YLE English reports on a camera trap which photographed a speeding model car on a highway.
Police in the southeastern city of Hamina [in Finland] are searching for the owner of a remote-controlled model car which was caught travelling at 70km/h in a 60km/h zone.
The approximately 50-centimetre-long [~20-inch] mini-car was captured by a new high-resolution camera on Highway 26 near the village of Töytäri.
Chief inspector Dennis Pasterstein of the Police Traffic Safety Centre told Yle that the car in question should not be considered a toy.
"This is a model car for a more serious enthusiast with a much more powerful engine. Ordinary toys do not travel at such a speed," Pasterstein said, adding that this is a unique case for the safety centre.
It was clocked at 70.3 km/h (43.6 mph) in a 60 km/h (37.3 mph) zone. What was your top speed with a remote-controlled vehicle?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Spamalope on Friday October 23 2020, @08:26AM (2 children)
I had trouble keeping my 10th scale electric on the ground over 40mph.
It had trouble getting started as it'd spin the tires if you didn't start gently, then if any air got under or you turned quickly it'd be sailing.
And you're moving at scale 400mph... I had to use a jeweled bearing prop balancer and pins as tire weights to balance all the tires.
The pavement had to be very smooth or the car would be launched. And that's with oil filled shocks/full suspension.
This sounds like an 1/8th scale car. It must have more conventional rubber tires, probably super glued to the rims. Not sure how you'd balance them well enough but I never raced that kind of car.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday October 24 2020, @06:50AM (1 child)
It could also have been a UK speed camera. Those have in the past clocked brick walls moving at 140kmh, traffic signs doing 70, and so on.
In any case to evade speed cameras you just do what my 80-year-old aunt did and make sure the car was in mid-air with the plates out of the frame when the photo is taken. In case you're wondering, they caught her on the return trip, when it wasn't in mid-air.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2020, @12:10PM
FYI there's two types of speed cams in the UK:
- multi-point measured average using TV cams on motorways
- photo cams snapping you from behind
(Score: 4, Interesting) by lentilla on Friday October 23 2020, @08:53AM (3 children)
Some years ago; in the early hours of the morning; I was riding a bicycle home. The streets were deserted, so I took a short cut along a main road riding against the (non-existent) traffic.
I took a turn off the main road and; laughingly noting a speed camera standing quiet sentinel to the empty road; took both my hands off the handlebars and presented a two handed salute as I leaned into the corner.
At once there was an almighty flash as the camera took my portrait.
I hope the guys reviewing the photo got a good laugh out of that one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23 2020, @09:04AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday October 23 2020, @05:21PM
Yeah, that's just all kinds of stupid. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The catastrophic end there would be that they hit a pebble and yeah, no need to imagine the rest.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2020, @12:18AM
Local cops have a trailer with radar and speed display that they leave in different places to deter speeders (no ticket, just a "your speed is" message). I rode up on my bicycle and saw a silly fast speed compared to what I was doing. So I stopped in front of it and picked up the front wheel, spun it and the radar read the speed of the spokes...when I turned the wheel slightly away from pointing straight at the radar horn antenna.
In normal riding the outer end of the spokes/spoke-nipples are going nearly 2x the ground speed at the top of the wheel and 0 ground speed at the tire contact patch. The radar was reading nearly double my actual speed.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday October 23 2020, @08:55AM
It sounds like something from Runaway [wikipedia.org] in real life. There was a chase scene in that movie involving an armed version of such a vehicle. In the film it may have been semi-autonomous and was probably going a lot faster. Still though, it's weird to think that something that was so fantastically sci-fi back then is close to reality, and probably *is* reality in some government projects they don't talk about.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday October 23 2020, @11:25AM (5 children)
The thing is the range of the controller should be fairly limited, for toy-cars it's probably only 10-15 meters or so. I guess this is more of a specialty item, toys for adult boys. From the article they assume he is somewhere close. If it moves at 70km/h (or about 20m/s) he should be out of range fairly quickly. So what is the top of the line range on one of them hobbyist units? I guess the once that control model aircraft/drones etc are somewhat good. One hopes or assume that the road in question was fairly straight and long, sort of like a runway (fairly common in the Nordic countries as they are also supposed to double as a landing strip in times of war).
Since it was late in the evening, or 1857, it should still be traffic or the possibility of traffic. That said there doesn't seem to be any sidewalks or bike lanes so it should not pose much of a risk, after all if that thing hits or get hit by a normal vehicle it should be toast, or just disintegrate, due to a simple matter of mass and velocity.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 23 2020, @01:34PM (4 children)
My brother is an RC enthusiast. He runs planes, helicopters, cars, tanks, drones. The range on his controllers is pretty good, like 2-3 football fields in radius. The more limiting factor is whether you can see your vehicle.
As for speed, 70km/h is not that high. My brother takes his RC cars to an old abandoned municipal air strip that local RC clubs have adopted and sell memberships to and opens up the throttle there. The reason is you want smooth pavement if you drive them that fast because they have a lot of trouble with even small imperfections in the surface.
