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Geek and Gadgets Set Cross-US Speed Record
Brikus writes "And you thought your car had gadgets. In this story from Wired magazine, we hear about Alex Roy and his quest to break the record time for a cross-USA road trip. One of the biggest roadblocks to breaking the record: highway patrol officers, about 31,000 along the way. So Roy decked out his E39 BMW M5 with a thermal camera, radar/laser detectors, GPS devices, police scanners, and other high-tech gadgets and toys."
Step 1: Speed across the United States while at the same time documenting your lawbreaking for all to see
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit???
Wow. If this guy doesn't get warrants out for his arrest because of this story I'll be really surprised.
:P
Congrats, Roy, I guess. Try not to drop the soap
(I woulda called the highway patrol on him too.)
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
How about: "Geek sets record by breaking the law and endangering innocent men, women, and children in selfish quest to do something pointless"
Seriously, this doesn't push any boundaries of technology or vehicle science. It tests two things: being able to stay awake, and being able to break laws and get away with it. Here they are tearing across the country in a car filled with distracting devices, sleep deprivation, fatigue, driving at unsafe speeds near vehicles filled with normal people trying to get to work or school.
32h07m divided by 31,000 highway cops means driving past one patrol officer on average every 3.7 seconds. How can the gadgets help under such circumstances?
Don't mistake haemorrhoids for testicles. He might be a dick, but he's definitely an asshole.
If you want to do something gutsy, go skyjumping, base jumping, downhill mountain-biking. Something that doesn't run the risk of injuring or killing innocent bystanders who want nothing to do with you.
What a fucking bastard.
To call him a geek is an insult to me and all other geeks i know of.
To endanger other people's lives like this is utterly despicable.
Obviously, he doesn't care if he kills someone along the way. If he did, he wouldn't do this.
Or what, is he a superhumanly safe driver is some non-imaginative way? Not fucking likely.
Put that asshole in jail(it would be OK to lose the key) right now, for showing that he has the obvious intent to go out try to kill people.
And why Slashdot sinks to the depths of publishing such a positively toned article about this psycho is far beyond me.
Baboons are cute.
This guy is an idiot and should have his license revoked. Anybody who thinks the public roads are his personal race track should be shot in the knee caps so that he may never drive again. what a prick.
I really hope this jerk is arrested for reckless endangerment to others. If he wants to play with own life, fine, but risking the lives of others for your own fun is not cool.
If he really wants to break the record he should do it on a motorcycle.
3000 miles on a motorcycle would add a whole new dimension to the word "torture". I'm not sure there is a person alive that could sustain those speeds that long. Riding a bike is much more fatiguing and requires loads more concentration.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
That's nice. Now, can we take away his driver's license and impound his car, please?
People need to read the whole article a little more carefully. This is only being publicized a year after it happened(2006), so I would venture a guess that all statutes of limitations have run out. 1 year on traffic violations seems about right. They were smart about it.
what a waste. give that F40 a new paint-job, and you have a pretty fast police pursuit vehicle to catch the next lamborghini. thank you, have a nice day.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Speed limits are there for a reason, so stick to them! Traffic tickets should be depending on income/wealth instead of being fixed like they are now.
Karma to burn, so I bite the bullet.
You suggest that speed limits are there for a reason, then provide the reason: quick cash for the municipalities.
Some limits are ridiculous low in some cases: I have a 30 km/h sign right in front of my window - and my condo is in front of a freeway! Often they are just a trick to further tax car owners, without resorting to the politically unpopular word "tax".
Here (Italy) there's a huge scandal about similar behavior by the police enforcers, and one that is quickly making some heads roll.
At some specific, usually not dangerous crossroads, the traffic lights have been reprogrammed to have a very short "yellow" time - around two seconds. It has been documented in a broadcast inquire on TV, with actual videos and SMPTE'd times. With two seconds from green to red, it's materially impossible to slow down and stop at the crossroad, even sticking to the very low speed limit.
So you WILL cross the crossroad with a red. And of course, that crossroad has this new CCTV system to recognize plates and automatically issue tickets in case of crossing with red. There was an outburst of enraged citizens against this practice: in a two weeks period, they received in excess of 13'000 tickets, all at the same crossroad. In a town with around 50'000 people, not a major city either...
