73 Expensive Mistakes People Made That Might Make You Say “Ouch” Just Looking At Them (New Pics)

Sometimes the simplest errors turn into the most expensive lessons. When it comes to famous blunders, few can match the scale of what happened to France’s national railway company in 2014. SNCF ordered 2,000 new trains worth billions, only to discover they were too wide for over 1,000 of the country’s train platforms.

The company had measured newer stations but neglected platforms built more than 50 years ago. The error forced them to spend an additional 50 million euros widening 1,300 platforms over two years, turning what should have been a triumph of modernization into an expensive reminder to double-check your measurements.

In London, a skyscraper became famous for melting cars. The building at 20 Fenchurch Street, nicknamed the Walkie Talkie, created an unexpected problem during its construction in 2013.

Its concave glass facade acted like a giant magnifying glass, focusing sunlight onto the street below with such intensity that it warped car panels and melted plastic parts. One Jaguar owner found his side mirror and bodywork damaged after parking nearby for just an hour.

The phenomenon earned the building a new nickname: the Walkie Scorchie. Developers eventually installed a permanent sunshade at a cost of around £10 million to fix the problem.

NASA experienced one of the most frustrating mistakes in space exploration history in 1999. The Mars Climate Orbiter, which cost $125 million to build, was lost because of a simple measurement mix-up.

Engineers at Lockheed Martin used imperial units while NASA’s team used metric units. Nobody caught the discrepancy until it was too late. The spacecraft missed its intended orbit and burned up in the Martian atmosphere. The entire mission vanished because it got lost in translation of mathematical language.

The business world has seen its share of spectacular misjudgments. In the early 1990s, Quaker Oats bought Snapple for $1.7 billion, convinced it would dominate the beverage market. The acquisition turned into a disaster, and just three years later, Quaker Oats sold Snapple for only $300 million.

The loss was staggering, made even more painful by the fact that Snapple continued to thrive as an independent brand after the sale. Sometimes the best business decision is recognizing when a partnership simply isn’t working.

Spain faced an engineering nightmare that sounds almost impossible to believe. Designers working on the Isaac Peral class submarine made a decimal point error in their calculations, making the vessel 100 tons heavier than planned.

The mistake meant the submarine would sink to the ocean floor and never resurface. Engineers caught the error before construction began and redesigned the submarine to be longer, but then discovered it was too large to fit into the port where it was being built. The cascading errors turned what should have been a routine military project into a costly lesson in precision.

Cultural attachment can be stronger than taste test data, as Coca-Cola learned in 1985. After conducting nearly 200,000 blind taste tests showing consumers preferred a sweeter formula, the company replaced its 99-year-old recipe with New Coke.

The backlash was immediate and intense. Protest groups formed across America, consumers stockpiled the original formula, and the company received up to 8,000 complaint calls per day. One person even wrote to the CEO addressing him as “Chief Dodo.”

Just 79 days later, Coca-Cola brought back the original formula as Coca-Cola Classic, having discovered that some things matter more to people than taste.

Trading errors can happen in the blink of an eye with devastating results. In 2005, a stockbroker at Mizuho Securities in Japan made a typing mistake that cost the company around $225 million. Instead of selling one share at 610,000 yen, he accidentally offered 610,000 shares at 1 yen each.

Investors immediately jumped on the incredible deal, buying up the drastically underpriced stock before anyone could stop the trade. Even with stock exchange rules limiting some of the damage, the typo became one of the most expensive keystrokes in financial history.

The entertainment industry isn’t immune to costly mistakes either. When reshoots were needed for the 2017 film Justice League, Warner Bros faced an unusual problem. Actor Henry Cavill had grown a mustache for another role and couldn’t shave it off.

The studio ended up spending around $25 million to digitally remove the mustache from every scene featuring Superman. The extensive visual effects work became a notorious example of how small scheduling conflicts can balloon into massive budget overruns when production timelines collide.

These stories remind us that mistakes happen at every level, from individual people to massive corporations. The scale might be different from dropping your phone or denting your bumper, but the fundamental lesson stays the same. We’re all capable of errors, and sometimes the most expensive ones come from the simplest oversights.

The best we can do is learn from these cautionary tales, double-check our work, and hope that when we inevitably mess up, the consequences are a bit more forgiving.

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