A Honda Odyssey doing 140 km/h in an 80 km/h construction zone. A novice driver behind the wheel bragging on his phone about being “the alpha.” And a dashcam rolling the entire time.
That’s the cocktail of stupidity that cost one Canadian body shop employee his job and got a customer’s minivan impounded for a week.
The Odyssey’s owner shared the footage on Reddit after the whole mess unfolded. The van had been at the body shop for repairs following a rear-end collision. During the work, the shop flagged a minor mechanical issue and sent it out to a mechanic for a look.
Routine stuff. What happened on the drive back was anything but.
The employee tasked with transporting the minivan apparently decided to explore the upper limits of Honda’s 3.5-liter V6. On a highway through a construction zone posted at 80 km/h, the dashcam clocked the Odyssey pushing 140 km/h — roughly 90 mph. In a family van that belongs to someone else.
The dashcam audio makes it worse. The driver can reportedly be heard on his phone, drunk on adrenaline, calling himself “the alpha” while piloting a vehicle designed to haul kids and grocery bags. Peak confidence, zero judgment.
Then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police appeared in the rearview mirror, and the alpha energy evaporated on contact. In most Canadian jurisdictions, 60 km/h over the limit qualifies as excessive speeding. Authorities didn’t hesitate — the Odyssey was impounded on the spot for seven days.
The driver’s situation got uglier from there. The owner says the employee held a novice license, which in Canadian graduated licensing programs carries stiffer penalties for infractions. That joyride may have done lasting damage to his driving privileges well beyond losing a job he clearly didn’t deserve.
The body shop owner fired the employee after learning what happened. But the shop also did something you rarely see in these situations: it owned the fallout completely. According to the Odyssey’s owner, the business covered all impound fees, had the van professionally detailed, and offered to take the family out to dinner.
That’s a textbook response to an employee going rogue, and it probably saved the shop’s reputation.
The dashcam footage turned out to be the linchpin. Police requested the video, almost certainly to build the speeding case against the driver. Without it, the owner would have been stuck with an impounded vehicle and a he-said-she-said mess.
With it, the facts were indisputable: speed, location, the driver’s own words.
Stories like this surface every few months — a dealership porter drifting a customer’s Corvette, a service tech drag-racing someone’s M3. Someone with temporary custody of a vehicle they could never afford treats it like a rental car with the damage waiver maxed out. The Odyssey twist just makes this one funnier and sadder at the same time.
The minivan is back with its owner now, detailed and none the worse for wear mechanically. The employee is job-hunting. And somewhere in Canada, an RCMP officer has a story about pulling over a Honda Odyssey doing 90 in a work zone driven by a kid on a learner’s permit who thought he was the alpha.
He was not the alpha.
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