mct16:
Goofy drives the jeep straight into a palm tree and they are forced to continue on foot. What's more, it is the only palm tree in the area!
This has actually happened in real life - the poor
Lonely Tree of Ténéré being a case in point; I read a similar story, about a different incident, in a book at primary school, prior to the Lonely Tree accident (which I seem to remember that
John Craven's Newsround covered at the time), and I think that
that reasoned it as follows.
Drivers in deserts have few markers by which to guage distance, so a tree makes a promising target for navigation.
However, it still isn't great, because as there is no context to judge the size/ height of the distant tree, depth perception plays tricks.
Driving across a desert is monotonous, and it's easy for a driver to lose attention/ fall asleep.
So a sleepy driver heads towards what they imagine to be a tall tree, far away, while not realizing that it's in fact stunted, and thus is a small tree closer-to than they think, which results in result a dozy driver running their vehicle into a lone tree that they weren't expecting to reach so soon!
I'm sure if it's happened once, it's happened before, and it's the sort of story which papers and word-of-mouth would carry, so it's entirely possible that many people, Hergé and Gottfredson included,have heard such tales.
If you take into account that such stories work best when stripped of too much detail (it's funnier if you just say "in the middle of the desert", than "by a road in the middle of the desert", and you don't mention that it was once one of several trees, all of which were also destroyed by people), it's easy to see that similar events just become stories of people driving across vast open spaces and suddenly hitting a tree, which then get transferred to strip cartoons.