Highway patrolmen have a lot of time to contemplate cars. And I've always wondered why they stop the car going 10 mph over the limit rather than the one that just overtook it in the outside lane at the speed of Joan Rivers' mouth.
So I am grateful to CNET's Wayne Cunningham for revealing the list of the 10 most ticketed cars and the 10 least ticketed:
Most ticketed Rate Least ticketed Rate Hummer H2/H3 463% Jaguar XJ 11% Scion tC 460% Chevrolet Suburban 16% Scion XB 403% Chevrolet Tahoe 21% Mercedes Benz CLK63 AMG 397% Chevrolet C/K 3500/2500 pickup 28% Toyota Solara Coupe 306% Buick Park Avenue 32% Mercedes Benz CLS63 AMG 276% Mazda6 34% Scion xA 275% Buick Rainier 37% Subaru Outback 266% Oldsmobile Silhouette 37% Audi A4 264% Buick Lucerne 40% Toyota Matrix 264% GMC Sierra C1500 pickup 40%
*Violations per 100,000 miles driven, expressed as percentage of average.
It seems that the police love to ticket Hummers most of all. Perhaps some of you will find this understandable. Rarely has a brand attracted such wholesale disdain. Rarely have men attempted to make up in such an obvious fashion for their paunches and manboobs.
But why do police have it in for the Scion? Three different Scion models festoon the Top Ticketed Ten. They were accompanied by two types of Mercedes, the Audi A4, the Subaru Outback, the Toyota Matrix, and the Toyota Solara Coupe.
I have a theory. The Scion site describes the brand as 'United by Individuality.' Unfortunately, too many individuals have bought Scions and chosen for them to look like instruments of youthful, effeminate subversion. Naturally, in times of orange alerts and a surge toward national defense, these strange Toyotas harbored a visual threat to our secure motorized monotony.
My theory appears to be strengthened by the list of the least ticketed. There you will find the following nine cars: Chevrolet Suburban, Chevrolet Tahoe, Chevrolet C/K 3500/2500 pickup, Buick Park Avenue, Mazda6, Buick Rainier, Oldsmobile Silhouette, Buick Lucerne, GMC Sierra C1500 pickup.
This group arouses a couple of questions: 1.) Is it possible to create a list of cars any less moving, any more tranquilizing than this? 2.) What is an Oldsmobile Silhouette? And 3.) What is an Oldsmobile?
Is it therefore possible that whenever our police see one of these cars rolling down the road, they feel an emotion somewhat akin to a dulled sympathy? Is it possible that these cars arouse so little feeling that a radar gunner cannot quite believe that they are speeding or running a red light, even when they are?
My theory is only threatened by the presence of the Jaguar XJ as the least ticketed car in the United States. Why might this Jag be so resistant to the routine of flashing lights and spreading legs?
Well, perhaps there simply aren't many of them on the roads, and this number is a statistical anomaly. Perhaps a majority of Supreme Court judges drives Jaguar XJs. Perhaps these cars are so beautiful that the police just stand and stare, incapable of flagging them down and wafting the wand of justice at their drivers.
Or perhaps there are many among our police forces who simply have a fondness (or an understandable sympathy) for things British.
I had a Jag once. A pretty car. The engine (made in America, I believe) was great. But the vents (made in Britain, so they said) rattled, even after five visits to the shop. So I gave it back. But while I had it, I never got a ticket.
Gas may well be cheaper, but for how long? The markets shoot up, so does the demand for oil and suddenly you're filling your tank through your nose again.
In my daily quest to rid the world of its ills and leave only the smiles of stupefied faces, I believe I have found the solution to this crushing dilemma. It lies in two very recent scientific happenings.
Firstly, there was the mind-altering research performed at the Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada. Dr. Angelo Tremblay's team of intrepid psychosomatists found that it is entirely likely that thinking can make you fat.
