LA Design Challenge, Highway Patrol

Scott: I also like that the Mercedes entry has the hot tight-fitting-leather-clad chick cop. Because this is the way cops will dress in 12 years.

Honda Drone Squad?

Who generated that proposal, the Toyota marketing department?

I figured it out Ray - they realized their entry was sh*t so they wanted to draw our attention away from it!

Happy Turkey Day to all the Americans, Happy Thursday to everyone else out there. :wink:

Pretty disappointing entries when considering that it’s work from some of the largest companies in the world.

Agreed. Such a cool theme, I was surprised by the entries.

I’m not that surprised by the results. You know this was given to some intern to keep them busy…

Big doesn’t equal great.

I have always had a suspicion that anyhow most car designers are mostly not so great designers but great sketchers/renderers. Just look at 90% of the cars on the road as proof. All car designers seem to be good at is making some ecobox car look awesome in a render that has no connection to reality when shown in flashy lines, 22" rims and crazy forced perspective. Then the real thing gets made from the sketch someone sold and it looks like junk.

R

Richard: YES.

At Uni, I talked to two GM sculptures that were visiting.* We asked about making the clay model look like the sketch. They said the clay will always look like the sketch, even if the sketch needs to be redone!

We can imagine forms that can not be made in reality, so it’s a back and forth process.

*Car designers do hot renderings. The sculptures make it in 3D. Both require a design background (understanding of form, line, detail, etc). Both require creativity, just one is macro and one is extremely micro.

I tend a bit more toward reality… . . :wink:

I’m assuming a highway patrol vehical is for high speed chases (and avoiding cardboard boxes, like on CHiPS).

This quora with ex-policeman Tim Dees is very informative:

especially this one:

His view was straight line speed didn’t matter in a car chase as even quite normal cars can get pretty fast, what matters is high speed driving skill and experience, and the counter-intuitiveness of high speed handling:

Most Americans believe they are above-average drivers who can handle a car moving at 100+ mph. Most of them are wrong. There is considerable skill involved here, and few people have the opportunity to learn it experientially. Emergency vehicle operations training includes several counter-intuitive aspects, such as staying off of the brake when an obstacle appears directly and immediately in your path (you’re usually better off to try and steer around it).

There is also something to be said for the way the vehicle is configured. Many pickup trucks will exceed 100 mph on the highway if pushed, but they have a high center of gravity and are prone to rollovers on tight, high-speed turns.

In this light the Mercedes and Honda drone entries are no-no’s.

His view was straight line speed didn’t matter in a car chase as even quite normal cars can get pretty fast, what matters is high speed driving skill and experience, and the counter-intuitiveness of high speed handling:

Most Americans believe they are above-average drivers who can handle a car moving at 100+ mph. Most of them are wrong. There is considerable skill involved here, and few people have the opportunity to learn it experientially. Emergency vehicle operations training includes several counter-intuitive aspects, such as staying off of the brake when an obstacle appears directly and immediately in your path (you’re usually better off to try and steer around it).

There is also something to be said for the way the vehicle is configured. Many pickup trucks will exceed 100 mph on the highway if pushed, but they have a high center of gravity and are prone to rollovers on tight, high-speed turns.

In this light the Mercedes and Honda drone entries are no-no’s.

I can tell you first hand that a well maintained BMW M3 can outrun the police, and I think he is almost spot-on - while most cars can go fast these days, it has to be a vehicle that can go fast quickly and easily then it’s all about the driver, his willingness for risk and how well the vehicle can handle [secondarily, knowing your surroundings & traffic patterns, the time of day or night and the size of the police force in a given area helps as well].

Maybe the brief was dystopian. 2025: To meet budget needs, the state California sells CHP brand to Blackwater Domestic Inc.

Yes!! Reminds me of the motorcycle scene near the beginning of the latest Star Trek remake (where the stationary patrol pod scans his bike’s barcode as he flies by and transmits a notice to his helmet that his Social Security account has been debited $500 for the speeding infraction).

Over all pretty disappointing. It seems like the submissions are getting worse every year, or maybe I’m just getting more critical. At the very least these things should be nice to look at, but some of these are borderline eyesores.

The Mercedes Ener-G concept seemed a little out of place with everything else being so futuristic and far reaching, but it was probably my favorite. Apparently they made a full size prototype, some cool details going on.

http://www.notcot.com/archives/2012/11/mercedes-benz-ener-g-force-con.php#more

My favourite was the Merc too. I liked the fact that it’s styling could feed into the next generation M-class or G-wagon. To me it looks like the best of 90’s surfacing mixed with a dash of todays more modern details. For me the M-class vehichles so far have been a bit disappointing style wise. Plus the automated drone tech future that is fast heading our way looks like a bit of an authoritarian nightmare I reckon!

Ok my 2 cents. the BMW is laughable every trans design student has drawn that vehicle at least once in there day. If I had to choose I may lean toward the GM group as far as feasibility but in reality they all these are making the cops jobs harder and traffic more congested. Each proposal even the drones seem longer and bigger than what is being used now. Also ‘Fire Drone’ or automated response vehicles? really? why would they need a drone to meet them at a fire. it does not seem to serve much purpose but to take up space. I have lived in LA for a little over a year now and the cops seem to be able to catch me fairly easily :unamused: on my bike or in my car.

I must be getting old… I like to design with innovation and function not just style these days :wink:

Just an observation… when I think of Police cruiser, I don’t think of some black & white painted Bug Veyron, or a SMART car in police livery.

I think INTIMIDATION. I want to believe that when the heat shows up the bad guys are apt to split . I want the very appearance to that grille in the rear view mirror to subjugate that twenty-something, hormone saturated, motorhead to think twice about passing on the shoulder. I want to know that the LEO has ALL the kit s/he needs to deal with everything from fully immolated 18-wheeler to a preggo ready to pop. It isn’t any of these machines…

Of course, it’s all relevant to age.

When I was 17 it was one of these.

“It’s got a cop motor, a 440 cubic inch plant, it’s got cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks. It’s a model made before catalytic converters so it’ll run good on regular gas.”

Fix the cigarette lighter…

I like cops like this:

Maybe who drive something sensible, like this:

Most of those designs are more movie based. For real-life applications, they almost all fail.

If you’ve ever driven in LA you know you would need a hover car!! Duh!