I was heading off to an ad-tech conference this morning (with sessions like “Data Collaboration in Action: Using Clean Rooms and First-Party Data To Deliver Outcomes”), which required me to walk to the train like a person with a real job. Though I’ve spent most of my life avoiding any occupation I could easily explain to my wife’s friends, a delayed flight yesterday meant I had no trouble mimicking the tired and depressed low-stare of the office worker.
Like many of you, my brain is in a constant state of processing every vehicle that passes my eye. Internal processing power was in short supply at the moment, so I made it quite far past the library before something deep in my frontal lobe alerted me that something was amiss.
Behind me, in the parking lot of the local library, was a brand new Ford Explorer sitting at a strange angle. It’s almost as if the front wheel wasn’t there. I had to go back and look.
That’s not good.
To clarify: This is a couple of spots into the parking lot. It could have been dropped there? I assumed it was driven, but the road looks clear and there were not obvious scrapes in the parking lot (it’s wet, so that may contribute to it being hard to see).
There was a tire here at some point, but no more. The wheel barely exists in the form you think of as a traditional wheel. I’ve seen this happen before with a carbon fiber wheel on a track where it just self-destructed after a curb-hit because of the nature of carbon fiber. This isn’t a CF wheel, which means that it had to be ground down in some way.
You’ll notice there’s a few scrapes along the driver’s door, which is probably indicative of a collision with something. Did the Explorer crash first and then that collapse the front suspension, or did the tire/suspension fail first and then the vehicle collided with another vehicle or a wall?
Or is this some kind of very specific art piece. Would that explain why the vehicle seems to have been perfectly dropped here? I’m a little lost here as to how the vehicle wound up in this library parking lot and why it wasn’t taken to a collision center.
Please provide your best theory, and put it in the comments. Both real and completely ridiculous theories accepted/encouraged.
Probably fleeing police and continued after the tire left the party
“I noticed that my left front tire pressure was 1.5psi off from the right…”
My (now ex) wife’s BMW X 5 M-Package had crazily wide, sticky and fragile run flat tires. A rear tire picked up a piece of electrical conduit kicked up by a front tire when we were in the middle of nowhere Texas. On a Sunday. We sat it out at a bar for a couple of hours and not getting to see the friends we were meeting. Eventually, the flatbed tow truck showed up and took the car to the local dealership and then dropped us at home.
it will balance right out
Hehe oops, someone’s an asparagus.
Drove it ’till the wheels fell off.