Chevy take you skiing back to the dock.
Posted on 05/26/2019 10:44:35 PM PDT by Impala64ssa
Do NOT try this at home kids. It doesn’t end well.
What, was racing a train across an intersection too ‘pedestrian’ for this guy?
Did he just finish a marathon of car-racing flicks like Fast and Furious or The Transporter, and the driver felt a need to show off like he could do it too?
Was he just so damned impatient that he figured this dumb stunt was worth the risk?
Or did he just look at the bridge and say to himself, ‘Doesn’t look so tough. I could probably make it’.
Of course, we’ll never know why he did something so reckless. Because we can’t ask him.
Louisiana State Police say two men from Texas died attempting to jump the ramp on the Black Bayou Bridge early Friday morning.
Alejandro Cazares, 23, of McAllen, Texas, and Roberto Alejandro Moreno, 32, of Edinburg, Texas, were both pronounced dead at the scene.
Trooper Derek Senegal, spokesperson for Troop D, said the men were traveling south on La. 384 (Big Lake Road) in a 2016 Chevrolet Cruze, when they came to a pontoon bridge that was closed to vehicle traffic to allow a boat to pass on the Intracoastal Waterway. The bridge has a pontoon section that swings out to allow ships to pass and a ramp on each side that lifts up.
A witness told state police that Moreno, the passenger, got out of the vehicle and pushed the gate arm up, allowing Cazarez to drive under the arm and pick up the passenger.
Cazares proceeded toward the ramp at the end of the bridge, stopped briefly, placed the vehicle in reverse, then accelerated forward in an attempt to jump the waterway and land on the other side of the bridge.
The vehicle landed in the water and sank to the bottom of the waterway.
The driver was unable to get out of the vehicle and the passenger’s body was found outside the submerged vehicle. Source: WAFB
Maybe if they knew the real story about the toll all the stunts the Duke Boys were known for took on the iconic Orange Dodge Charger, he would have thought twice about it.
In the beginning, a couple of cars were wrecked by flipping over during a jump until ballast, in the form of sand bags or concrete, was put in the trunk. It is believed, according to Road & Track, that more than 300 1969 Dodge Chargers were totaled during the run of the show, many because of bent frames from jumping.
If, by some chance, a stuntman actually lost control, the film of the accident was written into the show. Because of the number of cars that were destroyed, the producers had people going through parking lots and flying over residential homes offering to buy any 1969 Dodge Chargers that were found. Source: VintageNews
There are better ways to make the news besides being a dumbass.
Sadly, the best they could now hope for (so to speak) is a Darwin Award nomination.
You can help make their untimely deaths still mean something. Help others learn from their mistakes.
Stupidity really can kill you — pass it on.
I didn't have a Confederate flag on the roof, but I did on the front license plate. :)
The Chevy Cruze would have made it if they had remembered to weld the doors shut.
Final words???
Hey it worked with the hot wheeee
...
eeels! blub blub blub
I bet there is more to the story. Like being members of Cartel and drug running are involved in their decision.
Some “Texans” from the Mexican border tore down a fence and sought to cross illegally to the other side of the bridge.
There, I fixed it.
That’s not a shame; it was criminal.
“Hold ma beer”
It looks to be about 150 feet
The ramps are maybe 10 feet
I would think the car couldn’t start reaccelerating until all 4 wheels were on the ramp.
So that leaves, what, 5 feet to accelerate?
I’m guessing the ramps were all the way up? 60 degrees maybe? The drawbridge in post 11 doesn’t look quite that steep.
Even at 45 degrees you’d have to be going about 70 mph to make the jump. They might wreck the car on the ramp going from 0 degrees to 45 degrees...so they might have to confine the acceleration to the ramp.
Bending the frame - that scene from Speed with the bus jump was unrealistic.
Would have made it in a Toyota.
Chevy take you skiing back to the dock.
“As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
Yeah, looking at the span and the length of the ramps... I don’t think there is any reasonable combination of ramp angle and speed that puts them on dry land. Increase the angle and you’d hit it so hard the suspension bottoms out, front end drags, and you lose velocity and basically have a collision with the ramp. Lower the ramp to avoid this and you don’t impart much positive vertical velocity, so you need a tremendous amount of velocity to get across the span before gravity brings you down. I haven’t run the numbers but my gut instinct is that you’d need a ramp angle of 10 to 15 degrees and a velocity in excess of 130 mph. Based on the fact that stadium jumps of about that length usually are about 60 or 70 mph, but with a much higher ramp angle.
I read this before, but didn’t realize that it was a “how to” article. You need ballast in the trunk to keep the car from flipping during the jump.
Who knew?
Reminds me of a segment on a James Bond stunt. The one with the car doing a barrel roll in a chase scene. Pre-CGI.
The creator wouldn't give out any details of the physics "out of concern" for the safety of wannabe emulators (among other reasons, I'd bet).
I put some numbers into a spreadsheet and I've come to the conclusion those boys were doomed from the git-go. Of course common sense and gut feel tells most of us that without the physics to back it up.
Making some simplifying assumptions: no aerodynamic drag effects, and a well balanced weight and dampened suspension that isn't going to kick the backside over the nose, enough ramp to achieve reasonable stability before departing mother Earth...
With a ramp angle of 10 degrees you would need a vehicle velocity of 85 mph. That would land you 165 ft down range after achieving a rather unimpressive 7 ft or so at apogee...
Bump the ramp angle up to 15 degrees and a vehicle velocity of just 70 mph sails you to a dizzying height of about 11 ft and 163 ft down range...
Much more of a ramp angle isn't realistic - it starts looking like a collision with a barrier rather than transitioning to a ramp. ;-)
However, even being generous, a more reasonable estimate of velocity, a generous estimate of velocity, might be 40 mph? With a 15 degree ramp that's only going to get you maybe 53 ft down range after about 3.5 ft "up"... In other words they probably didn't even make it 1/3 of the way across the span... They were more Wile E. Coyote than Dukes of Hazard.
Getting impaled on the
Far side ramp was my
First Thought.
351
Didn’t they try to reproduce the “jump” from “Smoky and the Bandit” down at Road Atlanta a while back? (using a TranAm Pontiac). Anyone know how that came out?
Not all heroes wear capes.
:)
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