Speed limits and absurd, often intentional, road laws are demonstrably used to sanate local administrations' budgets and balances. Disguised as "think of the children" policies, they are just another way to transfer resources from citizens to public administrators.
While traffic violations do cover a number of items, you can apply non-traffic-specific laws as well. How about "reckless endangerment" or any variety of other laws that might still be within the limitations?
I'm not a huge fan of the "think about the children" type arguements, but would we be cheering this guy on if he'd hit a pedestrian, wrecked some property, or something else that may have occured had he not been lucky?
This guy's not a geek, he's just rich enough to afford some expensive toys, a fast car, and not enough common sense or respect for others.
"Agreed, but he's also got a point. BMWs (at least the M5) are not built for this kind of stuff. Perhaps a Porsche 911 would've been more appropriate." "
Apparantly you own and/or maintain neither.
Despite all this rhetoric, he did it.
As somebody who has a stable of oldish German cars, one of them being a BMW (633Csi) and one of them having 700,000 kms on the clock that can still top 120mph (300SD) I'd argue vehemently that they are built for all day high speed runs. Not Italian cars and certainly not British cars. The Autobahn is partly the reason for this. German enginerring is another. They are meant for this sort of flogging, it's desinged in.
Given the attention to detail in the rest of the trip, my uninformed guess is the car was in as perfect a mechnaical condition as possible, quite possibly better than "factory new".
And as I said, the proof was in the pudding. He made it.
Need Mercedes parts ?
That's terrible.
How does it benefit anyone to crush a car? You just end up with a pile of mostly unrecyclable car parts, a waste of resources and possibly the destruction of an item of historical interest. Sounds like jealousy of the rich. You'd get a lot more benefit to society if the cars were auctioned.
Let's see: It's very spectacular, quite a bit of a deterrent, and it makes it clear that it is an actual punishment and not just an attempt at adding more money to the citys coffers.
Sounds like jealousy of the rich.
Well, in theory, the law should be the same for everyone ? So if you speed in your <$1000 rustbucket, it'll get crushed too.
You'd get a lot more benefit to society if the cars were auctioned.
Yeah, and you'd have all the sports car drivers whining how speed limits are only put there to transfer their money to the local government.
No, let's just crush the thing and avoid that discussion altogether.
There are those and there are those. Yes, those "speed limits" you describe exist, and they get more and more by the day. Most of the time you have some suspiciously well hidden or badly lit little sign , most of the time on top of a hill, just before it starts the dip, that tells you that instead of 70, you only may drive 30 here and, well, guess where your friendly and helpful law enforcement guys are sitting? Actually, these things make traffic less safe, not more, because, well, have you ever tried hitting the breaks on the top of a hill?
Neither do I understand an arbitrary speed limit of 55 mph which exists pretty much across the whole USA. Yes, it might have made sense in the 50s when cars could often go not much more than 55, and more often than not 55 was already a rather unsafe speed in said cars. We're now half a century further down the road and cars got heaps safer. At much higher speeds. Even my old and quite quirky Mazda 626 could easily handle the 130 (kph, around 80mph) speed limit without falling apart.
Still, there are speed limits that make sense. I wouldn't want to be a road worker trying to repair damages when right behind me cars zip by at 100 kph. Observing a speed limit of 70 would have saved me a car, right behind that limit was a rater narrow corner.
But one thing is true (and that last example illustrates it perfectly), when speed limits are imposed arbitrarily, as they are today more often than not, people start ignoring them. It's like with any laws, when you learn that a law makes no sense in 90% of the time, you start ignoring it in 100% of the time.
The roads would be much safer if speed limits existed only where they make sense. People would observe them because they would understand their need to exist.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
First off, for all the negative posts that name-call this gentleman for being "unsafe" and "reckless", I hope you do some homework and inform yourself about the German Autobahns. For those of us who have driven on the autobahns faster than this man did at anytime in his journey, we know that safety is how you are paying attention and driving, not that you are following the laws of the US roads. The man planned with extreme detail, drove a car that was designed to drive this speed for much longer durations, and obviously from the videos it is clear they were "paying attention". Just because the name callers on these posts are not capable of driving the speeds and distances safely does not mean that that team could not do it. And they proved it.
