My thoughts are with the eighteen-year-old who demolished the facade of an Enschede house on Sunday evening with a borrowed Audi RS6. After an evasive maneuver, he lost control, hit a pole – boom. Ram raid without loot with a two-ton power combination, could it be more pathetic?
How would the perpetrator feel? The question is a blow to the real victims who, while fortunately unharmed, are left with an uninhabitable home. Perhaps it is also a question of the known way. It will not have been a boy with a buttery soft emotional life. At least he looks seriously against it. Anyone who at that age dares to carry on with someone else’s car, which chases a kind of supercar through the built-up area at extreme speeds, shows shit to rules and his fellow humans. You would almost be jealous of his lack of inhibitions. That guy can still go far with his mourning mentality. He doesn’t shy away from anything, and modern society suffers from limitless forgiveness. After his unsavory Audi antics, rapper Boef made it to the Dutch talk show tables, solemnly rehabilitated by people who could have been his victims.
At the same time, it is almost melancholic among the car-hating hipsters of today to find a real car enthusiast who went all the way for a day of blowing his boyhood dream. Without wanting to play the devil’s advocate, I wonder against my better judgment whether some compassion is in order after all. Perhaps the culprit was at the core a good kid who had no idea what he was quoting. That we had read in the car magazines how unapproachably those RSs stick to the asphalt, strengthened by that comforting insurance, considered invulnerable – and is now desperately biting his nails in his boy’s room. I too praised the adhesive power of those monsters, so soon I will be addressed on another mishap. Judge: “You, tokkie, so flew with a hundred of the cloverleaf?” Tokkie: “But Van Putten wrote that it was possible!” Anyway, this traffic offender was certainly not intoxicated. It’s something.
The opportunity makes the thief. Who can blame such a grass-green petrolhead for getting carried away by his lust? At that age, the drives are more powerful than the mind. The real responsibility lies with the owner who gives such a car to an 18-year-old. If you take the moral side of this story a little wider, the question of blame lies with all of us. With the manufacturers who make such a car, with governments that allow them on public roads, and maybe also a bit with wow vloggers in drifting supercars. In their own way, they all contribute to the normalization of the inadmissible.
Let one thing be clear; a car with 605 hp is always life-threatening. You don’t hit two hundred thousand pieces to drive a hundred. Anyone who buys something like this is driven by exactly the same feelings of power as that stupid teenager. Every time I approach the freeway driveway from a parking lot I realize, knowing what those cars can do, that I could be rammed into the side in three seconds by the Audi, Tesla or Ferrari taking off on the horizon. But my eighty-year-old father with his slow Peugeo and pre-war reaction speed doesn’t know. Even if the man behind the wheel happens to know what he is doing, the slow majority can pay a heavy price for his supersonic convenience.
That risk cannot be put into perspective with the small number of supercars. With their insane capacities, today’s electric lease bins are also in less than five seconds out of a hundred. As an eighteen-year-old Polestar employee on the way to a customer, had I resisted the temptation to secretly go full with 400 horsepower under the right foot at the wrong time? I dare not swear.