Apparently, thinking uses up so much energy that you want to eat more. And more. Almost 30% more. Which presumably means that Luciano Pavarotti did far more thinking than singing throughout his life. And that Janet Jackson has periods when she cogitates mercilessly, punctuated by swathes of time when she allows air to waft gently from her locks.
Jean-Philippe Chaput, the main author of the study, was quoted in the Daily Telegraph as declaring that: "Caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic currently observed in industrialized countries."
(You see, Americans are so obese because they're so intellectual. Up yours, Europe.)
How, then, can we use this excess of brains and fat to alter our globally warmed landscape? Well, we only need to turn to the daring work performed by Dr. Alan Bittner. I use the word 'daring' because Dr. Bittner's work has sucked him into a little bother.
This appears to be an early experiment in generating enough fuel to go from Copenhagen to Stockholm.
(Credit: CC Stig Nygaard)He is the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who allegedly turned fat from his patients into biodiesel, which he used to avoid his local Chevron and inject directly into the butt of his Ford Explorer and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator.
A gallon of human fat produces about a gallon of fuel. And the mileage you get out of your love handles is roughly the same as the mileage you get from diesel.
I understand and respect that currently it is illegal in the US to use fat produced by human guzzling to power your gas guzzler. But were that law to be relaxed, might we not be able to kill a whole flock of birds with one intellectual stone?
We could encourage the population to think more. People would therefore eat more. Then their excess poundage could be donated to fuel manufacturers. These voluntarily impounded donations would be tax deductible, naturally. And would result in a slimmer, fitter population. Until the people started thinking again, that is.
As the nation would become smarter, so would our cars. And the environment would tweet its gratitude from every river and treetop.
It is encouraging to be able to use science to solve so many of the world's problems by January 2nd. What would you like me to solve next? The financial crisis? I'm already onto it.
Aren't you momentarily stunned when your cab driver or your shuttle driver at Hertz or your local car dealership says something that really makes you think? Don't you wonder how someone so smart ended up driving you around?
Please, therefore, consider what it must be like to be Douglas Prasher.
Prasher, or as he should be known, Dr. Prasher, makes around $8 an hour as a courtesy shuttle driver for an Alabama car dealer. And he's been stunned to hear that the fruits of his work have led to a Nobel Prize for chemistry--which just happened to be awarded to two other scientists.
A couple of years ago, Prasher was involved in a slightly different kind of shuttle--the one occasionally shot up by NASA. And a few years before that, in 1992 to be precise, he isolated the gene that makes jellyfish glow in the dark. At the time, he believed this discovery could be used to study some of humankind's most debilitating diseases. He was right.
It's just that at the very moment he made his breakthrough, his funding, which had once come from the American Cancer Society, ran out.
He could have kept his work to himself. Instead, he mailed a couple of test tubes to Roger Tsien at the University of California and Martin Chalfie at Columbia University.
"It was more important to me to hand over the tool to other scientists with the funding than to have individual glory," Prasher told London's Daily Mail.
So how did he end up driving those nice folks in Alabama to and from Bill Penney's excellent and, no doubt, munificent Toyota dealership?
"After I gave up my work on the jellyfish, I eventually found another dream job, with the U.S. space program, but I was laid off in 2006 and I haven't been able to get another scientific position," Prasher said.
Prasher has three children and, apparently, had just taken out a large mortgage when he was laid off by NASA. But is it really possible that someone with so much evident ability can't get a more appropriate position in America's scientific community than helping to shift a Scion?
It's not as if Chalfie and Tsien don't concede Prasher's role. Tsien even sent him an e-mail to apologize. But doesn't Prasher deserve something more than a little acknowledgment?
If this were a movie--and perhaps it will be--Chalfie and Tsien would visit Prasher and offer him a cut of the $1.5 million Nobel Prize.
And then, in the last scene, he would get another knock on his door--a new sponsor to finance his future research. That sponsor would be Toyota, wouldn't it?
You're going to tell me life isn't like the movies, right?
- prev
- 1
- next
