Posted on 04/07/2014 7:59:52 PM PDT by artichokegrower
San Francisco police are investigating an unusual crime spree after four people who live in and around Bernal Heights awakened Monday morning to find their Smart microcars had been rolled over by groups of vandals.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Ooompah oompah oompapapa POP goes the weasel, or however you’d sing that nasally in Spanish.
Is Mentos (The Fresh-Maker!) back to filming weird commercials again???
Did you see the picture of one punted by a train here in the OC. There was massive damage to the car but the driver walked away.
38 to 40 MPG is good by American standards but a friend and I averaged 40 MPG in his 4-door Renault diesel on a 1995 trip from Siena to Venice. The two extra doors and the added room certainly made the car more practical although getting used to a manual transmission after not driving one for 20 years took a while.
I don’t think that car was stationary when it was overturned, look at the damaged metal around the broken out back window.
No, but I saw on the local news one that had hit a Lexus head on. The “Smart” car was unrecognizable and the driver dead. The Lexus driver walked away.
Unfortunately, this isn't true at all. While Mercedes advertises the Smart Car's 5-star crash rating, what they fail to mention is that this just means the passenger cabin stays intact in a frontal impact. In a car where there is no space for a crumple zone, however, a rigid body is a bad thing. When the Smart Car hits something, rather than absorb the energy like a normal car it's extremely rigid frame instead transfers the impact to the driver's body and most seriously, to his brain as it impacts the front of his skull while his body is held in place.
Top Gear crash tested a Smart Car and determined that while the car stayed remarkably intact, this just meant that the driver took the brunt of the crash forces and would have died. There's no magic here: A car so small that your feet are essentially right behind the front bumper has no ability to protect driver and passenger from the tremendous G-forces involved in a collision. For your sake, I would seriously rethink the whole Smart Car thing.
You mean the owners of the cars, or they people doing the tipping?
“My 2008 Smart car was $19500., bottom line.”
Did you have to sign a ‘waiver’ when you bought it?
“No, but I saw on the local news one that had hit a Lexus head on. The Smart car was unrecognizable and the driver dead. The Lexus driver walked away.”
4 Smart microcars tipped over in San Francisco
Pictures all show the same license plate for one car though... Too hard to find the others?
When I was a youngster, a friend and I would go around lifting up the back end of little cars and turning them sideways where they were parked. It was a hoot, especially when we found a car parked in a driveway between a trailer on jack stands and a wall. We always kept our ruckus rules to exclude any type of damage. I wish I saw some of the faces of the owners the next morning.
Liberals in SF are not pleased by this new trend.
When the first Honda cars appeared, we, er, people would pick them up and turn them sideways in the parking spaces.
Was that taken at Aberdeen Proving Grounds (APG), MD?
My dad had the misfortune of owning a 1969 Renault. At 30K it needed a new transaxle. At 50K a new engine. I finally ended up driving it for a few months in high school. The emergency kit included a wrench and screw driver to reattach the carburator which despite Lock Tight and other products managed to shake itself loose in a matter of hours driving. In short the only thing Renault built right was the front seats which I took out and put in another car. Oh one last thing the crank for the jack doubled as a hand crank for the engine. No Joke. Renault was the Yugo of the day.
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