Tuesday 19 September 2017

Warning : Flying Car Hood


The above would be a very terrifying experience. Imagine that the car in front of you suddenly has its hood flipped open, flying through the air. A very scary thought indeed.

Now, I wanted to share this experience as this was the first time that I had encountered such an experience after more than 2 decades of driving history. I was driving down South on the highway, when along came a Singaporean car tail-gating very closely behind me. Singaporeans always seemed to be driving on high speed mode on the Malaysian highways- perhaps that was the only way that they could de-carbonise their engines as there was hardly any space to drive in speed around Singapore.

So I drove faster, but the car kept coming on. Now, the Sorento diesel engine was quite a powerful engine so I knew that I could egg the ride to go faster. After a while, an alarm started sounding and I had to pull the car to the emergency lane. I had not heard of such an alarm before and I checked the temperature, tire pressure, etc vide the OBC but nothing seemed amiss.



Then I saw that there was a light flashing on the hood and wondered if it could be that the hood had gotten loose. I exited the ride carefully, tried lifting the hood but it was still locked. I went in again, pulled the release hood mechanism, opened the hood, and closed it again. And the warning light went off and I could drive again.

Which meant that while the car was moving faster, the wind pressure could have somehow caused the hood to be unlocked such that the sensor picked it up. Mind you, it wasn't fully unlocked as I couldn't pull it up in the beginning. But still, that was a first in all my driving years and I made a mental note to have the SC check on the hood mechanism when I go back to KL.

The rest of the drive was uneventful, and here was Patriot gleaming under the sun at the Palace.








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