So please stop whining about the "danger" to society. There are many countries with faster speed limits (or little or no enforcement which equals the same thing). And by the way, in this country if he were to have had an accident, he would have been sued into bankruptcy. But fact of the matter is who cares he did it safely!
Real men don't need signitures!!!
That's because you're bad at physics and biology. Here's a few hints:
1. Braking distance is a function of velocity squared. Same goes for kinetic energy.
2. Human reaction time is about one second, give or take a few hundred milliseconds. There's no way to get it significantly lower than that.
Not necessarily. Some american drivers suck, and because of that american motorway speeds are incredibly low. Almost everywhere in Europe the maximum speed is around 80 mph, and everywhere you can safely drive at OVER 90mph, while in the US it's at 65 or 75mph. The problem with the american drivers is that they hardly ever use the mirrors. I've seen drivers going directly from the carpool lane to the exit quite a few times without ever bothering to check the damned mirrors. From my point of view, automatic gear-boxes combined with driving only on motorways, leads to bad drivers. I've also seen drivers with their feet on the dashboard. I can't possibly imagine how on earth is the driver supposed to brake and avoid a possible accident with his feet up.
They give an 18 year old a gun, they allow him to drive (which is potentially dangerous) at 16, but he can't have a beer until he's 21. Figure that out.
It seems pretty normal to me to learn about the effects of alcohol _BEFORE_ you can get a weapon or drive a car.
Getting back to the subject at hand. I think that the US should make the drivers license exam (the practical part) a lot harder. Driving on a mountain-side road with a lot of hairpin-turns in a manual gearbox car (possibly on snow or other bad conditions), teaches one about driving more than 1000 hours on a motorway. I also think that the guy has a very serious point by doing that.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
You've missed the point. Alex Roy was giving up the freedom of others to not be smeared down a freeway for his own freedom. Alex Roy was the guy giving up freedoms, only they weren't his to give up. Just as murderers don't have the right to kill people (even if it's their dream), people don't have the right to endanger others for their own indulgences. The PATRIOT act and talk of a "police state" has nothing to do with this. Nothing at all. People are upset about the PATRIOT act and the "police state" punishing those who are not hurting anyone else. Alex Roy endangered everyone he was near during his stunt.
Harder raod tests? Sure. Mountain hairpin turns? In snow? There aren't enough taxes in the state of Florida to bus everyone who wants a license to West Virginia or something.
Where I live, roads are mostly straight, mostly flat, and occasionally under water; that's what they need to test. My mom used to say she'd much rather drive in snow than rain, since the idiots thought they could drive in rain.
But regardless of driver training, nothing can prepare you for some idiot coming up behind you at twice your speed. I'm good about using my mirrors (unlike most Americans, I have almost no overlap between my rear-view and side-view mirrors, so I have almost no blind spot). If I want to change lanes, I signal, check the mirror, and go. What looks like a two-second following distance disappears in, you guessed it, two seconds if the idiot is travelling at twice my speed.
Don't undersestimate the startle factor, either, as somebody blows by you at 70mph, relatively. How many accidents (and near accidents) did this guy leave in his wake, with people he never touched?
You might say it's the American sheep culture, that on European roads you have to expect people to pass you at high rates of speed. But that's because it's legal in (parts of) Europe. Here, we expect "bad boys" to whip by at maybe twenty over the limit. This guy's a moron if he thinks he can't hurt anyone he doesn't hit.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
Being a geek (in the sense of the word we use it here) is more about values than anything else:
I should point out this point includes ethical constraints: it's a greater accomplishment to do something better than anybody else, whilst doing it ethically. In fact, making intelligent decisions about which constraints matter and which ones don't is central to being a geek. When I was a young, rule-breaking hacker at MIT, we had a rule -- or rather a sense of style -- that demanded we do dangerous things safely and illegal things responsibly. If we were some place we didn't belong, we didn't interfere with the legitimate users' activities. Leave the place better than you found it, or at least no worse.
