If you’ve ever been pulled over for speeding on a good road, in good weather, with good driving conditions and wondered if it was really worth it for the cop to pull you over, then you should watch this video, which very dramatically shows a situation where pulling over a speeder was decidedly not worth it. At all. In fact, it cost this cop his car, and, probably, some of his dignity.
I hope you like clusterfudge, because here’s a nice big helping:
The audio is what really makes this video, which comes to the greater world from the Florida Highway Patrol. The officer was driving along in the mid-70s when he noticed a car going in the opposite direction doing around 90 MPH.
He decides it’s worth catching the speeder, so he makes a U-turn over the center median, then accelerates up to over 140 MPH, at one point even passing cars on the shoulder at about 130 MPH.
The officer realized that the actions taken were possibly more dangerous than a driver going about 20 MPH over the limit, and tells his partner “I don’t recommend doing that—what I just did,” just before doing something that, in hindsight, I bet he also wouldn’t recommend doing.
What he did was pull the driver of the speeding RAV4 (with a brake light out) over on the center median. Which is covered in dry grass. Which is making direct contact with the underside of his cruiser’s engine, which is nice and toasty from its 140 MPH run.
Oh boy.
“It smells like smoke,” observes the officer, before speculating that maybe, just maybe, the car is “trying to catch on fire.”
He’s not wrong, and soon everything becomes a smoky, hot fiasco. Officer Daredevil has a lot of trouble operating the fire extinguisher as he tries to put out the grass fire, but that doesn’t really matter since the whole car is starting to go up in flames.
He tells the speeder to go, just go, because that doesn’t even matter anymore, as his car, with his keys, computer, and, alarmingly, a lot of Glock ammunition, becomes engulfed in flames.
So, the lesson here? I guess you can get out of a ticket if you pull over on dry grass, and are morally okay with the idea of a massive, dangerous fire?
That’s not a great lesson. Maybe just that sometimes, it’s best to just let some things go.