Watch: Car launches like a rocket after hitting toll booth (driver survives)

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Originally published at: Watch: Car launches like a rocket after hitting toll booth (driver survives) | Boing Boing

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So that helicopter bit in Live Free or Die Hard is legit?

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Actually, it doesn’t look like the toll booth was affected at all since the car didn’t get that close. And “fifty feet”? Laughable.

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Them Duke boys are at it again.

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Yeah, bonus points to the designer of the crash barrier! Those barriers are there to protect the booths, and that one worked flawlessly.

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It is. Or, rather, it MIGHT be assuming a lot of factors, but the “launching the car high enough it could happen” part is realistic. There have been several of these incidents in real life. I almost think I remember Mythbusters looking into this, but I’m not sure now if they did.

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Lost in translation, or more to the point, conversion error from SI-unit into… something else.

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Seat belts, people-that’s how the driver probably survived this.

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Seat belts? I survived because I was tied up in the trunk.

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TBF, looking at that video, it probably wasn’t far off fifty feet.

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50 feet? No. 10m, maybe.

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Well, the nose of the car may have made fifty feet.
(I’ve lost my bloody tape-measure).
Still, a valiant high-jump effort.

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I, too, sometimes have difficulty choosing a lane.

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Same, choosing between horizontal and vertical is a bugger for me.

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The nose of the car went 25 feet up and then 25 feet back down, so technically it went 50 feet, in the air.

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This car crashed into a Toll Plaza barrier… that is more accurate.

Crazy how there are never any slow-speed collisions in these situations, always someone going Mach 1 in a rush to meet God.

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Average car length is almost 15 feet, so yeah, I’d guess 20 to 25 feet, tops.

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Or garbled spoken English: fifteen / fifty

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Unlikely:

  • Original source: CCTV 1)
  • China is metric 2)
  • Re-reported by USA Today
  • Intern at USA Today just winged it because he thought the 67th amendment makes conversion mandatory but was too stressed to look it up

 

1) “Unintentionally ironic since 1958”
2) As decreed by the CCP; talk about hard metric.

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Seem to me the flaw is in the design of the barrier. Seems kinda lethal for a defensive barrier.