RE: driving onto moving object

["Buchholz, Steven" <Steven.Buchholz@kla-tencor.com>]

> There was a commercial for a nissan something that drove down a runway
> supposedly at high speed and drove into a moving cargo plane.
> 
> Assuming I want to try this in a quattro:
> 1) What would be the effect of leaving the center differential locked or
> unlocked during this stunt?
> 
You DEFINITELY would not want to lock the center diff for this!  with the
center diff locked your front and rear wheels must turn the same speed.
This means that either the rear wheels lock up, or the front wheels continue
turning at whatever speed they were before.  If you look on the ramp of the
plane you can see that there are already skid marks in there with the cars
they were driving.  

> 2) What would be the difference in performing this stunt with a rear wheel
> drive vs a front wheel drive or quattro?
> 
I think my preference would be for a RWD configuration.  This allows you to
transition the front wheels from speed to 0 without having to deal with the
engine.  Once on you could accelerate while running up the ramp ... possibly
coasting that last foot onto the ramp.  It seems to me that you'd want to
disable the rear brakes completely for this stunt.  

This is definitely a stunt I'd like to see ... although I'm not sure I'd
like to do it myself.  From watching the commercial there is a very obvious
edit between when the car drives on the ramp and the next section where it
shows the airplane lifting off.  I wonder if the first part wasn't done with
the plane taxiing on the runway ...

Steve Buchholz
San Jose, CA (USA)