The driver stops the vehicle and comes out to check out the damage. He detaches the nozzle and line from the Chiron and almost tenderly places them on the ground. If it weren't for an employee coming into the frame to talk to him, you could think he's getting ready to bolt.
He didn't do that, though. The station owner, who is the same man who posted the video on the socials, tells one media outlet that there was no drama following the incident, contrary to what anyone might expect. "The customer waited and was gracious enough to pay the fines, so it was all cleared," the owner says, adding that the extra charge was $200.
Not that the lack of drama is preventing the Internet from having a blast with the video. Jokes range from "he wanted to make sure he had enough fuel to get back home," railing on Bugatti's notoriously bad fuel economy, to "Manny Khoshbin" in reference to one of the best-known Bugatti collectors out there, and "too rich to know to pump his own gas," a not-at-all-subtle dig at a man who can afford to splurge millions on a single car.
In the end, though, this video proves only one thing: we take pleasure in seeing rich people fail. It makes them less perfect and more like us, the people who drive old Hondas and sometimes forget to remove the nozzle from them at the gas station.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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