These values are not a moral philosophy in themselves, but they can inform whatever moral philosophy you subscribe to. Insofar as it is easy (observe the note of contempt here) to reconcile being a geek with being an ethical egoist, the particular stunt being done can be called a geek stunt. But it is not a hack.
Eluding the authorities whilst doing a hack can add to its stature, but only if what you are doing is strictly reasonable. Otherwise there is a good chance that you're not a hacker, you're just a scofflaw. Scofflaws use technology to avoid the authorities too. It's not much of an accomplishment.
Now, setting the record for crossing the country with the requirement that you don't exceed the speed limit even once -- that would not only be a hack, it would be an epic one. Naturally, you'd have to develop a technological method for documenting your feat, one that would convince a skeptical rival. That would be a hack too.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hear, hear! I hope they jail the SOB. These people aren't rebels or pioneers, they're dangerous sociopaths. They shouldn't be on the roads.
Since when does driving real fast qualify as sociopathy? And judging from the incredibly lengths he went to to defy authority while doing what he enjoys, yes, I'd say that at least in this domain he's very much a rebel.This is not my sandwich.
I am curious, as any time that I have done 120 plus MPH, my reaction time was affected by adrenaline
Or was it your perception of your reaction times that was affected? "Look at me, I'm going so fast, I'm so cool". Please.
On the highway, you are in one mode: Avoid everything.
Actually, this guy was probably in many modes. Look at GPS, look at radar detector, drink more coffee, try to stay awake. Oh, and maybe glance ahead every so often.
Assuming dry pavement
So it never rained on this whole trip? There were guaranteed to be no oil patches on the highway? No loose gravel? No glass that could cause a blowout? The highway is not a racetrack and is not maintained to the safety level of a racetrack.
That M5 likely would stop from 100 MPH in in under 200 feet
Awesome. So now he just has to make sure to stay 200ft behind any other vehicle at all times. Think he actually did that? Nah, me neither.
Speed doesn't kill. Bad decisions do.
People make bad decisions every day. Everyone does. When it comes to driving, speed invariably makes the results of those bad decisions much worse. He wants to throw his ass around a racetrack at high speed he's got my blessing, but stay the hell off the roads my kids are on.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Speed limits were created for ticket revenue generation.
Ah, that must be why it's stood for 22 years. Let's see you do it.
90 mph average from NY to LA? Good luck.
Actually, the picture in the article was from this year's Gumball 3000 -- an event where they are contractually obliged to deck their cars out in the event's sponsors' logos. It was also an event that took place after Alex's speed record attempt. Jalopnik has some pictures of the car as it was decked out for the transcontinental run. Aside from the abundance of antennas and a few small stickers on the trunk, the car looked like a relatively normal E39 BMW sedan.
One thing the Wired article also neglected to mention and that was mentioned in one of the Jalopnik articles (that I'm too lazy to look up a link for) was that they actually crafted a cover story in classic Cannonball tradition. Their cover for their fast driving and for all of the gadgets on their car was that they were storm chasers chasing a fast moving front across the country. I find it kind of funny since, to my knowledge, most storm fronts in the US move from West to East, not East to West as they were driving.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Doing 90mph on a 70mph road is probably fairly safe if there is no other traffic, the road is dry and visibility good, but that's a rare state.
Have you ever driven across country in the USA? Seriously, this is anything but "a rare state".
Most of this country, despite what many believe, is wide open space with low population and even less traffic. It's not difficult to do 120 mph for several hours without ever seeing another car. (I've done it though closer to 105 mph--I've only gone 120 once and it scared the crap out of me.) Populous areas are actually quite spread out until you get to the coastal states. If you avoid those and shoot straight across the middle of the country, it's very easy to "hit the open road" and avoid most traffic issues.
