But they still balls it up!
Nice!
My faith in the judgement of Richard Hammond and James May remains unshakable. They are clearly men of integrity, men who would not stoop to stunts such as…
Ah, bollocks. Top Gear hasn’t been about cars since about the time Chris Goffey was edged out of shot by Jeremy Clarkson’s perm, so what does it matter?
That damn thing. I ever tell you guys about the time, bout… four years back, maybe, Mercedes brought a prototype to the US (Jersey area, IIRC) for testing in live traffic?
Anyone want to guess the results?
Yep. It braked to make distance. Someone cut in. Repeat until the car was doing five miles an hour.
What’s this got to do with Top Gear? It was a stunt on German TV, according to the reports.
What does this have to do with Top Gear? All the links Ive checked talk about Michael Specht and Stern TV.
I thought this story, linked to in the above site, was a bit more distressing. :eek:
(I know it’s in Malaysia, not downtown Wichita, but still…yie.)
It was shown last Sunday on Top Gear, during the news section.
Didn’t someone ruin Audi sales in the US by concocting a fake test of a car with an oversized brake pedal?
So was the plan to show that the auto-brake worked or didn’t work? I’m baffled by the story. The engineers knew it wouldn’t work under the simulation conditions; yet they were bullied by a journalist into going along? The suspension on the car was so good the drivers didn’t notice they drove over their block-of-wood-used-as-a-mark and wrecked the cars? Why would they use a simulation the engineers knew wouldn’t work?
I assume they thought they were doing good for their company by showing the system seeminly in action. The journalist was in trouble then for saying it was the system itself failing and not the poorly planned test.
My understanding:
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Journalist convinces Mercedes to do a public demo under conditions that require them to ‘cheat’.
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Cheat does not work, resulting in a crash.
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Journalists from a different network/publication, who thought the test was valid, report failure of the autobrake system.
The people who reported the failure didn’t get in trouble. They had no reason to think the test was invalid.