A standard fiction device is to kill somebody by tampering with his car’s brakes. Ususally, it involves partially severing the brake lines, so that the victim will be able to get up to speed-and then when he has to brake hard-the lines bust, and the car crashes (killing the victim).
It is a popular device (it is rumored that the president of Brazil (Juscelino Kubichek) was killed in this way. However, it doesn’t seem doable-how could you precisely cut the brake lines? More likely, the victim’s brakes would fail pulling out of the parking lot-and you do have an emergency (mechanical) brake.
So, is this just a Hollywood dvice, or has it actually been done?
I don’t know if it has been done, but it could be done. Worked better back before hydraulic brakes because modern ones would leave a puddle of brake fluid on your driveway. You’re likely to notice you don’t have any brakes long before the road gets windy at the top of a mountain, like when you are backing out of your driveway.
Sounds like a Mythbusters testable-scenario-will the emergency brake still be usable, and/or could you stop the vehicle using just your gears?
In any case, in fiction, the brakes only fail when the intended victim is doing 70 on a winding mountain road. They never fail when doing 15 on a suburban street.
I had a similar experience - my accelerator stuck on while driving through a twisty suburban road (lots of woods) north of Princeton. I didn’t have that car long after that experience, which was very scary.
As a practical method of assassination I’d say it’s much too uncertain and is probably a Hollywood invention. Excluding the special and rare case of a winding mountain road, it would be reasonably easy to make a car lose momentum by scraping it along a gutter, fence, side of building or even the sides of parked cars. Some damage would be done, but no deaths.
I recall watching some very old movie, I think it was ‘Three Days of the Condor’ where the sabotaged brakes failed and the car transformed itself into a perpetual motion machine. The car started going down a short hill, went halfway across a suburb, across a long bridge, up and down a few more streets before finally crashing into something non lethal. The whole incident where the laws of physics were abolished lasted maybe three or four ridiculous minutes.
I think the idea is that you don’t sever the brake line, just slice it. That way it only leaks under pressure. Backing out of the driveway, stopping in town, etc. just drain the master cylinder slowly, hopefully without the driver noticing. Then, when they tromp on the brakes hard, the last of the brake fluid squirts out of the lines and they’re fucked.
My brakes failed on a city street. The light came on and I had ample time to pull over. Had it happened on a highway, I might’ve been in for a spot of trouble, as the emergency brake had broken some time before, but proper use of engine compression would’ve likely saved the day.
Conveniently, the characters in movies whose brakes fail are always idiots.
At any rate, it’s not a method you would use if you want to make it look like an accident. The tampering would be too easy to spot.
What if you make it look like groundhogs did it?
The tampering might not be obvious. A perpetrator could partially open one or more of the “bleed” valves present on each wheel cylinder and/or brake caliper. This would result in an incremental loss of hydraulic fluid, without any cutting required.
Of course, as noted above, the victim would have to live at the top of a mountain, and use that winding mountain road of necessity. Causing a brake failure in stop and go city traffic wouldn’t gratify an assassin’s ambition very well.
However, we must also assume that the driver panics and forgets about the emergency brake (and never wondered why it’s called that) and the transmission. Had a friend who lost his brakes and rearended somebody because of it. He tried to use the emergency brake but it wasn’t enough. I wondered why he didn’t just drop it into Park, which would stop his car very fast. A new transmission would be cheaper than all the body work he needed.
ETA: Ooh! Interesting idea, CannyDan! I may steal it. Er, for a story, that is. Northeast Illinois is much too flat for it to work.
Silly Grumman! Groundhogs eat–or lick–tires, not brake lines.
Dropzone, most owner manuals I’ve seen refer to it as a “parking brake”. I doubt that many of them could actually stop a car, especially one headed downhill at a fast clip. Many “parking brakes” operate on only one or two wheels, not all four.
And dropping the transmission into park will almost certainly not work (assuming you mean an automatic tranny, since manuals don’t have a park setting). But Park doesn’t actually “lock up” a tranny’s guts as may be popularly imagined. Instead it inserts a “park pawl” into a gear. Neither the pawl nor the gear are robust enough to actually stop a vehicle. They merely add rolling resistance, helping to prevent a stopped (parked) car from rolling down a slight difference in elevation. But the manual typically exhorts owners to apply the parking brake to help ensure that the car will still be present when one returns to it.
One could slow the runaway by using compression braking (shifting the tranny into lower gears) and slow it further by shutting off the engine while in the lowest gear. Then, perhaps, one could get some additional resistance, temporarily, by shifting the tranny into reverse. This will almost certainly cause catastrophic failure of the tranny, and may not stop the vehicle. Afterward, further compression braking will be impossible, so this would be my last resort.
It’s also not a method you would use if you care at all about possible collateral damage. You’re not just endangering your target, but everybody else on the road anywhere near the vehicle at the time. The courts would be very, very hard on that if you’re caught.
Aim for something soft and trust your airbags.
On several occasions I’ve rode with people who forgot that the parking brake was engaged and drove for quite some time wondering what the smell was and why the engine was straining.
Yep. And if they do it habitually they soon wear out one or another part of the mechanism. After which they no longer need to worry about releasing the parking brake, ever again.
Nah, you wouldn’t need to worry about that - when a car crashes, it invariably bursts into flames, eliminating all evidence :).
On my old car, I would occasionally switch the engine off and coast downhill when in a traffic jam. The brake would work normally initially, but after a short time the servo would stop working (because the engine was no longer pumping the fluid around the system. However, the brakes still worked - you just needed to press MUCH harder. Is this analogous to the situation when there is zero brake fluid? I assume not, but why?
It isn’t. In your case, you still had your hydraulics. You were just lacking the power assist. If you cut the lines, there is no hydraulic fluid left, no matter how hard you stomp on the brake pedal. No fluid means there is no way to brake.
But we’ve seen that the perps never survive that long, at least in the movies, where this is a far more popular method than in real life. Around here the method is to just shoot the guy you want to kill. Or blow up his car. These are more reliable methods.
That’s just a euphemism, something the PR people changed to reduce the scariness of driving. Everybody who watches old mysteries knows what it’s REALLY for.