A Car Caught Fire During A Gender Reveal Burnout, Again

People in Australia are still doing gender reveal burnouts, and those burnouts are still ending with the car going up in flames. For those who don’t know, a gender reveal burnout is when one or both parents-to-be are informed of their unborn baby’s gender by way of a fucking sick burnout. A car is equipped with custom tyres that produce a certain-coloured smoke, the driver spins the wheels, and pure magic ensues.

Earlier this week though, footage emerged of a black Holden sedan on the Gold Coast, Queensland, catching alight during the momentous family occasion.

Things started off pretty well, by the look of it: the driver puts both pedals to the metal, shrouds of thick blue smoke poured from the tyres—it was a boy, apparently—and onlookers ran alongside the slowly moving vehicle with their camera phones aloft. So far so good; standard procedure.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where things went awry, but it was probably somewhere between the 30- and 35-second mark. At that point the gender had been revealed for at least half a minute, the parents-to-be had pumped their fists in the air, and everyone had a good dousing of smoke—in other words, anything good that could come from a gender reveal burnout had well and truly come and gone. And yet the driver continued: the car turned sidelong in the road, the burnout ground away, until eventually two massive jets of fire erupted from the rear of the car.

The driver, a 29-year-old man from the town of Nerang, was convicted on one count of dangerous operation of a motor vehicle and charged a $1,000 fine, while also being barred from driving for six months, according to police. And while this particular mishap actually took place back in April 2018, it’s not an isolated incident.

Towards the end of last year, an expectant couple in South Australia similarly set their car on fire while revealing their baby’s gender. Around the same time, The Guardian UK reported that burnouts are the main high-risk behaviour associated with the gender-reveal event.

“I know people like to do unique things for gender reveals these days, but use a bit of common sense,” Queensland Police Service Sgt. Hilton Buckley told 7 News Brisbane. Speaking to 9 News Queensland, he added: “I can understand the excitement of people wanting to do something special for a gender reveal. But doing that sort of thing on a public road, with people standing in front of the car as you’re moving toward them, is a pretty silly thing to do.”

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