Italian white van man nudges sound barrier An Italian driver faces a €165 fine and three points off his licence for impressively nudging the speed of sound in a Fiat Doblo. The white van speed merchant was clocked gunning it in the small town of Orio, west of Brindisi, in the heel of Italy's boot. Cops were somewhat surprised to record his speed as 1,230 km/h, meaning …
Has it occurred to you that this is newsworthy not because anyone believes he was doing that speed, but because the Speed Camera returned a completely incorrect speed?
That's how I read it, especially knowing how inaccurate Gatso's can be.
Perhaps you might like to check the facts before venting!
You Sir are a genius.
You have perfected the perfect Trolling post. Deliberately missing the point and replying with a conviction that is a guarantee to ire any sensible person and yet at the same time invicting enough doubt in your understanding of the obviousness of the articles irony that you can at the same time be considered to be a genuine dolt. Of course this is the desired result and you will be healthily fed as a reward. Even if admittedly the source material is a gift to you this is still a commensurate achievement.
Bravo.
Journalists are famously inept when it comes to matters mathematical. During the recent floods in Queensland there were at least a couple of hilarious numerical stuff-ups. One newspaper reported that, according to one farmer, 30,000 pigs had been swept away by flood waters. It turns out the journo had misheard the farmer saying "30 sows and pigs." A misread news wire also resulted in one TV anchor claiming that a predicted 40 meter rise in the level of a river was in fact going to be a 80 - 90 meter rise (the numbers were actually 14, 18 and 19).
I always thought good listening and comprehension skills were a prerequisite for journalism. Clearly I was wrong.
I was driven to the airport on Monday by an Italian taxi driver who could certainly have broken the sound barrier all while talking on his mobile phone.
I figured the best course of action was to make sure my seatbelt was tight, sit quietly in the back and allow my wife to gently squeeze the blood out of my hand as she held it.
I have never seen so many cars with dents in them in my life.
All UK drivers you are forgiven!
It all depends what was in front of him.
Everyone knows that white panel vans are the fastest vehicles ever made by man. This is easily proved as it doesn't matter what you are driving or how fast you are going, there will inevitably be a white van right up your chuff and flashing its lights to pass.
The interesting question is what the heck was he trying to overtake at the time.....?
This post has been deleted by its author
C'mon Lester, you're known for good subtitles but you're missing an opportunity for a good^H^H^H pun!
What's all this about checking facts and engines exploding? Umm... you're not taking this reporting as a factual event, surely? Tell me the readers of El Reg have more common sense than /that/....
Mine's the one with a plaid effect. I call it my Reality Check (geddit?) No, oh, never mind...
Everybody who has used a motorway, or driven round town, knows that the fastest thing on the roads is a white van!
Sports car manufacturers have missed a trick, as the white colouring and boxy aerodynamics causes an exponential shift in spacetime, especially when a delivery is late.
Driving home late one night, in a borrowed, battered old ford fiesta, I was pulled up by the pigs and given a producer. At almost exactly the same time the next night, I was driving the same car home and got pulled again and given a second producer. I kept photocopies, because the first shows the mileage as 80,000 and the second as 88,000, so I have official police documentation to show that I must have been driving at a steady 333 MPH without stopping to sleep or piss for the entire 24 hours between the two pulls.
And I didn't even get any points on my licence!
This post has been deleted by its author
Wow.
I wonder how long it took to get up to speed, and how large a fuel tank it had, plus what type of suspension was on the car along with the tires?
And when can we get these in the US?
I bet I could sell a fleet to FedEx and then to all of those Pizza Hut delivery guys who have to get the pizza there in 30 mins or less.
PS. Do I really need to add the <sarcasm> tags? :-P
One thousand point three in English is 1,000.3 but in Italian I think it's 1.000,3 so there is scope for confusion, particularly with equipment sold across the single European market. I think the SI formula is "1 000,3" where the decimal indicator is your own choice.
Back in my military days I saw a hilarious incident with a radar speed gun. I was the officer in charge of the section that did all the calibration of electronic measuring equipment. It was a standing order that all electronic measuring equipment had to be recalibrated at least every year. We would then put a little sticker on the equipment with the date of calibration on it.
The Military Police got themselves a new speed gun and promptly caught my Warrant Officer speeding on base. His first question to the Military Police was, "When was that device last calibrated." The MP Corporal looked blank since it had never been calibrated. As soon as my Warrant Officer knew this he confiscated the speed gun.
Funny stories aside, because these speed guns usually work on a doppler effect it is actually very hard go get a frequency shift large enough to cause an error of this magnitude. Even if you happen to hit a moving part in the engine, or moving parts on the wheels, none of these parts can be doing anything close to the speed of sound. This means in this case it is likely to be either a faulty radar, or interference. The latter is very likely if the radar gun in question is X band.
Around thirty years ago some UK plod were getting (and attempting to prosecute on the basis of) similar stupid numbers. It turned out that they were "gunning" people on a stretch of road that paralleled an airfield runway. The high speeds were, of course, down to the jets making their run for takeoff as the cars passed.
Naturally, the police were unaware of the potential for erroneous pings in such situations and had picked the spot "randomly".
It took ages before anyone successfully challenged a prosecution because the five-o were careful not to submit anything *too* outrageous for further action.
"Anyone remember back in 1961, when the US early warning radar system saw the moon rise but thought it was a doomsday salvo from the soviets?"
Or the Russians nearly mistaking the rising sun for a salvo from the Americans in 1983? We owe a lot to Stanislav Petrov:
http://geoffolson.com/page5/page8/page24/page24.html
Noting that the Fiat Dobro is a family van, and not an exotic sports car, I have to think that the story, or the police radar, are in error.
Andy Green, in the Thrust SSC, did drive a motor vehicle at a speed over that of sound... 1227.986 km/h... in Black Rock Desert, not on the highway. However, his vehicle was of specialized construction, having turbofans.
Ah, and even though this happened in the U.S. of A., you Brits can be proud - he's an RAF pilot!
If you ever have an hour to kill in Coventry, go to the Transport Museum - Thrust SSC is there along with the control caravan. They also have a simulator where you get a mild impression of what Andy Green felt. It was a brutally fast car - I guarantee you will grin when you see the speedo numbers flash by as it gets into its stride.
It seems to be general consesus that there must be some error in the claim of such massive speed. However, isn't the point that the person writing the article should have reported on what the mistake was, rather than presenting the quite obvoiusly false information as fact?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
