I want rockets in my car to get rid of the slow drivers in front of me. Does this mean I have “issues?”
Bond-style gadget hid plate from police eyes
NEW ZEALAND: A Tauranga man who used a James Bond-style gadget to tilt his motorcycle numberplate to foil police and speed cameras was left shaken but not stirred after crashing into a patrol car.
Garry Leonard Muzyka, 46, from Cambridge Heights, had a hand lever next to the fuel tank enabling him to tilt the number plate so it was horizontal and could not be read by following traffic.
But, after a high-speed pursuit, Muzyka was unable to escape nearly $1700 in court imposed fines.
The self-employed man was yesterday convicted and fined $1640 after he pleaded guilty to one charge each of exceeding the 100kmh speed limit, failing to stop for police and dangerous driving.
No charge was laid in relation to the numberplate gadget.
Community magistrate Robyn Paterson also disqualified Muzyka from driving for six months. The court was told that at 1.35pm on August 31, Muzyka was caught on police radar travelling at 154km on his motorcycle in a 100kmh area on State Highway 5, some 10km south of Rotorua.
Pursued by police, he continued to accelerate through to the city, on one occasion crossing the centre line, where he maintained high speeds.
He eventually came to a stop after he lost control of his motorcycle and crashed into the side of a police car. On examination of the motorcycle, police found the hand lever and uncovered his numberplate trick.
Defence lawyer Bill Nabney said that while his client admitted travelling at high speeds, he denied having lost control of his vehicle.
“He was about to stop and was rammed by a police car.”
Mrs Paterson said: “It was a horrendous speed to be driving.”
… you are fortunate no one was injured.”
Having grown up with Bond films and books I can say there’s no gizmo / gadget I’d take over a rotating license plate for my car.
It’d be better if you rotated it a full 180, and had a false plate on the other side. Then they wont even know anythings up until the search is done, hopefully by then you’re long gone.
Why not eliminate the license plate all together and install and LCD display the same size of the plate. Then one can “post” a picture of a license plate and change it whimsically to anything.
Or how about we acknowledge that licensing and vehicle registration requirements infringe on people’s natural right to travel.
Anybody have the schematics for one of these. I would love to put one on my Z3. Seems like it would be easy to do. Just have a switch and a small motor driven arm to push the plate up.
What would be better for day to day driving in places where they use traffic cameras would be some type of cover that screws up the picture. Any ideas?
Shane, there are a bunch of tricks that motorists have used to fool cameras.
Use colored tape to change a number from say 8 to a 9 or 3.
Drive through some swamp so your whole car, including the plate, is covered in mud.
Install a tow hitch right in front of the plate then put a large ball cover on it.
Use a frame that covers the state, and any other identifiers, over the plate.
But you realize that would be cheating if you did any of these so I don’t recommend you try any.
Shane, there are already covers we can get for the license plate that blurs part of the plate at different angles.
I used to be a police officer (now I do criminal defense) and am familiar with all of those tricks. The trick is to do something that, if you are stopped, will pass a visual inspection. If you cover the tag, you can be cited for obscured tag. If you alter it with tape, you get cited for altered/obscured tag. If I was behind someone and saw anything obscuring a tag, that was always reason to run them through A.C.I.C./ N.C,I.C. More often than not, if a tag was obscured, there was a reason (usually an expired tag).
I either need to have the electric swing tag or something that messes with the optics in the camera while at the same time looking normal. The above references to James Bond are something like what I am after. Bond’s cars were modded to hell. His Lotus was a submarine for God’s sake! But even being that heavily modded, they looked normal to the casual observer. That is the key.
Citations are about revenue generation and little else. I don’t know about the rest of you but, where we live, a citation for speeding in a construction zone can run almost $1,000.00! Yes, you are reading that correctly.
When I was a cop, we didn’t have quotas, we had “expectations.” It was well known, even if it wasn’t said specifically, that your monthly better have a set amount of citations on it. And no, I am not bashing police officers. It is not the officers’ fault that their supervisors force them to write citations. The pressure comes from the top down. The supervisors are pressured by city hall. It may not be that way everywhere but that is certainly the way it was in the Birmingham Police Department.
If, by cheating, you mean breaking the law, please. They are implementing the traffic cameras that take a picture of your tag and then send you a ticket in the mail in cities near me. It has been proven that, in cities where these cameras have been implemented, the companies responsible have shortened yellow lights so they can generate more revenue. Who’s cheating there? Seems like I am just leveling the playing field.
Thanks Bill, do you have a link to a site that sells them? A few Google searches and searches on Ebay have been unsuccessful.
The problem with these cameras is that they totally negate the peoples’ right to face their accusers in court. There have been cases in some states that have challenged the legality of using cameras to catch speeder and people who run traffic lights.
I don’t like them for several reasons. First, there is the fact that they can shorten the yellow light to virtually zero which means that there is no way that you could stop in time. Second, the ticket comes to the registered owner, not necessarily the person who was driving. Looking at a grainy overhead photo, it is virtually impossible to identify the real driver. This means that you can: (a) Call the prosecutor and work something out before court (it works for attorneys anyway) (b) fight it in court.
The problem with fighting it out in court is that neither municipal court or district court are courts of record. This means that there is no court reporter making a transcript of testimony. So, you have to hire your own court reporter. You will still almost always lose on that level anyway because the judges sometimes don’t let the facts get in the way of a guilty verdict (especially if it brings in revenue). They know that they are unlikely to be reversed on appeal because virtually nobody appeals a traffic ticket worth only a couple hundred dollars. In any case, the average person is not going to go to the expense of paying a minimum of $300.00 to retain an attorney to represent them so most of the above is a moot point anyway.
I would just rather avoid getting the ticket in the first place.
Check out the eclipse licence plate cover From flashalert.com. Even james bond himself would be impressed.