Driving your RC car on a regular public road might be fun to do once, but it's not something you'd do as a regular RC enthusiast because hitting a pothole or break in the pavement would mess them up, and having the thing get run over by a real car would be an expensive and abrupt end to your RC fun (not to mention potential legal jeopardy).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday October 23 2020, @01:52PM (3 children)
"... The more limiting factor is whether you can see your vehicle."
Couldn't you solve that issue but installing a small camera or something in the front? It might take some time getting used to piloting via it but it might be better then nothing. I gather the sight here is probably fairly limited as it's seven o'clock in the evening and at this time of the year it's black outside at that time and the few streetlights probably won't help all that much, considering how small and low to the ground the vehicle is to I doubt you'll have a good visual on it for to long as it speeds around at 20m/s.
An American football field is about 90meters, give or take a few meters, so 2-3 of them should be ok. I guess it would be far greater then he is able to keep a visual on the car at that time in the evening. If the speed is constant tho he shouldn't be able to go for more then say 10 seconds or so, lets say 20-30ish seconds since it's not going to reach 70 km/h instantly, and then he is out of range and out of sight.
I'm starting to wonder if the enthusiast in question didn't pick this part of the road on purpose just cause he wanted to see how fast he could go, if he crosses the speed limit there should be a flash etc from the camera.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 23 2020, @02:55PM
I would think so, but I'm out of my depth here because I am not an RC enthusiast myself. I know my brother has a camera on the drone he flies, but nothing else; he doesn't like to use it that much because he feels a little weird about it like he's invading his neighbors' privacy.
As theoretical speculation, I'd suppose that if a person was an older RC enthusiast who predated the availability of tele-presence on RC vehicles, one would have gotten used to a certain control scheme and reflexively distrust tele-presence. It's like when you like to invert the Y-axis on a game controller, and cannot handle somebody else's system where their defaults are the opposite.
That would make sense. I could see it if the enthusiast had been caught in his real car by the speed camera and wanted to troll the authorities. But it doesn't seem like something an RC hobbyist would casually do, for the aforementioned reasons. Alas, in many parts of the world whimsy and boredom get the better of all of us from time to time...
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by nishi.b on Friday October 23 2020, @03:47PM (1 child)
Well yes, you can get pretty long-range (multiple kilometers) RC vehicle by using the technologies used for drones.
You can use first person view (FPV) to pilot, and I suppose it is much easier with a car than with a drone : I tried that myself and crashed pretty consistently ;)
Here is an example of real long-range RC drone flying over a well-known mountain :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ2BSHNgTlo [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23 2020, @07:44PM
Wonder if it's worth training birds to do the FPV thing...
Something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um8M9azpmb4 [youtube.com]
But with more control e.g. maybe train the bird to turn left or right depending on whether the left or right led lights up.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 23 2020, @12:43PM (2 children)
Big whoop. I can break 35 on my skateboard given a couple residential blocks worth of hill. Probably some other stuff if I do but that's another matter entirely.
Tangent: Bones Super Reds are fucking incredible skateboard bearings compared to what I used thirty years ago. They're kinda fucking dangerous for my ass to be using.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23 2020, @05:20PM (1 child)
You should have seen what we were running on in the 70s when skateboarding popularity really boomed. You sure didn't want any pebbles in your way.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 24 2020, @11:14AM
First trick every skater learns, the pebble-induced faceplant.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 23 2020, @01:23PM (3 children)
The cops should station an RC cop car along the route and pull over the offending toy when it reappears. Having a little cop figure climb out and get tough with the perp would be adorbs.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23 2020, @02:04PM (1 child)
Lol.
I wonder if they can simply jam the signal to stop it and then confiscate it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23 2020, @02:15PM
(or jam the signal so that it crashes and then pretend like they didn't do anything).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23 2020, @04:05PM
https://www.amazon.ca/Police-Patrol-Motorcycle-Remote-Control/dp/B01ICBGYM6 [amazon.ca]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 23 2020, @03:05PM
To find who this scofflaw is and fine him thousands, while immigrant lawbreaking is ignored.
(Score: 1) by chr on Friday October 23 2020, @08:27PM
This video shows a remote controlled aircraft being flown inside a 3.9 km long tunnel. It's from 2007.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-QJLOVLg7M [youtube.com]
The pilot is in a car behind the aeroplane. It's not going so fast though, maybe 50-70 km/h.
Regarding speed, some regular RC aeroplanes are faster than 200 km/h (horizontal flight).
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday October 23 2020, @09:49PM (1 child)
As a data point, a modestly built 700 class Diablo RC helicopter (That's a ~1.5 meter rotor disk.) can easily exceed 130mph/210kph. IIRC the record is ~190mph/300kph.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday October 23 2020, @10:01PM
I looked up the record for the fastest RC turbine jet. In 2016 it was 462 Mph/744 kmh. I've never seen one of the record-setting planes in person, but even the non-record ones I have seen tear across the sky in seconds. I honestly don't know how the pilots fly them.