To whom this may concern, I would like some clarity on a matter. A while ago, there was an announcement that road users may treat red traffic lights as stop streets after 22h30. I did not research at the time whether this was ever promulgated into law but I assumed (now to my disadvantage) that this was accepted road safety law. I do recall that this came about as a result of increasing crime at night like hijacking, attempted break-ins, and traffic light theft where stationary vehicles were targeted.
Last week Friday (6/2/15), my partner and I were travelling back from a movie in Sandton at around 1am. On the presumption that this was accepted now in practice, he treated the red traffic light of corner Sandton Drive and Grayston Drive as a stop street. As he continued driving, an SAPS vehicle (not a JMPD vehicle/official) stopped him and fined him R500 for “jumping a red traffic light”. I tried to tell the Constable that this is a mistake because of the practice / rule / law that red traffic lights could be treated as stop streets after 22h30.
He denied that this was a rule and said to me that no such rule exists. Not longer than 5 minutes after we drove away after being fined, we stopped at the Sandton Drive – William Nicol Road traffic light and next to us, a JMPD vehicle (the official was on his cellular phone at the time) stopped for a short period and then drove after he saw the adjacent road was clear. The JMPD official therefore treated the traffic light as a stop street! Please would you let me know whether you are aware of the existence of this accepted practice / rule / law so that we can fight this? I would appreciate your urgent response so that I know how to treat this fine. I have tried doing research now on the web and I have hit a dead-end. Thank you and kind regards
Answer:
In short, traffic signals must be obeyed 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and 365 days a year.
The National Road Traffic Act makes no provision for disobeying traffic signals “after hours” and although people like JMPD spokesperson, Edna Mamonyane have made reckless statements on radio to the contrary, unfortunately, this is not backed up by law. This said, you may make a representation and/or defend any matter you have been accused of and some judicial officers may have sympathy over the specific circumstances under which the offence was committed.
Howard Dembovsky
National Chairman – Justice Project South Africa (NPC)
The Svengalis at the 24 Hours of LeMons have managed to cloud the minds of Race Sonoma‘s management to the point where they look at their beautiful wine-nation race track getting befouled by horrible, LeMons cars dropping bumpers and spewing oil… and see a real race going on. Perhaps the hypnotism has them imagining shiny new Mustangs instead of this and wailing Porsche GT3s as an alternative of, properly, this. What ever the case, we’re undertaking 3 races at The Track Formerly Recognized As Sears Point inside a 4-month span, and the second a single just wrapped up final weekend. The climate was perfect, the battles have been tough-fought, and we witnessed more Sesame Street characters driving race vehicles than anyone had ever observed just before. Right here are the winners of the 2015 Good Effort Grand Prix. We’ll start with the least important prize first: The Class A prize plus the win on laps had been taken by Eyesore Racing and their hideous-but-quick “ghettocharged” Mazda Miata. The Eyesores were amongst the earliest teams to create the puzzling costumes and projects-of-questionable-sanity for which LeMons racing has turn out to be identified, and— prior to the group members became parents, got actual jobs, purchased homes, and so on.— were the dominant West Coast team for many years. They hadn’t won a LeMons race since 2012, however, and so final weekend’s win was (to place it in the East Bay parlance of LeMons HQ) Hella Sweet for Eyesore Racing. One particular of the factors that Los Eyesores have been obtaining all those P2 and P3 finishes in recent years has been that their strange-o automobile develop delivers no safe place for a massive fuel cell, limiting their car’s fuel capacity to the factory 10-gallon fuel tank and condemning the group to one much more fueling stop than the competition. Another purpose has been the rise of the team pictured above, the 1st LeMons team to figure out how to hold a Porsche 944 from exploding into a million not possible-to-reassemble pieces in our race. Formerly known as Porch Racing and now referred to as Depend, this group ended the Very good Effort Grand Prix less than a lap behind Eyesore. The 3 penalty laps handed to them during the automobile inspections by a