On this day in auto history - August 4th

Wed 4th Aug 2021

It was on this day in 1975 that Robert Plant, lead singer of English supergroup Led Zeppelin - arguably the biggest band in the world at the time - narrowly cheated death after a car crash on the Greek island of Rhodes.

Enjoying some downtime with his family in the middle of a sell-out world tour, Plant spun his hire car off the road at speed in an accident which left him and his wife seriously injured in intensive care and his two children badly shaken.

The multiple leg fractures Plant sustained in the accident forced Led Zeppelin to cancel the remainder of their world tour and he wouldn’t fully recover for another two years, spending much of that time in a wheelchair.

The Rhodes smash wasn’t the only time Plant was involved in a car crash.

At a civil trial accusing Led Zeppelin of plagiarising the opening chords of their most famous track, Stairway To Heaven, Plant famously told a jury he had “a lack of memory” owing to the effects of an earlier car crash in 1970.

Then in 2009, Plant escaped with minor injuries after an accident at a junction in North West London when his Audi A8 collided with a Mercedes SL 300, driven by a drugs counsellor, forcing the latter car to be written off.