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Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

Definitely this was probably "fun" for the driver. But I do suspect something wasn't above board here. I know it was mentioned in the article, but the choice to not use a helicopter was... putting a lot of people at unnecessary risk. Which is pretty stupid since you're trying to save someone's life.

Hopefully someone does this with a copter in the future.

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It's a PR stunt.

Roads are almost empty due to lockdown, it's the police and everyone in front will move far away, it's a fast highway track.

Numbers have clearly been cooked so that both Lamborghini and the Police get media exposure.

If they wanted to do it fast they'd have done it at night and without cameras.

Night is hardly a good moment for a highspeed race. Very poor visibility (extremely easy to outrun car's lights), but even if a race happens on a nicely lit highway, there's no protection from wild life that are more common in night time.

At night every moving object on a high speed highway has lights that make them more visible, wild life is fenced off the road and there are just a few vehicles. Bonus points: no trucks at night.

I see you never went 200+ km/h at night. The reality: It becomes impossible to recognize whether it's a car or a truck or a bike or nothing above 200. I regularly drive 260 on the autobahn like many people do, but evening is the slow-down moment for most of us. The risk of wildlife is extreme at these speeds, too, fencing does not exist and/or has holes. Trucks drive at night a lot, and you can't see the properly at night; at these speeds, trucks that are side by side can appear like one being behind the another - very scary experience when you realize the reality (usually only ~30 meters behind).

At 220 there isn't much you can do if something shows up at the limit of your beams or if somebody decides to change lanes at a wrong moment.

You are effectively giving away your life to the clueless people driving in front of you and also to the fact there is absolutely nothing obstructing the road.

What purpose does it serve? Is it to make people transporting harvested organs use Lambos?

> it's the police and everyone in front will move far away

I’ve found in Europe (Germany, France, Croatia and Slovenia), drivers stay to the right unless passing. So the fast lanes will be fairly empty.

Contract that with US/Canada where cars will merge from the on-ramp, switch 3 lanes to the left and camp in the fast lane at the speed limit. All without anything in front of them to warrant such action.

Well, actually in Italy is the opposite. The leftmost lanes are almost always occupied by cars, the rightmost ones by trucks.

American driving is nothing compared to Italian driving. It’s a complete mess. The very first time I went to Italy, my cab driver got into an accident before we ever even left the airport. He was trying to do a crazy maneuver to avoid a fee and rear-ended another cab driver who was doing the same thing, but who apparently wasn’t doing it fast enough. They got out of their cars, yelled at each other for 15 seconds, then continued on their way.

It was downhill from there.

That's my guess as well. A PR firm was hired and they came up with this idea. It's pretty much an ad for the police and lamborghini. The question is who paid for it.

It's like the jump from the space a few years ago sponsored by redbull. Or the bazillion "dog reacts to returning soldier" videos you see all over social media.

The only way it could be worse is if they had actual helicopter filming this.

It was probably cheaper on fuel for the Lambo vs. the helicopter?

I wonder what would be the maximum distance where a Lamborghini is actually faster than a helicopter (assuming there's almost no traffic e.g. at night).

For most helicopters its around as far as it takes Lambo to accelerate for 20 seconds.

Sure, but I would also like to consider the prep time + starting and landing. So lets assume, you call an helicopter pilot and a lambo driver at night up out of their bed, both lets say 20 km far away, in the middle of the night. For this distance I would bet that the lambo driver would be faster.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.

Lambo average speed ~150mph. Eurocopter EC145 cruise speed ~150mph.

Even the never-exceed speed of the 145 is ~170mph, which the Lambo should be more than capable of (~200mph).

It surely comes down to a matter of fuel capacity and straight-line travel.

I read the question wrong, minimum, not maximum. So the minimum is whatever the distance Lambo covers in 20 seconds, as thats the time it takes to accelerate past EC145 top speed of 167 mph. Max would depend on road availability and refueling speed.

The helicopter can fly in a straight line, the car must follow roads. The helicopter has no traffic to slow down for, no turns, and a relatively low risk of accidents.

Does that the time that it takes to prepare a helicopter and a pilot? Because that's probably the slowest part.

I've been on a helicopter ride once and it took quite a while before we were actually in the air. A lot of the time was spent on all of the pre-flight stuff and refueling. And that was in a scenario where a pilot was waiting for us at the airfield. I have no idea if the police in Italy always have a pilot ready to hop in at a moment's notice.

I don't think that would be a concern here - donor organs don't just suddenly show up at the blink of an eye, they need to be carefully extracted and prepped in an operating room. There's certainly enough time to prep a helicopter crew, if there isn't any on standby.

That said, at least in Germany and the surrounding countries, there's a fairly dense network of rescue helicopters which are usually ready on the pad, crew on standby. They're supposed to be airborne within minutes.

If this was a concern other fast-response helicopter services wouldn’t work. As well as the common helicopter air ambulance services used in many countries, helicopters are used on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro to drop lifeguards next to people who’re in trouble in the sea. Given someone in that situation could be dead in 3 minutes it’s clear that getting a helicopter off the ground in time is feasible. (I don’t know for sure but I doubt they have a crew sitting in the helicopter with the engine running 24/7, just waiting for a call.)

And as others have noted, the need to transport organs isn’t something that appears out of the blue — there’s at least some lead time available.

> putting a lot of people at unnecessary risk

I assumed that since this was a police job that they would have cleared all the roads and intersections along the route.

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