Spare that Bird, Spoil the Bugatti - Pelican Avoiding Driver Crashes Veyron
By John O'Dell November 12, 2009
A bird in hand may be worth two in the bush, as the old maxim goes, but it turns out that a bird on the wing is worth a Bugatti Veyron.
The driver of one of the few of those incredible performance machines to be sold in North America ran his $2 million Bugatti Veyron into a salt water lagoon near Galveston, Texas, earlier this week after he was startled by a passing pelican, dropped his cell phone in his lap and jerked the wheel.
The report from the Galveston County Daily News says the unidentified driver walked away unharmed but left the drowning Bugatti, its quatro-turbo engine burbling away like a motorboat, sitting in two feet of salt water.
The crashed Veyron's engine idled for 15 minutes before the salt water finally drowned it, the newspaper reported.
And the reason we bring you this as a green car report?
Well, it's funny - if you aren't the Bugatti driver - and laughter helps the environment (helps our environment, anyhow).
And there's this: the soggy Bugatti quite likely did its bit to help pollute the lagoon by dumping a fair amount of oil and gasoline into the water, but the accident may have spared the life of a pelican.
And, we can't help but point out, if the guy had - oh, say, run a Tesla electric roadster off the road, well, Tesla spokeswoman Rachel Konrad insists that except for a little grease from the suspension, nothing terribly bad would have been leached into the water. "There's absolutely nothing toxic in our lithium-ion battery pack," she said.
There's also a safety tip burning in the story: the driver "dropped his cell phone." Wonder how things would have gone had he not had it up to his ear while tooling along the motorway?
No word yet on whether the salt-soaked Veyron is going to be repaired.
John O'Dell, Senior Editor
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Photo courtesy of Chris Paschenko, Galveston County Daily News.
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My 11 year-old son who knows a great deal about Bugattis noticed that the rear spoiler was up in this picture. He told me that the rear spoiler only goes up when "you are driving over 137 mph to create a down force of 330 pounds". I looked it up on the internet and he was correct. So why are people talking about the pelican and the cell phone & neglecting to also mention that the guy was driving over 137 mph?
Good catch. In our case its because we weren't there, didn't talk to the guy and haven't seen the police report. Better to err on the side of omission than to misstate something like that. It's possible, perhaps (wink-wink, non-nod) that the water short-circuited the wing deployment mechanism and made it pop up when it wasn't supposed to.
He definetly could have been going that fast a bit before he crashed...you really could go from 60 to 140mph in about 4 seconds but I watched a video on youtube, some kid happen to be recording the veyron before and when it wrecked couldnt have been going more than 70 mph looked like 60 to me and if you were going 140mph that car would have been wrecked to pieces... spoiler must have been a malfunction or maybe it stays up for awhile after u slow down??? makes me sick to think of the sounds that engine was making when it was drowning...
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