That car really tracked well, and stayed on the road, right up until it didn’t.
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Yeah, that kinda surprised me. I’m used to properly-aligned cars tracking straight with no hand on the steering while rolling forward, but in reverse…
Oh. Yeah. It’s coasting. Front-wheel-drive cars rolling backwards would likely spin out quickly under power (due to the caster angle being aligned for travel in the opposite direction), as would rear-wheel-drive ones without locking differentials (due to one of the drive wheels being allowed to slip, which is why non-drag-race cars have differentials in the first place). But coasting, I guess there’s no reason for it to veer off course suddenly until the terrain made it do so.
If this car happens to have an automatic transmission, I’m not surprised the Park lockup failed. It happened in my Mercury Cougar years back. To this day, if I don’t set the parking brake when I park on anything steeper than a very slight slope in Park, the car will (gradually at first, then faster) ratchet itself right down the hill.
One of these days I’ll fix that, but so far the parking brake alone (along with proper wheel-cramping on hills) has been enough.
I’m fairly certain he hadn’t planned past “oh shit, must catch truck”…
the snow grooves might have assisted, until they didn’t.
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Yeah gravity sucks.
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Backwards is slightly more amusing: http://i.imgur.com/9k0uIto.gifv
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The tragedy is that about twenty years ago he could have made some money by selling his footage (and it would have been actual footage) to a light-hearted specialist TV program.
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I’m amazed that the guy could run that fast on snowy terrain. Still, a lesson: don’t chase after rolling cars unless someone else’s life is in danger. I damn near ran over myself once in an effort to stop what ended up being a 3 mph collision between my car and a wall. Like dropping a knife – once it goes, just let it happen.
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I see it as an allegory for what it looks like when democracy gets away from us.
Tex Avery would have handled this differently. At least, the car would roll half-way up the next hill, and then start coming back…
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Yeah, 1600 kg of car going 20 kph is…a metric crapton of momentum to try to stop.
Best bet might be to try to bump the left side of the front of the car to swing it onto the gentler slope, vs. the trees. Then again, that’s where it swung and it rolled, so maybe the trees were the better option.
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