I'm not saying what this guy did is smart, but it's far from automatically being as reckless as most of the comments suggest. Yes, generally speaking it was a stupid thing to do for a "record" that really isn't all that hard (it certainly didn't require all the ridiculous gadgets he added to his car) to attain. Stupid is a relative term though, and can be easily moderated to be far less stupid or even more stupid. I'd dare say he did make some effort to minimize the stupidity of his actions, if for no other reason than making the task easier by avoiding traffic, though I don't know that for sure.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
The speeding laws are outdated and only serve to let the police reach their weekly quotas. It is the police who keep them outdated.
In more logical countries it is not illegal to drive fast, but it is illegal to tail-chase other cars. This has shown to reduce accidents much more than speed-limiting laws, as tail-chasing is a very dangerous behavior, but simply speeding is not.
The next time when you drive slow enough but are tail-chasing the car in front of you ask yourself if you're not a reckless driver, just because the law says so.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Well, I've got no objection to those stupid wreckless drivers; it's the reckless ones I can't stand!
The moon may be smaller than the earth, but it's much farther away!
Go, friend! Please don't kill anyone while driving, it would make you look bad, and you'd lose precious time.
Frankly, that old "speed kills" line has to disappear into oblivion, fast. Here in Belgium everybody drives like a maniac, nobody cares, and we don't have more accidents per capita than in the US.
Slowing down cars helps no one, it only creates bottlenecks, frustration, and a slowed country with a slow economy. Responsible people know how fast they can drive in what area so as not to damage anything or injure anyone, simply take into account every possibility at every crossroads and you'll never crash.
Learn how to drive safe, you'll drive faster.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
The best way to break the record is to forget the gadgets and have a team of drivers who drove half a mile in front of me to spot/distract the cops.
It's not as cool... but it'd be fastest.
The USA is far too anal about "speed". Speed isn't the problem it's moron drivers, and highway driving in SUVs with auto-everything is the best way to produce them.
In Spain we drive through the center of town at what Americans would think of as "highway" speeds and nothing happens because we're used to it.
PS: Check this video of Team Polizei's encounter with the Italian police - the Italians have a healthy attitude towards driving.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbbtK90LZ9E
No sig today...
Ahh, another day, another idiot who presumes that "doing 200Mph safely" has anything to do with your car.
First off, the M5 is electronically limited to 250kph, like most European vehicles that can go that fast.
Second, stopping distance is proportional to the square of speed. Your reaction time is not.
People who claim that driving at 125MPH is safe don't understand the problem. The problem is not whether or not you can control the car. The problem is what you do when something unexpected happens.
Considering that a pretty good fraction of our cars are manufactured in Korea, Japan, or Europe, I'm not sure what you mean by the "crappy suspension" that "we" put in "our cars". Wake up. Volvo, Jaguar, and Land Rover are owned by Ford. Until recently, Daimler owned Chrysler.
This expresses everything that's wrong with your attitude. You are driving on a public highway, putting everyone else at risk by the very nature of you being there. Good drivers cause crashes. Bad drivers cause crashes. You are not so skilled that you could not screw up. Even F1 drivers screw up.
This is the LAST place where you want to be testing the limits of your vehicle. And if you do screw up, it will be far, far worse if you are going 125MPH.
Note that this driver AVERAGED 90 MPH. Considering that he had to stop for gas and other necessities, he must have been going faster than 90 MPH for a fair portion of the trip.
I am so sick and fucking tired of these arguments. Somehow, it's always the OTHER drivers who are the problem. Somehow, YOU are "skilled" enough to drive excessively fast (note that over the limit doesn't necessarily mean excessive). Perhaps YOU have never made a mistake and caused an accident. That's not the point. Perhaps someone else will make the mistake. Perhaps you will slip up. IT HAPPENS FAR MORE OFTEN THAN YOU WOULD LIKE TO ADMIT.
We design and operate airplanes with significant safety margins, so that people don't die when mistakes or failures happen. The same logic should apply to motor vehicles.
what would I do if involved in a fatal accident in a 3rd world nation?
Quit whining, and take some responsibility for your actions? You made the stupid decision to race in the third world nation, with full knowledge that racing is a risky venture.
The world isn't your fucking playground, rich boy.
You want to race on a closed racetrack? Fine, that's between you and the racetrack.
You want to race down my street? Fuck off. I'll hold you responsible for your actions.