Bear Trapped Inside SUV Honks All Night, Which Happens Way More Often Than You Think

Bears are a lot craftier than we give them credit for. As people across Japan have recently discovered, they’ll try just about anything to get into a building if there’s even a remote chance of finding food. A Colorado man recently learned they’re just as willing to break into your SUV.

KYMA reports that residents of Gold Hill spent an entire night wondering which asshole neighbor had decided to lean on their car horn until sunrise. Turns out it wasn’t a jilted lover making their ex’s life miserable or an annoyed carpool driver trying to wake up a sleepy coworker before they’re late for work — it was a bear.

A black bear had wandered into an unlocked SUV, somehow managed to shut the door behind itself, and locked itself inside. With no obvious escape plan, it spent the night stomping around the cabin, repeatedly honking the horn, probably not intentionally but for cartoonish comedic effect, let’s all collectively imagine it that way and accept it as fact in our hearts.

When daylight arrived, neighbors used a long rope to pull open the driver’s door from a safe distance. The bear bolted for freedom, leaving behind a wrecked interior, damaged body panels, and a deployed driver’s-side airbag, suggesting that the bear probably was scared shitless by its deployment at some point during the night.

Bears Do This a Lot. Like, a Lot a Lot.

For years, I’ve been chronicling the bizarre, extremely specific occurrence of dogs shooting people. I may have to do something similar with bears trapped in cars, because after a cursory search, I found way too many instances of this happening.

Back in 2016, again in Colorado, deputies freed a bear that locked itself in a parked Subaru after it had torn up its interior.

The best part of this one is when the guy holding the camera, who is but a thin car window away from a black bear, calmly assures the bear, desperate to escape, that “yeah, I’m trying, buddy.”

North Carolina, 2017: a bleary-eyed homeowner woke to deputies telling him there was a bear trapped in his car. The bear destroyed the seats and airbags, but somehow left behind a granola bar. This bear was clearly an idiot.  

South Lake Tahoe, California, 2023: a woman who worked as a wedding content creator, whatever that is, found a bear trapped inside her car, shredding the woman’s vehicle apart until police opened the door and the bear casually walked away. The report goes on to say that a Tahoe-based bear conservation group that calls itself The Bear League says there are “15 to 25 cases of bears opening vehicles every day in Tahoe” alone. That cannot be right. Yeah, clearly bears were constantly getting trapped in cars, but 15 to 25 cases a day in Tahoe is preposterous. That’s not a coincidence. That’s evidence of organized crime. That’s a crime spree.

Winsted, Connecticut, 2023: this time, an adult bear and one of its cubs became trapped inside a car while another cub waited outside, potentially acting as a lookout while its mother and sibling robbed the car of its valuables. As is the running theme, the mother and child tore apart the car’s interior, perhaps desperate for food, perhaps desperately looking for the door handle the way we all briefly do when we are driving an unfamiliar car.

There are probably several dozen more instances like this out there. If The Bear League is to be believed, there are probably thousands more instances. The only lesson to take away from all this is that it’s only a matter of time before a bear learns it can flip down the sun visor and the keys will slide out, allowing it to turn the ignition and drive off into the sunset, never to be seen again.