I almost died today

Ok, that may be a bit of an overstatement, but it was close!

Some background information. I don't have air conditioning in my car, so I leave my windows down pretty much all the time, unless it is going to rain. Because of this, I have found some really interesting (and living) thing in my car when I get to it in the morning. Among these being raccoons, cats, and birds. It doesn't happen enough to warrant a change of habit though.

This morning, I was driving to work. About halfway there, I got stopped at a rather long red light. At about the time I I came to a full stop, I started hearing this really low buzzing sound behind me. All of my windows are rolled down except one, the one behind the passenger seat. It only works about half the time, so I generally leave it rolled up. As I look behind me, I see what I think is a small humming bird flying around in the back of my car. That is, until it landed on the one window that I couldn't roll down. It was a huge wasp. Like 2-3 inches long. The thorax was oval-shaped (this comes up later on) and very round and shiny. The wasp itself was black, brown, and yellow. Right now, I am pretty much paralyzed.

What I think happened is I have some bottles and stuff in my back seat. The wasp had crawled up under my seat last night. As I was stopping, a bottle hit the wasp or disturbed it or something and it starting flying around.

Anyway, I am at a red light. I have to figure out a way to get the wasp out of the car before the light turns green. Since all the windows are down but one, once I start moving, all this wind change will probably freak the wasp out and it will kill me. I a slowly move my hand over to the window button and start pressing down on it. It doesn't work, I press and depress about 5-6 times. As soon as the light turns green, the window starts to move down. By this time, the wasp is literally headbutting the window. It is loud, too. I can see the lady in the car behind pointing at it with a "WTF" expression on her face (it was that big, you could see it from the car behind me). Once the window is down about halfway, the wasp flies away.

Seriously, I don't know if I have been that scared in my life. As soon as I got to work, I started looking up giant wasps. There are some here in Texas, but they don't match the description of what I saw (the Cicada Killer wasp has an elongated and pointed stinger, the one I saw was round). The closest I found to what I saw was this.

Has anyone ever seen a wasp like this in Texas or have a better idea of what was in my car this morning?