Soon they’ll start equipping the hood ornaments with little machine guns to defend themselves like the door knocker on Jabba the Hutt’s palace door.
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It seems like a mechanism like this will only encourage someone to find a way to steal one of these things. People like a good challenge.
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I don’t think the hiding behavior specifically is for safety – more of a side effect of safety regs. I do remember the spring-loaded ornaments on Mercedes and Chryslers from my childhood (we would bend them down and watch them spring back into place).
Pedestrian collision safety regulations are no joke. They are what killed pop-up headlights, and part of why front fascia and bumper designs have changed so dramatically since the 1980s.
I’ve been hit by a car as a pedestrian, and it fucking sucks.
@jerwin Exactly what I was thinking when I saw this thread.
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I thought these days they hid when parked and re deployed when driving. (Have not clicked on video. There may well be intrepid spirit wrangling from moving cars)
What?! You’ve gone too far this time, “safety.”
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I am afraid that as a supposedly responsible adult I used to enjoy demonstrating to people that RR mascots folded down. On more than one occasion this caused excitement and a desire to avoid my vicinity.
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Apparently the stock one is in the $10,000 range. Fancy ones go higher.
It’s probably best to get a fancy one so that you can proudly say “My hood ornament costs more than your POS car!”
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It’s nice to see that petty vandalism has its eager supporters here, too!
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Hell yes.
I had a friend who was ex-Army and stayed in contact with some of his lads in logistics after he retired. As a result he was able to acquire a somewhat knackered SEL500* and restore it to more or less showroom condition (he then went on to do over 50 000 miles in it in a couple of years).
He used to enjoy telling people who asked how much it cost “Oh, a bit less than a basic Ford Escort.”
*with folding propeller mascot of course.
…must…resist…temptation…to…post…about…guns
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- The correct term is Rolls-Royce Motor Car, as Messrs Rolls, Royce and Johnson (who was a lot more to the original company than just the hyphen) once stipulated.
- These days, it is technically (and in more than one possible meaning) a BMW, courtesy of Volkswagen - when Vickers sold it in 1998, things got a little bit complicated.
- These days, a Bentley is technically a Volkswagen.
It should just retract when the car is locked.
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I think it can, but there’s an option to leave it up to taunt the thieves.
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giphy is really starting to piss me off. Not as bad as shitbucket, but…
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Oh well, I don’t know how the damn thing works anyways
It’s not Giphy that is the issue, I believe it’s Discourse BoingBoing limiting gifs to 3MB (Discourse never hotlinks images, it downloads and hosts them on the forum itself, which is good because security and future proof against link rot).
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Depends on how the gif is made. Occasionally you get a gif that is made using some fancy video-to-gif wizardry that doesn’t embed well like regular gifs do.
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However, the sort of people who have had them in the family for a long time tend to refer to them as “Royces” - because the hon. C S Rolls was just the salesman, Royce designed the cars.
Royce snobbery is a wonderful thing. The modern ones* depreciate like a very fast depreciating thing, and a guy in East London, UK had the idea of replacing the engine and gearbox on old ones with the Diesel version of the GM truck engine that the British car company used. (They bought GM parts en masse and simply threw away the ones that were outside their tolerance - and I was told that by a former manufacturing director of RR motors, so I believe it.)
The motor company did not want to sell him spares to prevent him putting his Diesel RRs on the road, but the EU, I believe, intervened.
The problem with the cars of that generation was that the bodywork and so on (which cost most of the money) long outlasted the cheapo GM petrol engine. The Diesel was actually a better fit in terms of longevity, but not NVH. But for some people the prospect of driving a £16000 RR around the place and knowing that the servicing costs were actually quite reasonable was tempting.
The old Royce whose bonnet ornament you bend back to test the spring may be driven by someone with a sense of humour who did not want to spring for a Teutomobile.
*i.e. the last British ones, before they became another German badge,
