#suicide

Considering they’re only making 160 of them, the suicide doors on the eighty Coach Door Edition Lincoln Continentals to be sold next year have garnered quite a bit of attention.

The use of rear-hinged doors on vehicles dates to the horse age. It seems that sometime in the 1930s the moniker “suicide doors” was applied to them, apparently due to people’s propensity for falling out of cars in the decades before Ford introduced the seat belt (as an option in 1956). There’s also, at least according to something frequently reproduced online, a connection with gangsters pushing people out of cars — though to my ears, that would be more like homicide doors.

I’m not convinced, though, it’s any easier to fall (or be pushed) out of a car with such doors, other than the fact that aerodynamics will help keep the door open while you’re falling (or being pushed).

Michigan State Police, along with a baker’s dozen of truckers and a couple of suburban police departments, came up with a clever solution to avert a suicide early Tuesday morning. Some time around 1:00 a.m., police received a report of a man getting ready to jump off the overpass where I-696 runs under Coolidge Hwy, just a couple of miles north of Detroit. He had either climbed over or around the protective fence and was standing on the top of the bridge’s side barrier, above eastbound traffic, near the median.

There happens to be a Michigan State Police post just a half mile away, so response was both quick and massive. While negotiators from the MSP, Oak Park, and Huntington Woods PDs talked to the man, the state police began shutting down eastbound traffic on the interstate highway. Well, they didn’t shut down traffic entirely. While cars and light trucks were rerouted off the freeway, about a half dozen tractor-trailer rigs were let through to the overpass, where police directed them to line up closely, side-by-side, directly under the bridge. The idea was to shorten the fall if the man decided to go ahead and jump. The same was done on the westbound side of the overpass. A total of 14 truckers apparently volunteered to help save the man’s life, though only 13 fit under the bridge.

Caparo Industries chairman Angad Paul died Nov. 9 in an apparent suicide just days after the steelmaking company his father founded, and Angad ran, announced massive job cuts and forced administration in Britain, according to The Guardian (via Autoblog).

Caparo Industries is the parent company of Caparo Vehicle Technologies, which produced the Caparo T1 and was planning a higher-end version of the car to go on sale.

The Caparo T1, which was developed with help from McLaren engineers, lived on the fringes of the supercar market with only 16 examples sold in the UK for around $360,000. It was also built at a short-lived plant in the U.S. Prince Albert of Monaco helped unveil the car in 2006 and it later appeared in several racing events around the world, including Goodwood.

Hyundai chickened out and took down a clever ad that promotes the zero carbon emissions of its ix35 in a very convincing way: The ad shows a man who tries to commit suicide using a hose attached to the exhaust. The man fails and lives. Instead, the ad was killed.

I’ll admit it: when I wrote my anguished screed regarding the ridiculous curated-Tweet Lincoln “Motor Company” advertisement-in-progress, I sincerely hoped that I would be wrong. I secretly thought: hey, there are some smart people involved, and “crowdsourcing” might produce the work of Shakespeare as easily as an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters.

Boy, was I wrong.