But compare with the time when one of my cars (the first second-hand one I ever got, from outside the family) had its clutch go. As a new car (to me) I'd not recognised the tell-tale feel of the clutch on the test drive, with its overall new feel anyway, compounded by it being the first car with power-steering (thus feeling odd to the hands, as well as the feet). Within a month, it had deteriorated and eventually, going up one hill, I lost all drive. That took some heavy negotiating to get sorted out at minimal cost (to me) under the "reasonable wear and tear" clause. But it helped that they essentially admitted the fault having already been there when they sold it to me. (And other signs that "one careful lady owner" had been at least a partial fiction, during the sales-talk, from the detritus discovered during that post-sale month in various nooks and crannies of of the interior that had obviously escaped their valeting regimen.)
These days I'd probably recognise the signs a lot earlier. And you'd
imagine that the kind of driver who is usually targeted for assassination-by-automobile would 'feel' the first signs of failure if they're actually driving the finely-tuned sports-car they
regularly drive recklessly around hairpin bends, etc. But nothing beets 'the necessity of plot', as we all know.
...
Anyway certainly all cars I've driven (that I know anything about, having so erred for a few moments at least) have been capable of powering against their parking brake from standstill (i.e. limiting friction, no less!). It might be an uneven match (slightly one way or another) between engine-power and stopping-power according to the sporty setup of the car (none of mine have been
at all sporty, at least to the level of the typical car in a movie). Although in the fictional scenario it has to be a matter of arresting the
momentum of a car with a handbrake (if our antagonists haven't sabotaged the gas-pedal, too, it thus remaining stomped-upon at the point of failure). I've never actually tried arresting a significantly moving vehicle on handbrake alone... save for that time very early in my driving career on the gravel carpark outside the scout hut where I tried a low-speed handbrake-slight-turn-then-come-to-an-embarrassingly-anticlimactic-halt.
But I've run through the scenario in my mind. I'm more likely to use the slow-yourself-on-the-gears method, which I've 'practised' on occasion, when on an empty stretch of road and nowhere to be, in a hurry. (Like I also try get a small deliberate skid, on the first snow of the winter, to get myself used to the feeling so I don't get so surprised when if happens spontaneously.) But it's hard to tell what I could actually do should I happen to be in a
real emergency.
(All the above are mere opinions and observations of the author of this post. Who has
never driven an automatic, so lacks a whole swathe of driving experience.)
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Topic: Nitpicks that Ruined Movies (Read 137751 times)