Snorkel-Equipped Peugeot Wagon Thinks It’s A Submarine

Watching drivers wreck their cars trying to drive through heavy water has become a bit of a spectator sport in the UK, with entire YouTube channels springing up devoted to the ‘sport.’ But one Peugeot owner proved you don’t need to be scared of a little water if you’ve got the right equipment, and that equipment doesn’t necessarily have to mean an SUV.

Footage shared by the YouTube channel Bengregers, filmed at the appropriately named Watery Ford near Leicester in the English Midlands, sets the scene showing a Boots pharmacy van and a small SUV almost completely submerged after recent heavy rainfall in the UK.

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Surely no one is mad enough to try to drive through water that the marker sign shows is around 3 ft (1 m) deep in places, and by the looks of those two abandoned cars, even deeper at some points? Yes, they are.

Schwimmwagen

Madness soon appears in the shape of an almost 30-year-old Peugeot 405 wagon, but one with a secret weapon. The 405’s 1.9-liter diesel engine has been fitted with an intake snorkel that exits above the roofline, and the driver wastes no time jumping into the water to show us what it can do.

The Peugeot flies into the water and breezes past the stricken van, water washing over the windshield, then turns around for another run in the opposite direction that’s even crazier. This time, the water lifts the entire back of the car off the ground, but the 405 keeps going, eventually hauling out onto dry-ish land, leaving a plume of rolling coal diesel smoke behind it.

Interior Water Feature

Unlike a modern Defender, of course, the Peugeot’s door seals and firewall plugs were never designed to cope with this kind of abuse, and a shot of the 405 parked up with the door open shows its footwell filled with murky brown water. But the car, helped by being an old, simple diesel model, and from an era before everything was electrified, is still running.