“Why do so many people destroy their cars in the water here?” we asked a year and a half ago. Drivers in an English town almost wantonly destroyed their vehicle because they wanted to cross a ford too quickly and the engine suffered a water hammer. This is finally over.
It is probably impossible to find out how many cars actually died from water here. In any case, YouTube is full of videos that show the ignorance or daring, or at least the misjudgment, of many cars. Countless YouTubers and bloggers have posted relevant content online over the years. But now the police have blocked this water passage. The scene is (or was) Rufford Lane in Newark-on-Trent in Nottinghamshire, Newark and Sherwood district. There a sunken road crosses the course of a brook. The road is often dry (or simply wet in the rain), but often the trickle carries more water, and then the piece is under water. Depending on how deep it is, it can be over 30 centimeters deep or even much more. Instead of taking the six-kilometer detour, many drivers simply drive through, sometimes to the hooting of local residents (and sometimes from onlookers who have traveled a long way), who are already waiting for it. Many made it too. They were either lucky that the water wasn’t that deep or they had a car with a more conveniently placed air intake, or they had a Land Rover or a similar off-road vehicle with a correspondingly high fording depth. Or just drive slowly enough.Water hammer is pretty definitiveBut many underestimate the bow wave that triggers a slightly higher speed. What then happens is that the water reaches the point where the engine is sucking in air. As a result, it sucks in water, which then gets into the cylinders. Since water, unlike the fuel-air mixture, cannot be compressed, but the piston still moves upwards, the respective connecting rod bends. End of story, nothing to add. It’s called water hammer. When it’s older, you can have the car towed straight to the scrap heap. Why would you do something like that? The BBC asked a psychologist why drivers would do such irrational things. dr According to William Van Gordon, it is mainly people who consider themselves to be above-average drivers, that is 80 to 90 percent. And driving can give us a false sense of security: because we are in control of the car, we believe the same is true of the road, but of course that is not the case. In addition, we are generally bad at assessing risks when driving. So it’s quite possible that one or the other who is now laughing at “the idiots” in the video will become a laughing stock tomorrow – if someone accidentally pulls out the cell phone camera. By the way: The ford passage was not closed because so much engine damage was caused, but because the water fountains caused when driving through disturbed the residents as much as the wildly parked cars of onlookers. And because people kept trying to drive into the creek. So protecting drivers from themselves is just a side effect.
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