40 
OK, so I’ll admit I thought about taking my Dad’s sports car for a spin or two when I was a kid, but I didn’t. Judging by this video, I’m pretty glad I didn’t. What happens when you let loose a teenager in a BMW M3 with a GoPro strapped to the side? Carnage, that’s what.
Blasting down an Arizona highway in a fast car is awesome. Misjudging a turn and totalling the front of, what’s highly likely to be your Dad’s car, now that’s just priceless. Oh no, what the hell have I just done. [YouTube via Jalopnik]
The BBC's Got a Slick New Free Sport App For Your iPhone
A Bunch of Wimbledon Centre Court Tickets Is Your "Screw Football, I'm Going to Watch a Proper Sport" Deal of the Day
Toilet Training's Way Easier When Your Kid's Distracted With an iPad
That’s not gone well..
lol, hope he gets grounded for a year..
It doesn’t look like he even attempted the turn
I think his front wheels lose contact
They do, you can see he turns the wheel in anticipation and freezes up when nothing happens.
HAhahahahahaha,
That’s brilliant
When driving quickly keep your eyes UP!
All manner of fail here.
Also, I wouldn’t call an automatic car regardless of it’s make or model a sports car.
That said, I’d have loved to see the damage to the front.
It looks like an E39 so no automatic there.
Sorry, E46… Bleh
It’s a sequential manual gearbox in an E46 M3. It’s not an automatic any more than the gearbox in a Ferrari Enzo is automatic. He could be using the paddles, but this guy has just put it in auto mode because he lacks the skill to, you know, change gear. *sigh* Americans.
and steer
I was going to say, it didn’t look like he was using the paddles at all. I can’t stand automatics, driven a couple for work, hated them, takes all the fun out of driving, my manual RX8 however, very very fun, regardless of how impractical it may be with UK fuel prices.
Automatics have their place. Mostly in town and stop/start motorway traffic. Judging by the sound of people riding clutches outside my house a lot of people in this country would benefit from having an Auto. But I agree, if you really want to ‘drive’ nothing beats a proper manual..
I do agree. My point is that this is a deficiency of the driver and not the car that’s on display here. I most certainly would describe an M3 SMG as a ‘sports car’, or at least a ‘sports saloon’.
I’ve driven a DSG box in a Golf R. It does take some of the fun out of changing gear, but it shifts so damn fast that it adds some of its own fun too. It also improves acceleration, so it makes the car faster.
DSG is probably the best compromise for driving on the road since you can bung it in auto or get it to change when you want to. You can’t heel and toe but, quite honestly, that’s only really important on the track.
It does blip the throttle on downshifts if you’re driving enthusiastically though. I guess that’s compensation for the lack of heel & toe.
IMHO, DSG does an amazing job of providing the best of both worlds.
I was quite amused how you can pull up at some lights and take your foot off the pedals and it’ll sit there but slightly tap the throttle and they’ve engineered some creep into it
I have the car he’s driving, an E46 M3 SMG, and I can assure you it’s nothing like an automatic and the car is definitely a sports car! It has a clutch but it’s an electrohydraulically actuated clutch pedal, so you still choose the gear manually but it depresses the clutch. On hills it will still roll backwards (makes parallel parking on a hill a nightmare). I chose the SMG so I could have something new to learn (takes a while to get used to it) and also I love the blip on the down shift.
I drive an Audi TT MK2 DSG ( semi-auto ) and I can tell you its the most fun I have ever had driving.
You can drive it like a manual, put it in auto or sports mode.
Manual you just push the stick or the paddles to change gear. Lets you rev hard and change at high revs. The computer engages the clutch so a gear change takes fractions of a second, power doesn’t drop off. The next gear in line is preselected by a 2nd clutch before it is needed.
Auto is the easy way to drive, it changes gear when it is most efficient, at quite low revs. Saves on fuel and messing about in traffic with lots of stops and starts.
Sports mode tightens up the suspension and the computer changes gears at higher revs allowing for a faster, more aggressive drive. Scares a lot of people until they have a drive and see how well the car sticks to the road.
DSG / Tronic allow for the racing start as well where you just disable traction control, floor the accelerator while the brake is on and release the brake to go. It is the only way most drivers could hit the true 0-60 mark in a way a good driver could do in any car. Truly fast.
In all modes you can use the stick or paddles to up / down shift and flooring the accelerator hits a button behind it which also downshifts. This is good for hills and overtaking.
If you do get a DSK / Semi-auto then pay for Hill Start as its quite hard otherwise without a true manual clutch peddle.
