This incident was a bit embarrassingfor the US Embassy in Dublin , and the Secret Service men involved. The crowd enjoyed it immensely. (The slope was foolishly created in the construction of this weird building by the US embassy.)
Scroll down to see film of the incident.
I was surprised that the president’s armoured car should be so vulnerable to such an incident - it seems to have been completely stuck. What are the criteria for armoured vehicles of this kind?
I realise that the armour would still protect the occupants from attacks from dangerous madmen like birthers, but surely one of the purposes of the car is mobility - to safely drive away from danger. This implies that the car cannot deal with any surface which is not completely flat. If it has to leave the road for any reason, it becomes a sitting target - literally.
If it was under any real threat it would have gotten itself unstuck. The driver probably did not feel the need to floor it or the other cars did not feel the need to give it a love tap or love smash out of its stuckness.
Well, when you say “armored vehicles of this kind,” those cars are one of a kind. They were designed specifically for the president. I would readily assume that the exact requirements for the car (e.g., must withstand such and such explosive, reach such and such speed, weigh no more than such and such pounds, etc.) would most likely be classified, so who knows what the expected ground clearance was supposed to be.
But it could also be the case that the car was designed to deal with obstacles of “x” inches, but later someone decided to put 500 pounds of more stuff in the car (maybe more radios, nicer seats, additional passengers, whatever) which lowered the clearance by enough to have a problem in that driveway.
You can’t build anything to do everything, so it gets built to what it us expected to do. I can’t imagine that there are many likely scenarios where the Beast and the President would be forced into four-wheelin’ it… I mean, he has helicopters, and it isn’t like the Beast travels alone so that it would be forced off into a country road. I’d imagine that the Secret Service motorcade would probably try to plow a hole through traffic before they would dream of telling the President to hang a right on Rural Route 638564, just past the old oak tree.
Looks like the car has too long a wheel base for that particulalr ramp. I don’t think it’s an issue with the car being armoured so much as it being a stretch.
I think another tick item just got added to the Secret Service’s checklist for scouting missions
It’s a very serious flaw and potentially dangerous. The car stuck, even if it had been for a second it’s bad. flooring it might cause the car to ram the onlooker, with the long wheelbase and all of that.
This amazes me on many levels. A shorter car bottoms out and they can’t figure out the longer car behind it will get stuck? On top of that it takes the SS how long to transfer to another vehicle?
Every bus tour I’ve ever set up involved a dry run with a car to scope out high points such as railroad tracks. It’s one of the basic items on a checklist that we pass on down to other tour organizers. This is amateur stuff.
As so much of the engineering of the car is classified it’s impossible to identify the incident as a vulnerability.
It could have ways itself of dealing with the situation but they weren’t in a hostile situation and easily resolved it without revealing anything about the capacities the car might have. Why show off your repulsor lift or extendable mechanical legs if you don’t need to.
In Québec (city) in 2001, a few weeks before G. W. Bush attended the Summit of the Americas, local journalists described how secret service agents measured the width of archways the motorcade would have to use. (They also had procedures for not-knowing-in-advance which elevator he would use when he got to his hotel, etc.) And this was before September 11th, mind you.
I guess in Dublin they didn’t do their homework correctly, possibly because they figured nothing could go wrong at the U.S. embassy.
I imagine the clearance of a car changes with weight, temperature and with wear on the shocks, so perhaps the car was just riding lower then it theoretically was supposed to.
I used to be part of a team that arranged events for Lamborghini. Ground clearance was something that we scouted very very carefullly before hand. And I am also surprised that just eyeballing it, it wouldn’t occur to somebody experienced to check.
It’s also a bit of a surprise that it took so long to get the car moved - either a love tap of a snatch hook would have pulled it off there pretty damn smart. (assuming an armoured and plated undercarriage that would be / wasn’t damaged by the beaching).
Having said that - it didn’t look like there was any significant risk. Mind you - that’s probably what was thought in Dallas also
I think it’s pretty significant that the president’s car can be stopped in its tracks by what amounts to an oversized speed bump. They will have to fix it by adding a hydraulic or compressed air system to jack up the car via the suspension.
I think it would be really funny if it ended up with, like, low-rider bounce up and down to hip hop music, abilities.
The only problem with that - how much is enough? If someone really has nefarious means in mind, I would think the “bump” is going to be pretty big - more than any hydraulic system can counter right?
This is far from my area of expertise, so I have no definitive answer. However, presumably there comes a point where the obstruction is so large that a driver wouldn’t even attempt to go over it. My guess is that this particular bump turned out to be an inch or two too high – the advance car got over it without a problem. I’m reasonably sure hydraulics could deal with that and more.
OTOH, if they used an advance car with the same wheelbase and ground clearance as the limo, it would have been caught first and the potential danger averted.
