Autoblog

Last night's episode of Mythbusters was wonderfully auto related. The show's hosts, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, take on the myth that a speed camera can be foiled. They attack the myth from various angles, including testing various types of license plate covers that claim to obscure one's plate from the prying eyes of a roadside speed camera. Of course, every mailorder plate cover fails miserably.

The real myth behind this segment, however, is that one can drive so fast that a speed camera will be unable to snap a pic before the car moves out of frame. They begin with an average car, the late-model Dodge Neon. On an abandoned airforce runway the Neon manages to hit 100 mph, clearly not fast enough to foil the camera. Their best shot is with a Lamborghini Murcielago, but they make the mistake of using a drag strip this time that doesn't offer enough room to get up to speed. A professional driver manages to reach about 140 mph, though it's still snapped with ease. Their conclusion is that the speed camera cannot be foiled just by going faster. Really? The Top Gear crew actually managed to foil a speed camera back in their first on-air episode back in 2002, when a TVR Tuscan S driven by the Stig passed a speed camera at over 170 mph, and the camera never went off (check the video here). Now, speed camera technology has no doubt advanced in the past five years, so perhaps the Mythbusters crew is still right and it is impossible to beat a speed camera in 2007.

Adam and Jaime have so much fun testing cars that at the end of the show they implore their viewership to send in more auto-related myths. You can do so here, and tell them Autoblog sent you. Maybe we can get a walk-on roll or something.

We've left some surprises if you still plan to watch the show, which will now enter the pantheon of Mythbusters reruns on the Discovery Channel, and can also be downloaded as a torrent here (NSFW).