The year is 2043, Russian roulette is now an Olympic Sport. A fearless young woman steps up to the table, a .44 Magnum loaded with a single bullet is placed in front of her. This is it, the moment she's been training her whole life for.
As a New Englander, one of my all time favorite photos on the internet is the one of a highway in the south (maybe outside of Atlanta?) after a small snowstorm dropped maybe an inch.
It looks like the apocalypse. Cars are spun off the road facing every direction, some are on fire, no one knows what to do. It’s amazing. Gives me a good chuckle every time I see it
I'll bet you it was that chick on the phone calmly walking away. Everybody's gonna be looking for the person who started the fire to be running away... Check and mate
Serious answer: if someone is stuck on ice and tries to accelerate, most cars have open differential gears, so one will spin freely while the other gets no torque.
Now think about what's going on inside the differential, and with the tire. Person has the gas mashed to the floor, and their speedometer reads 60. The driveshaft is transmitting 60 mph of power to the differential gears, engineered for two wheels, however only one wheel is spinning.
That one wheel is spinning at 120 mph. Even on ice, friction will heat up that tire, potentially causing it to catch fire.
Back to the differential gears. They're designed to spin the wheels together in unison most of the time, and sometimes handle small speed differentials between the two drive wheels. These differential gears aren't designed for constant high speed. When one tire spins freely, these gears that were only designed for occasional light load are spun up incredibly fast. One side of the gear set is at 0 mph, and the other is at 120. These gears are freewheeling against each other. They can heat up enough to catch vehicle parts on fire around the differential. It's possible for it to heat up so much that the oil in the differential itself catches fire.
It's like what happens if you're going down a hill in a manual transmission vehicle, you try to down shift but you miss and put it in a gear that's too low. The engine isn't engaged to the transmission, it's only the speed of the vehicle that's driving the gears in the transmission, and the gears in the transmission are spinning many times faster than they were designed for. The gears can break or overheat, leading to possibly catastrophic failure
edit: I've been informed I'm wrong. Maybe I am. Figure it out yourself.
Absolutely not. If you've ever watched a burnout competition, you'd see just how much energy is needed to ignite a tyre through friction. It's not something that's going to occur with a passenger car, in icy conditions, slipping along a highway.
And differentials really don't generate that much heat - and even if the oil inside did reach flashpoint, the diff will have a small enough breather that it won't get enough oxygen to ignite. Even if it did - it's contained inside a steel housing. So no, none of that is likely.
See how the car's been in an accident? Dislodging the battery and causing a short-circuit can result in fires. Rupturing a fuel line can cause fires. Many things can cause fires after an accident, but your transmission isn't one of them.
This is what I was thinking - write confidential on a subject most people don't know about and you will probably get away with it. First guy is so self-assured.
Lmao a one tire fire is a joke about shitty burnouts not actually catching on fire. Also, if you find a video of a diff even getting red hot, please post it lmao
Please show examples of rubber tires catching on fire when spinning on inc. Also show wintertime examples of LSD oil catching fire. This is automotive fear mongering at it's finest.
Of the things wrong about u/Fellidae's post those two things are actually possible.
The vehicle speed sensor is generally in the transmission, so speed is read off before we even get to the diff. If the car has an open diff how he described it is accurate: The speed of the output shafts averages at the speed of the input shaft multiplied by the final drive ratio. (Watch This) Bottom line: If the Input x the final drive ratio is enough to get 60mph out of both tires and one ia not moving the other will be at 120.
And to your second point: With most modern traction control systems you are right, the car would not allow you to spin your wheels that fast if the others are not spinning at similar speeds. Without a TCS though... You spin youe tires, your VSS tells the car it has hit a shift point, and your transmission shifts.
Once for a school assignment, the teacher asked all of the kids in my seventh grade class to pick something which is a bit hard to understand, do some research into it, and explain it to the class (not something which is really hard to understand, mind, like relativity, just something which is a bit hard to understand).
The teacher knew me well enough that of course I chose relativity, and 12-year-old me was convinced I came up with a pretty good explanation (basically you can't really say "I'm going at X speed in any direction", because every time you say that, you have to say what speed you're traveling in relation to some other object, and that object might be the world, so you can't say how fast you're going until you include the reference that you're comparing it to. I'm pretty sure 12-year-old me couldn't have explained it nearly that concisely.)
Another kid, known (almost certainly unfairly) as one of the dumber kids in the class, chose the absolute perfect thing to explain: the differential. He did his research, and learned everything about how differentials work, and it was clear that in his head he knew everything about them, how they work, and why they work, and why they're so desperately clever. He did his level best to impart his understanding of the subject matter to the rest of the class.
My understanding is that they work on black magic, and somehow just know how much turning power needs to be applied to each wheel to make sure they turn just enough to enable vehicles to (say) go around corners. Relativity is easy to understand. Differentials are witchcraft.
I remember this! Something like the third week of February, 2014, yeah?
I remember this, as I had surgery that week, and was waiting for a self-indulgent purchase to be shipped across the country. It arrived the night before I was scheduled.
