Can't wait to have my car accidentally killed by the police

Re: Can't wait to have my car accidentally killed by the pol

I've heard about this.

One problem I see with this is that if this technology works it WILL get into the wrong hands eventually. People will use it to commit crimes, and ultimately, when the technology to build these things is cheap enough the same sort of jerks who write computer viruses will use it on people's cars just because they think it's funny.

 

Re: Can't wait to have my car accidentally killed by the pol

Tsk-tsk, all this safety nonsense. Can't people deal with a little liberty? If the car gets away, so what? There needs to be a little bit of an ability to at least try to get away for everyone so we can at least feel like we're not totally stepped over by the police...And no, that's not sarcasm. :mrgreen:

My general rule is that if it's illegal for your everyday citizen, then the police shouldn't have it, and I'm going to guess that this technology would be illegal for a general citizen, hehe.

 

Some thoughts...

The story is about bringing high speed chases to a safer end, yet the photo is of the famous OJ low speed chase!

There are still plenty of Dukes of Hazzard-mobiles on the road which would be immune to this thing.

If it fell into the wrong hands (and most likely it will), what would prevent the tables being turned, and cop-cars being zapped by the 'bad guys'? Will the cops have to drive old beaters too?!

 

interesting rule. my rule is that if the police have it, its only a matter of time before the crooks have a better version of it.

 

actually i see a big market for jealous wives out looking for the cheating hubbys.

zap the car because, as we all know, moving targets are so much harder to hit...

 

Re: Can't wait to have my car accidentally killed by the pol

Gimmee one!

I’d love to zap a few perpetually-late-for-work speeders who think 40 MPH on my narrow residential street is OK.

 

I would assume the same principal would work on cell phones, as well as cars. :mrgreen:

I'm also ignorant of what a microwave beam with this sort of energy behind it would do to human tissue. That would worry me.

In the end, though, it's very difficult to cork the genie after it's out of the bottle. Whether the police use it or no, somebody will be getting one sooner or later. (I'd be surprised if SWAT teams and the like don't already have a modified version of it.)

 

i think it would be great to get one that would just give drivers a "timeout".... say 10 minutes...

now that I would buy!!

it would be totally awesome!! complete KAOS!!

individual citizen traffic control, after all, who better to decide the traffic laws then the ones who break them daily.

i would be nice to have a robot controlled one in front of every school.

 

Re: Can't wait to have my car accidentally killed by the pol

I'd be ineterested to find out if this thing causes permanent damage to the car, and what the peripheral field range is. It sounds like it would be very easy to misfire this thing and inadvertently hit an uninvolved car, especially a car in the opposite lane of traffic, which could potentially cause accidents. And, what recourse do you have if they permanently fry the computer in your car? That's an expensive thing to replace, and if this device is used willy-nilly, that can become a mess really quickly. I also wonder about the affect on human tissue. Is the cop that is potentially using this thing even shielded enough, let alone the target?

 

Re: Can't wait to have my car accidentally killed by the pol

So who pays for replacing all the electronics in a Prius? Isn't it somthing like a dozen CPU's in a BC package?

 

who pays for it??

YOU DO!!

moral of the story....

DONT RUN FROM THE COPS!!!

 

good questions for sure. but dont look at this as some cop swaggering down the street wielding this thing like a Colt 45 or something.

current models weigh over 200 pounds. trust me, with laser sighting that is accurate within inches at HUNDREDS OF MILES, something that has an effective range of a few hundred feet will have no problems hitting their target moving or otherwise

also the power needed to damage sensitive electronics would be something that we couldnt even feel

 

Re: Can't wait to have my car accidentally killed by the pol

Way way back before the days of the majority of Prius posters, police cars could stop innocent little VW bugs with certain bands on their radios. They would do it "just for fun" around the campus. No permanent damage, just a puzzled driver. Now I could use the new technology if it would stop snowmobilers.

