They bought them and spent a lot of money on supporting infrastructure and are therefore compelled to use them when they chase a middle aged drunken homeless man through a neighborhood.
They get away from time to time from the airship. Two in one week this past august and I don't think they ever caught the suspects. One drove under an overpass and fled on foot, the other entered LAX airspace which requires waiting on clearance from ATC and got away somehow after that. I don't know why they don't just shoot a magnetic dart at the car with a gps tracker on it.
> I don't know why they don't just shoot a magnetic dart at the car with a gps tracker on it.
Hitting a car going 100mph with a magnetic dart that and getting it to hit on a metal part, not a window or trim, and specially a steel panel, is not easy at all.
This got me curious so I went out on the street and held a magnet to the front passenger door of the first 6 parked cars I came across. The magnet stuck to 4 of them. The ones it did not stick to are a Nissan Rogue and a Jeep Sahara 4xe.
Unfortunately, yes. Dropping a magnet onto a car and pulling it off, especially if not recently cleaned, will damage the paint to some degree. Maybe not enough for an average person to notice, but you really shouldn’t do this to other people’s cars.
Some people will get snide about anyone who cares about their car’s paint, but as someone who once bought a car I had to save a long time for and spent a lot of time with car care products I would be very sad if I saw you drop a magnet on to it and then pull it off without a second thought. Please don’t.
The "unpainted" parts are galvanized. Galvanization is essentially zinc paint (with no dye). For the painted parts, the paint serves the same purpose, which is why it's important not to mess it up.
I'm curious, how did you make it this far in life without realizing that paint is delicate and scratches easily? Do you have untreated brick walls in your house or something?
It won't really matter all that much, but it will have done more than 0 damage to the paintwork (since metal is hard and paint is soft). Worth noting that drivers are touchy and emotional, and can't be trusted not to murder you over perceived slights, so it's safest to stick to doing nothing. Stuff something under the windscreen wipers if you really must, and even that is risky.
Unless the cars are perfectly washed and clayed, even running a clean finger over a car is likely to introduce scratches. I just wouldn’t ever touch someone’s car.
You can look up people even trying to detail their cars to make them cleaner and end up leaving “love marks.” It doesn’t matter how soft the thing you’re using is. It’s because the car has contaminants on it and by rubbing anything on the car, those contaminants end up scratching everything. It’s like when you’re at the beach and you’re trying to remove sand off your skin. You’re probably not aggressively rubbing it off or using much pressure but it still hurts. It’s the same with cars, it’s just that the rocks aren’t as visible to you. They will leave swirls and scratches though… which become noticeable.
I’ve had people just lean against my car when it wasn’t completely clean and completely ruin the paint requiring an entire 5 stage detail.
Yeah we are talking pathological territory here. Car paints need less love than their owners need therapy if they have to "detail" their car every time a cat jump on the hood to enjoy the warmth.
Cars spend a significant amount of time outside and they depreciate so quickly it just doesn't matter. One shouldn't expect a paint to stay perfect the same way we expect our skin to wear and age over the years.
I don't even know what a 5 stage detail means but I can safely say you are overreacting. A car is just a tool and a rando putting a fridge magnet or leaning against your car once in a while is just completely negligible compared to the amount of shit a paint is exposed to when driving it. Sand and dirt do not ask for your permission either.
As long as the car is dirty, then contact with it can damage the top coat. This is a lot more true if you need to drag or scrape the magnet to remove it.
> Outside certain high performance cars, most cars have steel body panels.
I never thought of my Olds Silhouette minivan as a high performance car. Neat.
The rubbery panels were great. I was at school pickup and another parent backed into it. They crushed the front fender to the firewall. Then they pulled up and it popped out.
They were freaked out but it was fine. And it's just a car.
Now this assumes that the LAPD/LASD/whomever actually cares to catch the suspect! In my (limited) experience with them, you could incinerate a full bus and they'd not blink an eye, but if you block the intersection at one of the many rush hours, that's a capital offense!
I used to use the old old form factor iphones with a jailbroken tweak that would split the screen. It was surprisingly useful even just having those maybe two inches a piece. I could type while referencing something else.
It used to take me 50 minutes to go 11 miles on 101/110 from studio city to downtown LA, so 20mph seems optimistic.
Heck, it wasn't even all that rare for it to take me 45 minutes to go 5 miles on 101 from Rengstorff Ave to Willow Rd in the Bay Area in 6pm rush hour just because of the exit.
It even once took me 2h to make it from Candlestick Park to the 101 after an NFL game.
So yeah, maybe 2 hours for a few miles isn't quite right, but I've experienced daily counterexamples to your 20mph number too.