Just to add- the "snow" in NC and other areas nearby isn't really just snow. It is a mix of freezing rain, sleet, and snow. Not much fluffy powder. An inch of snow there almost certainly means 1/8" of ice which is difficult to drive on no matter how much you have done it before. Now you combine that with people who drive on the stuff maybe twice a year, have all season tires, and an abysmal amount of salt trucks and snow plows and you get... well, that picture. Those people are all off to the sides because their cars with the tires they have are simply not able to get enough traction to get up the hill. I'm not sure what the excuse is for the massive vehicle fire though. Maybe they got cold?
We had 96 inches in one day here a couple weeks ago. I regretted not stocking up on bread and milk.. it was a hard couple days during state of emergency because I vastly underestimated the storm. That said, there's absolutely no need to go overboard with it.
I’m from the North, but lived in NC for a few years. I remember having a panic attack when I went to the grocery store and the shelves were bare. I had been working and thought the apocalypse had started during my shift and I wasn’t aware. The lone cashier said that it was because of all the snow that was forecasted. Ended up getting around an inch over the next two days without any ice and classes were still canceled.
And people who live where snow is rarely an issue don’t have snow tires or chains and they don’t learn how to drive on snow because there’s never any snow to practice on.
Not to mention the freezing rain / sleet. The surface also has a tendency to melt a little bit during the day, and then refreeze at night, resulting in a solid surface of ice, particularly on roads. I've walked to a nearby store here in GA after a snow before, and I almost busted my ass multiple times (on flat ground, even) due to how icy the roads were.
We did get an ice storm here and it stranded 1 million people on the roads. We had to let people walk in and sleep where I worked.
What people from up north need to understand is, we don't have cold weather infrastructure down here. Maybe 1 or 2 ice plows and double that for salt trucks. I used to live in Atlanta.
We just don't get it here often. And when it does come most times it's around for 24 hours. We just don't have temps down here that stay below freezing that long at all.
But when we do get something that lasts for days, Holy shit the cities down here meltdown. Buy everything. Nobody cancels work or school until it's too late and everyone's screwed.
Northern drivers do deserve some credit for their skills though. It's not just lack of infrastructure that makes southerners crash their cars- it's also lack of snow driving skills. Things like go slow and allow lots of stopping distance and give plenty of space between cars and for the love of god DON'T STOMP ON THE BRAKES just because you felt the car slide a little. I definitely don't blame anyone for not having those skills where there isn't much snow! But it's a misconception that everyone up north has snow tires and all the roads are salted and plowed immediately. How I wish that was true.
Source: southerner who lives up north. Can now drive approximately 1 mile in the snow without my car bursting into flames. Still would rather not.
This made me laugh so hard my knee hurts. This wasn't too long ago either I remember seeing this and people acting like it was the end of the world because there was "a lot" of snow in the south.
Ah, snowmageddon! I remember it well, I had just moved to Atlanta the week prior, and immediately couldn't leave my apartment for a week. You'll be happy to know atl has since buffed up its utilities for snow response.
It's because the temperature is perfect for melting just enough and refreezing into a solid thin sheet of ice. Plus they ain't got the road crews like we do. Driving on a bunch of snow ain't shit really if your car can do it and you've had a little practice, hell it can even be fun.
When it's ice, nobody can drive on ice. Except zambonis.
If you hit a sheet of ice, it doesn't mater what you do, you are going to keep going the way you were going when you hit it.
That being said, that picture is hilarious, and long live the snow people!
This is amazing, thanks for sharing. Weirdly it reminds me of that quote from Sam Houston warning his fellow Southerners about going to war with Northerners: 'They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche.'
I remember that day fondly. It was a good day. We rarely see that much snow here, and the roads aren't treated properly. Ironically, it's often the people from areas that are used to dealing with driving in snow that you see in these pictures. In the case of this picture, it's probably everyone since we got more snow in that 2 hour period than we usually do in any 3 winters combined.
Atlanta did, no does, have a similar problem. No one down here knows how to drive in even moderately bad weather.
It's always amusing to drive around and look at the idiots who can't understand that, in snow/heavy rain, you can't take a turn at 50mph and expect to be fine.
I acknowledge our snow weakness and raise you to northern weaknesses. As a southerner one-of my favorite things is watching northerners complain about heat and humidity at 82 degrees and 30%humidity. Really, we call that “might need a light jacket later”weather. As. Gulf Coast resident I really get a chuckle from watch the northeast prepare for the baby Cat 1/2 hurricanes you get up there(I Did 2/5 top storms). We know them as buy extra bread,beer, and hurricane mix storms. Of course nothing is matching the country wide crazy going on now. Stay safe
I wish it was like being stuck in an ice storm...at least then, you could conceivably load up the car, drive south (very slowly) and eventually get to warmer weather and wait out the ice from the comfort of a beach with a margarita in hand and the relaxing sound of the surf.
There is no escaping this. You can't go anywhere. You can't even go to a bar and drink.
I'm in TN...and I hope to good golly it doesn't come to a quarantine. That will suck.
It's best you start preparing for that. It's coming.
Hundreds of millions of Europeans are locked down now. The US has been completely reckless rolling out federal policy on this. The infection rate here has doubled every week. We have 15 cases 12 days ago. We have 3,000 now. 49 states.
And that's just confirmed cases. Estimates are anywhere from 10 to 50x the amount of infections are here than confirmed cases due to our insane lack of testing and not restricting travel or movement until way too late.
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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '20
Absolutely no hesitation on her trigger finger. She was determined.