We do have hard shoulders. But, increasingly they are being used up on very busy sections of motorway, which are converted to ‘smart’ motorways. Shoulder converted to a normal running lane with overhead red/green signs to tell you when you can use them.
But motoring org’ns were always a bit uncertain and this year …
How about an axe?
I used to know the time to within about 15 mins when I didn’t own a watch. The ability has atrophied now. Apropos fancy-schmancy cars, much as they fascinate me (I own a moderately fast ex-luxury shitheap and love a straight six engine), that whole penis extension thing is ludicrous and annoying. Especially Lambos. If I wanted a car that would make me look cool and sexy, I reckon I’d drive an Autobianchi:
Oooooh, band name.
And one where the head will fly off if you don’t get the special exotic-plant-resin glue replaced regularly by a maintenance specialist. The level of fussiness and expense required in maintaining these high-end vehicles adds to the silliness of having them. Why else would this crazy-expensive machine just stop in the middle of driving? At least I know my boring regular-ass Honda has pretty good odds of getting me to the supermarket and back today. Reliability is definitely not what you’re shelling out the big bucks for when you buy these things.
There are exceptions but if you get rear-ended the default is that it is the other guys fault.
Because there comes a point when you’re ability to add value to the world is exceeded by your means to do so, so you divert those means to frivolities. Essentially it’s a failure of imagination.
I liken it to pre industrial kings going off to fight wars to garner slightly larger empires. They basically had nothing else to do with their vast power. It’s not like they could invest in R&D to discover better forms of energy, or they had the insight to think much about effective welfare programmes.
So basically a super-model 
I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating. I have my private pilot’s license and (if I had the money (I don’t)) would love nothing more than to fly WW2 airplanes, even just AT-6 trainers. But I am currently completely unqualified to do so. I would kill myself within 3 flights at the most, probably less. I know what my limitations are, however. And so if someone handed me the keys to a P-51 mustang I would politely turn them down.
Yet there’s a class of people that think that because they can drive pretty well in traffic, they can therefore drive supercars. And they are morons.
Again? WTF!
I’ve read about accidents where a fan belt wrapped around an axle and instantly stopped the car or flipped it.
That’s the irony re some exotic cars: Their makers’ cater to the price-is-no-object-crowd… therefore their engineers/designers can go far into what goes into the final product (performance/safety/reliability) without having to worry about the price point to the same degree that their counterparts in the family sedan market have to. To satisfy the latter market, numerous details must be furiously sweated out to deliver an affordable vehicle that owners would be happy enough to be brought back to again and again model year after model year while still turning a profit.
So gentleman didn’t actually crash his Lamborghini - it just made a better headline to claim he did?
Thanks for thinking of my headline reading pleasure.
Damn that’s cute. I want to bring it inside and give it a saucer of milk.
Yeah had this discussion with a skydiver during a recent paragliding course. People who take these things up think they are going to buy the ultimate high performance gear but put them in the air for their first ten hours of flight, and they will happily buy the safest, most conservative equipment because they suddenly realize their life is 100% in their own hands and its really dumb to make that any harder than it needs to be.
That is the most British thing I have heard in a long time. Cover decades long neglect of essential maintenance and investment in the future through a “plucky” solution displaying “British ingeniousness” that in reality relies on unsafe and unsustainable practices, spin the hell out of it with a fancy name to make the government look good and have it all fall apart when reality bites.
I mean, that sounds a lot like the history of Jaguar.
I looked it up and this collision happened in a short section of the motorway (5 miles long) that doesn’t have a hard shoulder, because it has been widened to four lanes in each direction.
I always read that Lamborghinis are notoriously fire prone on sites like Jalopnik, but didn’t really know why. As I was posting I decided to check out why. It’s kind of obvious, but apparently they run super rich (and therefore super hot) to get the kind of power necessary to propel Russian oil barons and trust fund teens at absurd takeoff speeds. The perfect crossroad of unqualified, narcissistic drivers and wasteful wealth.
Oh, and a lot of the fires happen during burnouts. That way, if you don’t happen to blow up the engine, you can destroy $3000 tires. Just to compound the stupid.
There is another version in manual transmission cars with large engines. The driver shifts down a couple of cogs and the engine just refuses to spin up, resulting in a loss of traction to the back wheels and corresponding loss of control.
