all car crashes, all the time

August 30, 2005 3:37 PM

Crashed Cars of KuwaitWith a 120kph (75mph) highway speed limit, an 80kph (50mph) urban speed limit, a lot of expensive high performance cars, next to no law enforcement, driving in Kuwait can be a little, err, exciting. Psycho Milt, a New Zealander working in Kuwait, has a substantial and ever-growing flickr photoset of crashed cars he's snapped on his daily commute.
posted by noizyboy (19 comments total)

bah! second link is broken - errant quote mark got in there. first one (title) works ok. Or click here.
posted by noizyboy at 3:39 PM on August 30, 2005

Nice post, "Psycho Milt" is a cool nickname, and these are cool too. linked here before, perhaps
posted by Kwantsar at 3:47 PM on August 30, 2005

If I lived over there, I'd be making franken-cars and selling them as the latest German luxury cars.
posted by HiveMind at 3:56 PM on August 30, 2005

thanks to admin for fixing second link. cheers.
posted by noizyboy at 3:57 PM on August 30, 2005

Wow, some of these are really impressive. I'm glad to have the opportunity to rubberneck without slowing down traffic.

Very reminiscent of this lousy movie (or was it the remake?).
posted by Aknaton at 3:58 PM on August 30, 2005

Wow, makes my commute look like a cakewalk.
posted by fenriq at 4:02 PM on August 30, 2005

The New Jersey Turnpike looks like that on occasion.
posted by R. Mutt at 4:16 PM on August 30, 2005

R. Mutt, only not as clean?
posted by fenriq at 4:18 PM on August 30, 2005

Exactly fenriq - plus I think someone has been stealing the aluminum guardrail pieces again.
posted by R. Mutt at 4:26 PM on August 30, 2005

A buddy of mine showed me a video he obtained, which appeared to be filmed somewhere in that part of the world (Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia) that involved lots of young guys in very expensive cars driving very fast past crowds of people, locking up the wheels, getting the car into a spin, and seeing where it ended up. Crowds of people were cheering these spinning, out of control Mercs as they careered and inevitably crashed into light posts, and occasionally members of the crowd. Very strange. Anyone know what that's about?
posted by Jimbob at 8:10 PM on August 30, 2005

Interesting, but by the FPP, I was assuming I'd see a lot of wrecked Ferraris and shit. Most of these cars are kind of crappy.
posted by fungible at 8:41 PM on August 30, 2005

Jimbob, that's called Drifting, and it's wildly popular in the Gulf. Islam limits male-female social interaction, so there's a lot of young men who hang out together, and they do stuff like that to impress the girls who watch, chaperoned, from a distance. Some videos.

I still love one of those videos for introducing me to the fun, obscure track "No 1 Else" by Bushman. Can anyone tell me, though, if that's the reggae artist, or somebody else?
posted by dhartung at 12:06 AM on August 31, 2005

I am Jack's underdeveloped sense of empathy. Kind of disturbing, if you stop to consider that it's hard to imagine someone walking from a few of those.
posted by psmealey at 3:56 AM on August 31, 2005

Something else to consider for the Kuwaiti pics is that no one can touch any of those cars unless they want to face Kuwaiti justice for theft.

Out in the deserts you see Rolls Royces and Mercedes that have broken down or run out of gas that are being reclaimed by the dunes because the billionaire owner simply had another car come pick him up.
posted by Pollomacho at 6:13 AM on August 31, 2005

The photoset is pretty chilling. The first couple are fun to look at, in a kind of gruesome way, and then the loss of life starts to kind of sink in as the pictures keep coming.
posted by OmieWise at 8:08 AM on August 31, 2005

I disagree with dhartung that Arabs the spinning and flipping cars qualifies as drifting. Drifting is a popular Japanese motorsport where cars race around tracks or mountain roads, keeping the car sideways (relative to the direction of the road) as often as possible. It takes skill, unlike the videos I've seen of the Arabs doing donuts.
posted by knave at 11:35 AM on August 31, 2005

This reminds me of a story a friend of mine who was in the First Gulf War told me. He and his buddies were in Saudi Arabia before the first invasion of Iraq. When they were bored they would roll along the highways and look for the camel road kill. According to him, the Saudis would take their small, white pickups (usually toyota or nissan) and race them around in the desert, occasionally totalling them against a camel. So camel roadkill was an amusing sight and a way to kill an hour or two.

(Thinking back, it's odd that he was so specific about the cars- for anyone who's been in Saudi Arabia, how common are these cars?)
posted by Hactar at 1:54 PM on August 31, 2005

Having lived and driven in Saudi Arabia, this does not surprise me at all. I saw more horrific wrecks there than I can count. Even the local press acknowledged that the kingdom officially had the world's worst vehicular accident rate. I believe it.

My route to work took me past a place where cars were taken after wrecks. I know cars, read car magazines, can look at any car going down the road and know it's a ____. So many of these cars I saw were obliterated beyond recognition. My employer would occasionally send around pictures of cars that other employees had demolished, as a safety reminder.

As for camels, they often enough wander freely. It is said, and makes sense, that if you hit one straight on or close to it while driving at any sginificant rate of speed (through driving unsafely or through bad luck), chances are you will die or be grievously injured. The height of camels' legs is apparently such that when cars hit them, the body of the camel often comes through the windshield or lands on the roof.

I still have a watch-out-for-camels safety poster the company put out: "Camels don't know the rules of the road, but you do."
posted by ambient2 at 12:23 AM on September 1, 2005

Living in Kuwait and familiar with the pictures, and the car crashes. Most of the ones he has are from outside the city. If you check out the Kuwait +cras tags in Flickr you will find a lot more accidents. The problem is that people (kids) drive way to fast and you got people driving way to slow.

Jimbob, they do that in Saudi those kids are really crazy there. They will just floor it in any car, then just pull the side brake and let the car just spin and roll. Then you got specators that will run infront of the car in a game of chicken.

You will not see any of the super cars in those type of car wrecks for the owners of them know the value of them and know how to drive them. The only super car accident I recall was with a Lamborgini. He was taking it out on one of the long straight roads and it flipped over. They sent a team of engineers to see what happened. The results were that his tires blew due to the heat causing the car to flip.
posted by nibaq at 12:25 AM on September 1, 2005