TJRed76

Does anyone remember the story from many years ago about the guy with the Impala that put a JATO Rocket on it and ended up smashed into a mountain in Arizona?
Last night I saw a program that debunked that story. They bought an Impala and connected rockets to it. Then they put radio controls on the car and took it to a dry lake bed. They got the car up to 80 mph and fired the rockets. The helicopter that the operator was in topped out at 130 and they could not keep up with the car. Not surprisingly, the car did not become airborn.
The radio controlled Impala with rocket assist was very cool though.
:yesnod:

Fevre

:cool: story but alas it is just that, a story:

http://snopes.com/autos/dream/jato.asp

RedHot

:withstupid:

Urban Legand. :yesnod:

lbell101

Yes, I saw that too.
Now that's a fun job!

Larry

Ken73

"MythBusters" was the show.. absolutely hilarious! They also bought a pig's stomach and filled it with 6 cans of Coke and 6 packs of Pop Rocks to see if it would explode.. :lol:

burners

It's a funny story but totally untrue. That's quite amusing that someone actually did it to prove the point. I wonder what JATO bottle they used, there are all kinds of thrust ratings. Maybe they used a small one.

Cookwithvette

That was a great show. My favorite bit was the exploding biscuit cans. I never expected one could jump so far or explode so violently. I was rolling. :rofl:

TJRed76

They could not get an actual JATO, so they got some hobby rocketeers to put three huge rockets together to simulate a JATO.

98RKC

I love websites like that.
Some of my favs: truthorfiction.com and deadoralive.com

a454corvette

I once wran across a site that claimed to have the "real" story of the rocket-car-in-the-cliff legend. It involved a military surplus scrapyard, an abandoned mine, and a couple of bored small desert town teens.

Made a pretty good read, even if it was all :bs

EDIT: here it is: http://www.ddave.com/rocketcar/


[Modified by a454corvette, 11:23 AM 1/24/2003]