Tag: Cars

Amusing

Real Life Hot Wheels Double Loop

A team of engineers and two crazy drivers are preparing for a history-making challenge drawn from the daydreams of every child who’s ever crisscrossed his parents’ living room with plastic race tracks: building, and racing on, a human-scale Hot Wheels double loop track, just like the one you had when you were a kid.

The “Hot Wheels Double Loop Dare” is set to take place at this month’s Summer X-Games in Los Angeles. Drivers Tanner Foust and Greg Tracy will attempt to race through a 60-foot vertical loop modeled after the new Double Dare Snare Hot Wheels toy, in what would be the first time in history two cars mounted a vertical loop at once.

“We’ve done large-scale stuff before,”said Dave McKay, of Laissez Faire, the company that designed and created the physical structure for the stunt.”But this is the biggest stunt that I’ve ever been apart of.”

It’s a race and a stunt in one, with the drivers racing two purpose-built cars at 52 mph down separate tracks that merge into one big loop, where they will face a a gravitational force of 7 G’s (that’s what a fighter pilot feels), before being spit out on the other side to complete a jump. First one through wins.

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Amusing

Abandoned Antique Cars Nature Has Reclaimed

After they paved paradise and put up a parking lot, paradise fought back. Peter Lippmann’s photos foretell the fate of many a gas-guzzling machine with cars that have been reclaimed by nature.

Lippmann’s photo series is called, appropriately, Paradise Parking, and it’s all the more beautiful for having antique cars as its subjects. I imagine it would take a bit longer for some more modern vehicles to look so melancholy under the ivy.

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Amusing

You Are What You Drive

Strategic Vision conducted a major study of new automobile buyers, including party affiliation. For what it’s worth, a new car buyer is more likely to be a Republican than a Democrat, by 37% to 31%. Strategic Vision identified the five “most popular models” for Democrats and Republicans. The results look like a parody, but they aren’t:

Democrats:

1. Honda Civic Hybrid
2. Volvo C30
3. Nissan Leaf
4. Acura TSX Wagon
5. Ford Fiesta sedan

Republicans:

1. Ford Mustang Convertible
2. Audi A8
3. Mercedes GL
4. Ford Expedition
5. Ford F-­‐150

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Amusing

Well of Death

As seen above: Yikes.

What you see there is called the Muat Ka Kuan in Hindi, or, in English, the Well of Death (or sometimes, the Wall of Death). And yes, that’s a car in it. And yes, the car is driving on a vertical wall, perpendicular to the ground, defying gravity.

The way it works is simple, albeit too close to insane for most to try. Cars or motorcycles start at the well’s bottom, traveling counterclockwise while picking up speed. At the base of the well’s walls are inclines, and the drivers carefully (carefully!) make their ways up the ramps. As they accelerate, it becomes safe (relatively speaking) to enter the nearly vertical walls, as centripetal forces keeps their vehicles adhered to the sides and out of gravity’s — and harm’s — way.

In other words: Yikes.

The stunt has its origins in the United States. In the early 1900s, motorcyclists at Brooklyn’s Coney Island took to the boardwalk, climbing the walls of much less steep motordomes. The fad waned in the United States but not before it spread to Europe. If you are in the UK, you can still experience motorcycles (with their drivers decked out in helmets and safety pads) climbing near-vertical walls at traveling carnivals. But performers in India have taken the stunt to another extreme: cars scaling nearly 100 foot high walls as their drivers take to action without any safety precautions.

As for why local authorities allow the stunt? There actually have not been many efforts to regulate the Well, as exhibitors rarely suffer serious injuries.

More images (including a larger version of the one above) are available at All That’s Interesting.

Bonus fact: The Well of Death does not actually involve death, at least when done correctly. The same cannot be said for the Euthanasia Coaster, a project designed (but thankfully not built) by a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. The Coaster, seen here, has a huge lift followed by seven inversions of decreasing size. Taken together, it is designed to kill its passengers, as its name suggests. In theory, it would do so by denying oxygen to the passengers’ brains for a prolonged time, leading the passengers to black out and, ultimately, die while unconscious.

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