Two BMW-Related Stories From England

[JoshCalkins]

Normally these articles are reserved for stories about BMW car models, racing news, company news, etc., but two stories in the past couple of days from Great Britain have caught my eye and simply beg to be told. The first is a testament to a true petrol head, and the second illustrates just how stupid people can be.

Dulcibella King-Hall

First the petrol head. Here's a question: how would you like to spend your 107th birthday? Well, if you're Englishwoman Dulcibella King-Hall, you want to get into a brand new M3 and rip around a track, reaching a top speed of 108 mph. Ms. King-Hall was a vehicle tester for the Allies during World War II, responsible to testing commandeered civilian vehicles for military use, and her enthusiasm for speed has not been diluted by age.

At age 100, she took a trip in a Porsche and at 105 she climbed into a Rolls-Royce, but this year she upped the ante by doing four laps around the Brands Hatch course as a passenger. Her comment about the ride? "It could have been faster."

Lena Akers, a social coordinator who set up the track time, says that Ms. King-Hall is constantly telling the local bus driver "to go a little faster, please." Here's hoping that Dulcibella King-Hall gets a shot at a Bugatti or something for her 108th birthday next year.

Robert Jones' BMW

Okay, here's the stupid one. Robert Jones was driving his BMW to a friend's house and was using his sat nav for directions. No explanation why he needed sat nav to find a friend's house, but he was using it anyway. As he was driving, the sat nav told him to turn onto an unpaved, rocky footpath. Because sat nav is never, ever, wrong, Mr. Jones obeyed the command. Despite the increasing steepness of the path and the fact that it got increasingly narrow, Mr. Jones continued on.

Looks like an average road, right?

It wasn't until he hit a wire fence that he noticed something wasn't quite right and stopped; and good thing, because directly on the other side of that fence was a 100-foot vertical drop. Members of the police and other public works officials then had to spend nine hours dragging Jones' car out of the precarious position he had driven it into.

What are the morals of these two stories? First, you are never too old to enjoy speed. Second, anybody who completely trusts BMW's iDrive might end up going over a cliff.