Vandalize Your Car
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
Would you drive differently if
your real name was spray
painted across your trunk lid?
White Van Man's reputation for considerate driving is, to be charitable, not above average.
Source: Grew up in Essex and most of my neighbors were white van men.
Is it uncomfortable?
Yeah. Sometimes it is. Honesty and transparency can be searing. But it’s also real."
Would you speak out the same if you knew that your community would feel very strongly against you for it?
Obviously you've got to check that the minor damage doesn't reflect more severe damage you can't see, but that's the same for any second hand car and a good inspection should reveal that.
The list of colors is finite and based on EU law[1][2], so it would be odd if Greece didn't share the same system. It would mean you couldn't import re-painted vehicles into Greece, maybe that's true, but that seems like it wouldn't fly with the single market.
The car in the article clearly has a base color of "yellow". On my street there's a car completely covered in stickers, to my eye it's mostly white, but looking it up I see it's registered as blue (barely any blue visible). So perhaps covering it in stickers is a way to get around this in some areas of the EU.
1. https://www.rdw.nl/particulier/voertuigen/auto/het-kentekenb...
2. It's: blue, brown, yellow, gray, green, orange, violet, red, white, black. Anything not listed must be whatever color is closest, e.g. pink is either "white" or "red" depending on if it's light pink or not.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkhFnQtJZls
There must be an "other" option, or at least, everyone who has to use the database will soon learn that when the model is "Harlequin", "yellow" doesn't quite mean "yellow".
Try living without one. As a 38-year-old car free man, I feel almost deviant. In great shape from all that fresh and and exercise, but that also is somewhat peculiar (I don't look much like my age).
Or how wearying. I walked to work, and it took 45 minutes. I had to do that walk during 90 degree heat, 6 inches of snow the ground, heavy rainstorms etc, unless, like other people I knew without a car, we begged our coworkers for a ride. If we couldn't, we had to call out of work.
We have plenty of people in my small town who walk or moped to work because they are poor. They usually buy cars the first thing they can get, because walking sucks.
Honestly it's not bad, save for deep winter, which can be rough. Walking keeps me in shape, and it's saved me a ton of money in terms of monthly payments and insurance.
And yes people would still zone out while driving, sorry.
But that's also a commitment to nuke your resale value. If you plan on replacing the car before it's scrap, vandalizing it like in the article could be a ~$10k decision.
But she made it clear it already lost a significant resale value before the paint job - "heavily modified and long suffering"
People also don't generally custom modify their expensive possessions unless they are committed to ownership for the long haul.
Driving a flashy car has implications like it or not, driving an obnoxiously flashy car is even worse.
And in the US it’s likely even worse since a traffic stop is one of the most dangerous interactions you can have with the police.
It also has other implications, parked at a block you don’t live on around the time a crime occurred? Well take a guess which car would be definitely reported as suspicious during the testimony sweep...
P.S. I’ve seen conflicted studies about the benefits of a dash cam or stating to the police you are filing the engagement; while some studies show it reduces the “aggression” officers might display others show that it increases the chances of them basically wanting to fuck with you; if you think you can never be baited into acting out or they can’t confuse you during questioning to give a contradictory statement e.g. asking where you’ve been and where you are going multiple times then by all means drive what ever you want.
I would rather minimize my interaction with the police because I can’t think of a single interaction with them that would be objectively pleasant under all conditions and I can’t guarantee that they won’t catch me on a bad day when I’m in a pissy mood and I might act or say something that could be taken as aggressive or suspicious.
Can you expand further on this, or provide some statistics/sources? It seems highly unlikely that a traffic stop could be at all dangerous unless you're not cooperating.
Of course there are extremely rare cases where accidents happen, but without doing any research would be willing to guess it's less than .001% of all stops.
Is a rare event but it seems that is still dangerous for both drivers and police
"It is not uncommon for routine traffic stops to escalate into a violent situation... At least 300 officers have been killed by drivers or other occupants of vehicles involved in traffic stops or pursuits"
source: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.544...
Googling "killed by police traffic stop US" returns a depressing amount of positives also
> ... the risk of police victimization, police homicides and assaults were found to be very infrequent occurrences during traffic encounters. The results of this study cast doubt on the Court’s assumption of danger during the routine police–citizen traffic encounter.
> Despite anecdotal accounts that show particular instances of danger confronted by law enforcement officers, there are few research findings or statistics to support the assumption of police dangerousness during traffic encounters.
> Most, if not all of the assertions that routine traffic stops are dangerous rely on the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI)’s data on police homicide and assault victimization during traffic encounters. All of these assertions share one crippling methodological flaw. They fail to appropriately account for the frequency of the police activity in the risk calculation
So yes, there are going to be a number of fatalities during traffic stops, but there are also a very large number of total traffic stops. Police work is inherently dangerous, and if you're stopping a large number of people you're going to run into dangerous people with a much higher chance of a fatality.
To assert that the average person be fearful of a traffic stop because some people were killed is just completely false. Police work is dangerous, I imagine they go into any situation with the assumption the person is dangerous.
From a US point of view 300 killed among several thousands millions of people can be seen as (statistically) reasonable and the article reflects that point of view accurately.
The problem is that from a non US point of view and comparing with other places with similar number of interactions this feels like a outrageous and strangely high number. The ever increasing number of cases of perfectly innocent people in their way to home killed by police by mistake or by "mistake" (specially if most of this people are black or hispanic) is also hard to swallow.
I think you're right, the US has a bad image when it comes to crime.
> The ever increasing number of cases of perfectly innocent people in their way to home killed by police by mistake or by "mistake"
From what statistics I've been able to find, it's more-or-less stayed the same or even gone down slightly (for unarmed individuals shot by police). It's hard to know for sure as it's a relatively small amount and difficult to deduce any trends. Media coverage of these events seems to be disproportionately higher - however.
This is my opinion so it could be completely wrong, but it's hard to believe police are going to shoot someone that is complying with orders, hasn't committed a violent crime, and is not showing any signs of aggression.
We talk about an accumulative number of victims. The only acceptable number of innocent people killed by police is zero. If the number of casualties has not stopped growing despite learning from (lots and lots and lots of) past errors, the number of victims is obviously increasing and the problem has not been addressed accurately still.
Has anyone ever won a lawsuit for being pulled over without cause?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/court...
If you want to customize your car at least do it well.
This is not how you paint a car, with cheap products and any lack of direction in the art part.
Professional grade car paint is really expensive stuff, for several good reasons: It does not change color or fade overnight and often has metallic dust or some kind of pearly "glitter" embebbed.
A professional car painter will add also a hard layer of lacquer to protect the painting, uniformize the design, and add reflections and gloss (sorely lacking there). The car will not reflect light in the same way as a propperly painted work and will gets scratched and worn in no time.
The design here is multicolor but totally flat and random (there is science in arranging adjacent colors also). Artistically is a mess. There are not sharp borders defining areas and gradients are badly executed. Not a common theme or a good idea to express, just plain chaos (in a not good way).
Of course she can made anything with her car but lets not pretend that is a great job, not even mediocre. There are two good examples of how you made a unique car:
https://dyler.com/cars/3724/bmw-i8-rene-turrek-joker-theme-c...
https://www.rollingstone.it/musica/news-musica/la-porsche-di...
You're right, she may hate it in a month or six, but she's happy with it now and I'm pretty sure she knows how to go get a professional paint job if she wants to.