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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 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.