At traffic lights in auto or sports, when not even trying I am probably doing 30 when everyone else is still just starting to roll. Its just that efficient.
Does it take away from a true driving experience, I don’t think so. I don’t miss a manual clutch as it gives me more time to concentrate on the road and the driving experience. Something that you should be doing more of in a more powerful car.
He was going way to fast! You couldn’t even see over those bumps in the road, no wonder a corner was hiding behind one. I’d only floor it on a dead straight flat tbh.
1) Epic win airbag technology – never seen one ‘go off’ before. 2) He is lucky not to have a broken neck from the bumping around that threw his head side to side. A benefit of young bones, soft and less likely to crack.
I remember my boss loaning me his car once to go on an errand for the company. His only words as he handed over the keys were, “Don’t break it.”
I was filled with fear and drove in second gear the whole way…
I was actually thinking that the airbag had failed miserably there. It goes off when the car hits the rock from the underside, which would be more of a whiplash injury, with the driver being thrown back slightly.
By the time it comes down and hits a rock the bag has deflated already! I suppose they can’t make them for every single type of accident.
This. If airbags go off under the wrong conditions, they can cause more harm than good. It’s hard to tell, but it looks like this particular impact was never going to cause the driver to smash into the wheel, so perhaps the airbag should not have deployed.
Airbags go off when sensors are activated. As the car hits a rock, which launches the car in the air I would say it did its job perfectly as the sensor activated. The car was travelling as such speed and received such a force the limits were reached and the logic applied. The same force while stationary probably wouldn’t have deployed the airbags.
Airbags are just a safety feature, and once deployed a car can be basically written off, no matter the extend of the crash damage. Apart from ripping apart the dashboard, side panels, smashing windows ( which they do ) they will go off even when you don’t have anyone in the passenger seat.
I would have thought that the main factor that should determine whether an airbag deploys is extreme negative longitudinal G, not just any large G force. If an impact causes the car to launch into the air, then the airbag shouldn’t necessarily deploy, as that’s a vertical G force.
Imagine if this guy had hit a concrete block a second after being launched into the air. As the airbag had already deployed a second earlier, it wouldn’t have been as effective as if it had deployed at the instant that the car hit the brick wall.
I suspect that the reason that insurance companies often write off a car when the airbag has deployed is because it’s an indication that the car has been subjected to significant G forces, and may be unsafe to drive, regardless of the degree of visible damage.
The first impact would have been longitudinal as the car was travelling forward before hitting the rock. That would be the inpact / trigger point, it all takes a fraction of a second. Job done.
It is no concern to the engineers what the car hits or where the direction of travel is after the impact, just an impact force and the size of the force and other initial conditions.
For instance if you were traveling along a road and hit a car the airbag would deploy. Hitting the car could launch your car into the air or off the road or into oncoming traffic. This is after the impact the bags were designed for. You could not argue the engineers should have designed the airbag to wait for a second impact before deploying if both satisfied the conditions.
In some cases a second impact on the side of the car, after initial collision would activate the side airbags but this is not dependant on the first, just that the conditions were again satisfied but for other airbags.
Yes, this is all quite obvious…. Like I said, it doesn’t look like the first impact should have generated enough longitudinal deceleration to cause the driver to hit the wheel, and therefore the airbag shouldn’t have deployed. It looks like his head doesn’t even travel forward as the airbag deploys. I mentioned the second impact scenario as a demonstration of one reason why it’s bad for an airbag to deploy when it’s not necessary for it to do so.
An airbag does its job better when it only deploys when it’s 100% necessary for it to do so, and I don’t think this qualifies as such.
wtf! what kind of idiot drives a car that fast down a road they clearly dont know, theirs a reason race drivers study the track before driving it. twat!
Part of being able to drive a car correctly is knowing when to apply speed and when to break. This kid known neither as can be seen through the whole video. It sounds like he is not breaking, just letting of the accelerator. If this was a normal car without the computers then he would have wiped out earlier.
yeah definitely, i thought it was gonna let go way before he actually crashed it
This is basically me on every driving game I’ve ever played. The old ‘hide the bend over the brow of a hill’ routine gets me every time.
This reminds me of Need for Speed: Prostreet and the High Speed runs in the desert. Same thing always happened to me 90% of the way through a race!
The kids even smarter for keeping the evidence on the GoPro….
An expensive lesson! Hopefully this single incident has taught him respect for money, respect for other people’s property and not to act like a dick.
His Dad should set up a payment plan spanning the rest of his life.