This first question that comes to mind is what was he doing driving at 4:30 in the morning.
His friends describe him as a "grandma diver" so why was he driving so fast and blowing red lights on a residential street? Did he ever display this type of behaviour before?
Another question is.. how does a well made car burst into flames so quickly.
Another question is.. how does a well made car burst into flames so quickly.
There was a lot of discussion about various aspects of how cars behave when they crash, in a previous thread. But, speaking as a former firefighter, the tl/dr; is "cars do sometimes catch fire and burn when they crash". Hollywood style explosions don't normally happen, and car fires resulting from wrecks don't always happen, or even happen terribly often at all in my experience, but they are far from unheard of.
Both the test driver and the passenger walked away unharmed. Do note that this was on the track, where the cars are supposedly driven at much higher speeds than on regular roads.
People are making a typical statistical error here. It is unlikely for a car to catch fire in an accident, certainly. But it's wrong to take that and conclude that this fire was therefore likely due to foul play. Foul play is still a much less likely explanation for the facts as currently known.
That's only the case if in your world theory (and based on the input you have) you trust the government to not do such stuff.
If an investigative journalist "mysteriously vanished" in a Latin American dictatorship, for example, one would not even raise an eyebrow if told it was government work. Even if lots of people also vanished without foul play there.
Figure out a prior probability of foul play, figure out the probability of a car bursting into flames on impact, plug the result into Bayes' theorem, and you get the relative likelihoods.
No, scarcity isn't proof against, but it is evidence. A lot of people are talking nonstop about the rarity of cars bursting into flames as evidence against that interpretation, while ignoring the even greater rarity of journalists being murdered by the US government.
> Another question is.. how does a well made car burst into flames so quickly.
A fuel line is torn in the crash... a few milliliters of gasoline seep onto the ground, while the heat from the catalytic converter ignites some grass that has gotten a little long. The small amount of gasoline and brush cause a fire that is able to quickly spread through the damaged structure of the car, igniting the carpet, fabric, and seat cushions.
Within a minute the fire is well on its way. Within 3 minutes, the car is fully involved.
Obviously I don't know what happened in this case, but I've seen the exact scenario described happen more than once (the gas leak was only confirmed in one case, in two other cases, it was just the brush and debris under the car).
In his first book, he said he crashed a Buick while drunk at the age of 19.
He also had mentioned in a few columns about being a former addict. He said he'd been sober since (10+ years?), but until there are conclusive results on the toxicology report, it's all really speculative.
In either case, yes, he has displayed this type of behaviour before.
Or we're all exposed to mind-altering substances that make us paranoid, making us think he was exposed to drugs, thinking he was chased. It's the contrails, I tell you!
His friends describe him as a "grandma diver" so why was he driving so fast and blowing red lights on a residential street? Did he ever display this type of behaviour before?
Another question is.. how does a well made car burst into flames so quickly.