Steve Jobs is still parking in handicapped spaces at Apple, according to a new snap posted to Flickr.
Snapper Rana Sobhany spotted Jobs’ Mercedes SL55 AMG parked in a handicapped spot at the Apple campus over the weekend.
“Mercedes? Check. No license plate? Check. Handicap spot? Yep, this is Steve Jobs’ car!!!” she writes.
Jobs, of course, has a long history of parking in handicapped parking spaces at Apple. The reports go back years, and have recently been documented on Flickr.
Since 2006, Jobs’ car has been snapped in handicapped parking spaces at Apple at least five times. See the pictures after the jump.
Jobs drives a Mercedes SL55 AMG, a super fast, $130,000 sports car. Equipped with a supercharged 5.5 liter V-8 engine, the SL55 is the fastest Benz in America.
“Crack the throttle, and this posh heavyweight lunges forward like a shark that’s been invited to nibble a chunk of Britney Spears,” wrote Tony Swan in Car&Driver’s review. Curiously, it’s not the top of the line Merc: the $190,00 SL65 is. You’d expect Jobs to plump for the best.
Apple veteran Andy Hertzfled reports on his history of the Mac website, Folklore.org, that Jobs was constantly parking in the restricted spaces. “He seemed to think the blue wheelchair symbol meant the spot was reserved for the chairman,” Hertzfeld writes.
In a comment to Hertzfeld’s post, Dan Cochran, who worked at Apple, noted that one day someone converted the handicapped “wheelchair” graphic into the Mercedes logo.
“I thought it was hilarious but as I recall Steve didn’t find it particularly funny at all,” he notes.
Quipped former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gassee, when he saw Jobs park in a restricted spot: “I never realized those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped…” (According to Wikiquote, Jean-Louis now says morally handicapped when retelling the story.)
March 3, 2006 Photo by steevil
January 13, 2007 Photo by brianamerige In the caption, the photographer says: “Jobs didn’t really seem to care about the car much. He owns the darn parking lot, so he’s parked all crookedly and in a handicap space, no less.”
November 18, 2007 Picture by morethanreal
March 26, 2008 Picture by roachtt3. “I guess he was late for work this morning.”
August 22, 2008. Picture by ranajune. “Mercedes? Check. No license plate? Check. Handicap spot? Yep, this is Steve Jobs’ car!!!”
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