 

Well, the device operates in the same frequency band as cell phones. The article says the zapper works from 350 MHz to 1.3 GHz. That's actually a huge amount of RF spectrum, encompassing UHF television, police and fire radio, and the 800 MHz cellular phone spectrum.

This thing would have to blast phenominal amounts of RF energy to fry microprocessors. I can't imagine the FCC would authorize the use of a device that indiscriminantly blasts that much RF energy. I do not know, but I don't believe the article. Sounds like BS to me.

 

"with laser sighting that is accurate within inches at HUNDREDS OF MILES, something that has an effective range of a few hundred feet will have no problems hitting their target moving or otherwise "

It's one thing to aim from a stabilized platform, it's quite another from a pursuing car bumping along the road. So what do you do, use a wide beam pattern? Sure, you'll have no problem hitting the car you WANT to hit, but what about when that same beam hits cars nearby, hearing aids, pacemakers.

Narrow the beam? That sharp a beam will lose little power with distance and pose a threat to objects far behind the target vehicle, such as computers in the building behind it.

The liability in anything but a wide open road is huge.

 

cmon KT phil!!

BE REAL MAN!!

you forgot to mention aiming AND driving at the same time... now thats a skill

 

we can hit a jet flying nearly a thousand miles an hour performing evasive manuvers at distances up to 25 miles away but we cant hit a car 200 feet away?

hmmm need to think about that one a bit longer.

 

Re: Can't wait to have my car accidentally killed by the pol

This really isn't anything new.

Around a decade ago there was a DARPA project that came up with a mobile "sled." The officer fired this cute rocket powered (Very tiny rockets though) "sled" from the front of a police car. The gadget had antennae protruding, had some huge nasty capacitors, and would go under the suspect fleeing car.

It would then discharge several hundred thousand volts, in essence a lightning strike but under the car. Same end effect, by coming into close contact with the wiring harness it would cook the PCM and the car would stop.

It takes a *lot* of energy to disable modern automotive electronics, as the metal shell of the car acts like a Faraday Cage. If you don't know what that is, Google it. Long story short the Faraday Cage Effect is why a car is one of the most safest places to be during a lightning storm.

The amount of energy involved is fairly easy to generate, we've had MMIC's and MASER's for a long time now. I would think there would be a safety issue to the police officer from such a power source.

When radar speed guns first came out, the output stage was still a vacuum tube. To be ready for use, it was always kept in "standby" to keep the filaments warm, so it was still emitting low-level doses of microwave energy.

To conceal the device, a lot of officers would lay the speed gun on their lap. Guess what part of their anatomy was affected? If they already had a family, fine, if not, tough.

It makes more sense to broadcast "noise" to confuse the onboard network and PCM. That is, you could target specific frequency bands that onboard networks use, and within that narrow spectrum you would broadcast chaotic noise.

To ensure you cover most of the cars out there, you could quickly sweep through the target bands. This is known as "chirping" and is similar to EW used against Threat radar and communications systems.

I don't foresee something the size of a walkie-talkie that could generate that level of energy and be controllable. However, most of the technology is already Public Domain so an enterprising criminal ring could - in theory - develop such a device for use against the police.

The issue of targeting is still very troublesome. It's very difficult to hit a moving target from a moving platform. It's fairly easy to hit a moving target from a stationary platform. It's also fairly easy to hit a stationary target from a moving platform. I would imagine the only way to guarantee any sort of accuracy would be from a stationary microwave emitter.

Some have suggested that perhaps the criminals *should* be allowed to get away. Pure BS. There is little enough deterrence factor as it is, why make it worse?

Otherwise you'll end up with a situation like what happened in Winnipeg this winter, when a street gang of 10-14 year olds were stealing cars and putting a brick on the gas pedal. The car would rocket down the street or a back alley to crash into another car or a building. Just luck nobody was killed.

The kids laughed it off as they didn't even spend 4 hours in jail. Back on the street to do it again.