A 73-year-old woman drove straight through the front window of Solar Nails in Waukesha on Friday morning, after apparently mistaking her gas pedal for the brake while pulling into a parking spot for her nail appointment. Waukesha police said no one inside the salon was hurt in the crash, which happened around 10:55 a.m. at the shop's location on West St. Paul Avenue.
According to WISN, the woman was the only person in the vehicle and was arriving for her appointment when the pedal mix-up sent her car into the storefront. As CBS 58 reports, police confirmed she mistook the gas for the brake while attempting to park. One woman went to Waukesha Memorial Hospital afterward for a checkup, though it's unclear from available reports whether that was the driver or someone connected to the salon.
A Storefront Built for Head-In Parking
Solar Nails sits at 2140 W. St. Paul Ave., inside a commercial strip center whose tenants also include Great Clips and Sally Beauty, according to business listings for the plaza. That kind of layout, where head-in parking spaces face directly into shop windows, is common at strip malls and puts glass storefronts squarely in the path of any car that lurches forward instead of stopping.
ProHealth Waukesha Memorial Hospital, where the woman sought her post-crash checkup, is a 272-bed acute care hospital about five minutes from central Waukesha, per ProHealth Care. The hospital runs a Level 3 emergency room and serves as the county's primary acute care facility, making it the natural stop for anyone checked out after a low-speed but jarring collision like Friday's.
A Familiar Pattern Nationwide
Friday's crash fits a pattern researchers have tracked for years: a driver moving slowly into a parking spot presses the wrong pedal and ends up inside a building instead of stopping short of it. The Storefront Safety Council estimates that roughly 100 vehicle-into-building crashes happen every day across the country, causing about 16,000 injuries and 2,600 deaths annually, with commercial strip malls and convenience stores accounting for more than a third of those locations.
The same organization's data shows 41% of storefront crashes stem from pedal misapplication, and nearly 40% of drivers involved are over 60. A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study backs that up, finding drivers 65 and older experience pedal-error crashes at four times the rate of middle-aged drivers, with 77% of those errors happening in parking lots or driveways, since NHTSA notes the mistakes often occur when drivers are trying to stop at low speeds.
It wasn't an isolated Waukesha incident, either. Just a day earlier, on Aug. 6, a driver mistook the accelerator for the brake and crashed into a nail salon on Shermer Road in Glenview, Illinois, sending three workers to the hospital, as Hoodline previously reported. Waukesha itself saw a similar commercial crash in December 2025, when a driver lost control and hit a business near Five Points on West Main Street, though FOX6 News Milwaukee reported police determined impairment wasn't a factor in that early-morning wreck.
Wisconsin's Rules for Senior Drivers
Wisconsin requires drivers 65 and older to renew their license in person at a DMV Customer Service Center every eight years and pass a vision screening, but the state doesn't impose age-based road retesting or require physicians to report unsafe drivers, according to the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. Citizens and family members can still submit unsafe-driver reports that trigger an individual functional evaluation.
The stakes behind that policy debate are real. Motor vehicle crashes are the second-leading cause of injury death for Wisconsin residents 65 and older, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, which recorded 163 senior fatalities in 2024 and notes the fatality rate for drivers over 65 is significantly higher than for those between 15 and 64.
Friday's crash adds to a string of serious road incidents in Waukesha this year, from a fatal two-vehicle collision on Les Paul Parkway in May to a deadly pedestrian crash on Highway 164 in July. No charges or injuries connected to Friday's nail salon crash have been reported, and police have not indicated whether the driver will face any citation.
