We have seen the scene on several tv shows: guys cut car in half, do some magic for the fuel tank and manage to drive the two-wheeled contraption. Now, let’s say that one is to forget half his car over a railroad and a train manages to clip his car in half. Now the person has a pair of wheels with engine, fuel tank, seats and some body parts. Would it be legal to drive this thing on a road? I mean, you can drive… this thing http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Tata_Nano_im_Verkehrszentrum_des_Deutschen_Museums.JPG …
If there’s a state law on the books about having taillights/brake lights, you’d probably be screwed.
Can’t talk for where you are but around here there are regulations controlling modifications to motor vehicles. Outside certain permitted modifications, to maintain registration of a modified vehicle you need to obtain engineering certification of the modifications to show that the vehicle is still safe and still complies with all the relevant standards.
Needless to say chopping a car in half is going to utterly compromise braking, steering, passenger compartment strength, wheels and tyres, lights, etc all of which are, around here, very tightly controlled.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say the exercise is impossible but I think it would close to impossible.
They certainly did great candid cameras back in the time…
2 wheeled car…semi enclosed motorcycle…
Princhester covered basically what I was going to say, though I was coming from another direction: pretend the half car is something you built yourself (out of junk?).
To register it and use it on the roads, you are going to need a few things:
Does it have all the lights the law requires?
It is controllable? Does it turn and stop with adequate safety?
Will it damage the roads? (Dragging the rear works for limited distances on private property, on public roads you’re going to need to stick some wheels under there.)
I believe it can be done, but I’m not sure it would be worth the effort.
Baby, you can drive my half a car
And baby, I love you
Beep, mm beep yeah!
I can’t do the research right now, but I think there might actually be fewer requirements in at least some areas for a car you built yourself. I believe federal (U.S.) air pollution standards only apply to cars built for sale – IIRC you can build your own coal-fired steam car without getting EPA certfication, as long as you don’t sell it to anyone else (building a car out of spare parts is maybe a grey area here). BUT there are regulations about tampering with emissions controls on cars that were certified. And I think cutting off the catalytic converter (along with the back half of the exhaust pipe) would probably qualify as ‘tampering’, so you’d be in EPA trouble for the sawn-in-half car.
It very much depends on jurisdiction. As far as the Feds are concerned, I think the only real way it would be legal is if the car started out as a pre-1970’s model and so is only required to meet the (virtually non-existent) safety standards of the time.
However, a lot of states don’t really care what the Feds say on the topic and will give you a set of plates for pretty much anything that’s self-propelled and has wheels. It would be “legal” to drive such a vehicle in much the same way that pot is legal in Colorado-- still technically illegal under federal law, but it’s not like there’s a federal police force tasked with hunting down not-quite-legal cars.
A case in point around here are the Japanese mini-trucks (like the Daihatsu Hijet). These don’t come close to meeting the safety or emissions standards for their model years, but they can be imported as off-road farm vehicles. Once they’re here, though, my state has no problem giving them a set of plates and letting them drive around on the highway.
The Feds have been known to make an example of an illegally-imported grey market exotic car every once in a while, especially when they’re being imported for profit, but they’re probably not going to bother you about your one-off novelty car.
Nope, from-scratch kit cars aren’t legal in the US. If you want to build your own car, you’d technically have to go through the same expensive certification process the major car makers do. (Although, see above, that doesn’t necessarily mean your state won’t give you a set of plates for it.) The one bit of leeway the Feds do give in this area is that they’ll let you modify an old car fairly extensively and it will still only need to pass the older much less stringent standards. Even then, though, I think a lot of people don’t necessarily follow the exact letter of those regulations, but still slide under the radar because the Feds don’t really care that much.
In this clip Jeremy Clarkson drives half a Fiat Panda on what appears to be a public thoroughfare. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s legal.
And this!
Do you know, Is this because of safety or pollution standards?