Microsoft Money Leads To Street-Legal Porsche 959s

Ken Greenebaum writes "Soon there will be a 'new' Porsche 959 racing down highway 520 in Redmond. This article in autoweek describes how Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Ralph Lauren teamed up with Bruce Canepa to make the 959 street legal. Best quote: Gates 'suggested to Canepa that perhaps they could federalize the car by buying a number of sacrificial 959s to "crash and test."' They modernized and increased the performance of the already super car to: 575HP making the 15 year old cars race to 60 in 3.3 seconds with a top speed of 215MPH."

Comments

Only not street legal in the United States!

[avidday]

The 959 was always street legal, expcept in the US, because of Porsche's refusal to supply the required vehicles (up to four if memory serves correctly) for the mandatory crash test. People have been happily and safely driving their road specification 959's (Porsche had to build 200 road going examples for FIA Group B homologation purposes) in many other places since deliveries began in late 1987.

Re:Microsoft money buys laws

[abmurray]

What has always struck me as idiotic is that the 959 wasn't street legal in the US while other, non-crash-worthy super cars like the Ferrari F40 and F50, Pantera and Shelby Cobra have been.

Whether or not a car is 'street legal' in the US is entirely up to the manufacturer. The car must adhere to emissions and safety regulations. The car must also be crash-tested and all relevant information throughly documented. There's a host of hoops the manufacturer must jump through that can add significantly to the cost of the car.

It's not the government that was keeping the 959 from being street legal, but Porsche itself.

--
a.b. murray

Re:tagging bills together

[JimBobJoe]

The thing that struck me about this article was how screwed up the US political system is whereby bills are all bundled together

This is a peculiarity of Congress. States usually have constitional requirements for single subject bills (with names that identify what the bill does, none of this "Save the babies and orphaned Hamsters act of 2003" shit) as well as line item veto.

I happen to know that several states, like my Ohio, and Illinois, get pretty mean on enforcement...courts have no problems throwing out laws simply because they were codified under a bill that had multiple subjects.

Re:tagging bills together

[Zeinfeld]

In the UK our bills have a short title, which is what they'll be known as if passed, and a long title which sets out what the law is for. The bill may not contain anything that is not consistent with the long title.

That is not the reason for the difference. In the UK the government controls time in both houses of parliament and introduces almost every bill (except for private members bills and 5 minute rule bills). The government has such a tight control on the legislature that there is nothing to be gained by adding an ammendment to an unrelated bill. If the government does not like the ammendment they can either strip it out in the Lords or gut it on the floor of the House.

There are cases of ammendments of this particular type making it into law but they would have to be attached to a relevant bill, in this case it would probably be a transport bill. What you do not get is ammendments to bills that direct money to particular interests such as a tax break for Haliburton or (Bob Dole's favorite) Archer Daniels Midland.

In effect the situation is much closer to what you would have in the US if there was a line item veto provision.

It is also possible for a private bill to get passed. This is a major undertaking but occasionally happens, usually for something like the channel tunnel, building of a railway line or such.

The real truth about the US 959

[britt]

http://www.6speedonline.com/forums/showthread.ph p? threadid=1594

Here is some info from the guy who did the work for
Gates, and wrote the 959 portion of the Show & Display law.

Canepa Design really has had nothing to do with this

B