A Random Quack of Kindness
The image above comes from the parking lot of a small town grocery store on a regular weekday day in America. The car pictured — a Jeep Wrangler — isn’t anything special; it’s just sitting there, its owner or operator likely doing some grocery shopping. By and large, there’s nothing unusual about this car.
But if you zoom in on the dashboard, you’ll note something that typically doesn’t appear inside car windshields — a lot of rubber ducks.
What the duck is going on here? It’s not just a Jeep driver with an affinity for bath toys. It’s someone who wants to share a little joy — at least, with other Jeep owners.
In July 2020, a Jeep owner named Allison Parliament wanted to add a little levity to the world imperiled by a global pandemic. As the New York Times reported, “she wrote ‘Cool Jeep’ in Sharpie on a rubber duck and left it on a stranger’s hood,” and then shared the image on her social media accounts. Harmless fun that no one should have given a second thought to, but it met the moment and resonated with many online — particularly in communities of Jeep owners.
Within weeks, others followed suit, buying rubber ducks and placing them on Jeeps here, there, and everywhere. And from there, the trend spread near and far. Next time you’re in a parking lot with multiple Jeeps, it’s likely you’ll see at least one with a few ducks on the dash. (For what it’s worth, I took the pictures above, and there was a second Jeep in the lot with a few ducks on it, too.)
The “Jeep ducking” trend has become so widespread that Jeep itself has gotten involved. There’s a page on their official website about the tradition. And, at the 2022 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, the company brought in a 61-foot tall inflatable duck to celebrate its community of drivers.
While not all Jeep drivers are fans of getting ducked, most embrace the trend.
Parliament, who passed away two years ago, saw the initial ducking as a way to bring an extra dash of humanity to an otherwise mundane moment — and was glad it carried forward. Per Motor Trend, she said “for me, it was an act of kindness, a healing of sorts, as well as recognition of and greeting to a fellow Jeep owner. But it can just be that you like their Jeep, or it’s the same Jeep you have, or maybe a classic Jeep you would like to own one day. You don’t really need a reason for Jeep ducking other than to connect, bring a smile to someone’s face, and have fun.”
Bonus fact: In 2007, a Jeep owner named Matthias Jeschke, per Autoblog, “ set the Guinness World Record for highest altitude attained by a four-wheeled vehicle [when he] reached a height of 6,646 meters on the Ojos del Salado volcano in Chile.” To celebrate, he placed a sign at the apex of the climb reading “Jeep Parking Only: All others don’t make it up here anyway.” That turned out to be wrong — per the same story, a few months later, a pair of Chileans named Gonzalo Bravo and Eduardo Canales topped that mark on the same volcano in a Suzuki Samurai — and, once there, removed the Jeep’s sign.
From the Archives: The Mystery of Pia Farrenkopf: This isn’t a fun story and I only selected it because it involves a Jeep. Warning — it also involves an unsolved death.