A Volvo PV544 sat near the telephone exchange on Fiskaregatan in Lysekil, where the pavement sloped toward the south harbor. The driver left without setting the handbrake. Then the empty car began its short solo trip: down the grade, past barrels of herring unloaded from Iceland, across Sodra Hamngatan, and straight into the bow rail of a Royal Swedish Navy submarine.[1]
In 1961, a driverless Volvo rolled into the docked submarine HSwMS Bävern in Lysekil, Sweden. The accident is often described as the only known collision between a car and a submarine.
On 19 August 1961, HSwMS Bävern was tied up at Anderssons quay in the south harbor, not lurking offshore or slipping under ice. The submarine was close enough to ordinary street life that a badly parked family car could reach it.[1]
The path down to the water gave the accident its almost comic precision. The Volvo missed the herring barrels, crossed the harbor street, and arrived at the bow, where the museum photograph shows the car nosed over the quay with its front end crushed against the submarine.[1]
Hans Johansson, editor of the local newspaper Kuriren, is credited by the Maritime Museum as the photographer. The DigitaltMuseum record preserves the collision as an object with a place, a date, a vehicle, and a ship, which is useful because the story otherwise sounds engineered for pub retelling.[1]
Klassiker later noted a neat coincidence in the machinery. The Volvo PV544 had appeared in 1958, the same year as the Bävern it struck. After the collision, the car disappears from the record into maybe repaired, maybe scrapped.[2]
Bävern left a cleaner paper trail. The submarine, one of Sweden's Hajen III class boats, apparently suffered no lasting harm beyond the dented rail and continued in service until 1980, before being scrapped in Odense the following year.[2]
Most retellings linger on the impossible pairing because "car hits submarine" sounds like a filing error. The day itself was smaller and funnier than that. No one was hurt. No captain made a dramatic mistake. A driver forgot the handbrake, gravity took over, and a harbor full of ordinary objects briefly formed the strangest traffic report in Sweden.[3]
The surviving photograph keeps the joke from floating away. The car is too plain, the pier too wet, the submarine too solid. One wheel hangs where a wheel should not be, over black harbor water, as if the Volvo has just discovered that the road can end in a navy.[4]