LeMons Supreme Court justice who smelled a hint of cheatonium in their automobile couldn’t be overcome by Depend’s longer stints, and Eyesore clawed out their first win in 3 years. In Class B, the LeMons Supreme Court justices were faced with a dilemma: how can you place a breakdown-prone ’89 Chevy Cavalier with 3.1 liter V6 and terrible suspension into Class A, even right after ONSET/Tetanus West Racing won the class in Washington last summer? We couldn’t do it, and then ONSET/Tetanus won the class by 6 laps more than the John Galt Racing BMW 2002. Even even though ONSET/Tetanus team captain Anton Lovett has more LeMons races below his belt than any other driver and brings his Cavalier to the track inside a former bread truck, that vehicle goes in Class A from now on (unless it gets an Iron Duke engine swap, of course). For more of the wonderful race-automobile-transporter rigs of this race, verify out LeMons Supreme Court Justice Tim Odell’s piece on Hooniverse. Class C gave the judges another classing dilemma the Aqua Volvo Volvo 242 has been around for quite a even though and had often been miserably slow and profoundly unreliable, but a stock Volvo 240 can be a potent Class B or even Class A LeMons racer in the hands of a team whose members know what they’re carrying out. Properly, it looks like the Aqua Volvo folks finally figured it out, grabbing a Class C victory by a single lap more than the POS Angry Bird Datsun 200SX (yet another fairly excellent car handicapped by hapless-but-lovable team personnel). Welcome to Class B, Aqua Volvo! The designed-just-for-the-occasion trophy this time was awarded to Zero Below Racing, for taking a not-very-good-to-start off-with Chevrolet Corvair and generating it even worse with the swap of a mid-mounted Buick 215 aka Rover V8 engine. In a lot the identical way that the remake of Gone In 60 Seconds was even worse than the extremely cheezy original, Zero Under has earned the Gone In 60 Seconds Poor Remake Trophy. We’re positive that Corvair fans about the globe are rejoicing at this news. The Sunday Funday Honda CRX team races with a transvestite/transexual theme, like a pink fringe on the automobile and the ugliest, most hirsute trannies ever inflicted upon the eyes of race organizers (and, think me, we’ve seen lots). So, naturally, when the transmission failed on their vehicle and the group fixed it, we had no choice but to award the Most Heroic Repair trophy to the tranny-fixing trannies of Team Sunday Funday, just so we could make a clever joke at the awards ceremony. The I Got Screwed award went to Altar Boy Racing for the purgatorial travails they underwent even though attempting to get their 1985 Mazda 626 race-legal and then operating. The team brought about 20 crew members and place collectively a fantastic “Evolution Is Okay” theme, but the auto suffered from a long list of safety problems (such as a rear suspension with 0° of camber on the left and about 40° on the correct). The team thrashed away at those issues and ultimately got the car onto the track late in the 1st race session… at which point the automatic transmission refused to shift out of very first gear. That lap didn’t count (the tow truck didn’t pull the Mazda past the commence/finish line), the team in no way did get the transmission functioning, and so Altar Boy Racing took home the I Got Screwed trophy. Due to the fact LeMons HQ gave admission precedence to teams that weren’t accepted to the overbooked Arse Freeze-a-Palooza race last month, we had more than the usual number of teams recognized for becoming a bit too spinny and crashy with their race automobiles. Since of this, the LeMons Supreme Court’s judges decided that the Judges’ Selection award would go to the ideal redemption story of the weekend, the team that got their act collectively and went from black-flag magnet to super-clean racers. That team was Expendable and their BMW E30 3-series, frequent penalty-box visitors and sent-home-in-shame racers at all their previous LeMons events but startlingly clean competitors this time. It didn’t hurt that Group Expendable’s drivers operate at Vintage Electric Bikes and loaned us one particular of their exceptional American-created bikes as pit transportation for the weekend. This bike can haul even the greatest-fed judge up the steepest hill at Race Sonoma at a great clip, and permitted us to enable Hush Mode and sneak up on unsafe fuelers and jack-stand-significantly less wrenchers for some righteous paddock security-violation busts. Group OMShenanigans had some sort of Obama’s Black-Helicopter-flying FEMA Camp Enforcers theme on their BMW E23 7-series final time we saw them, and— apparently inspired by TARP Racing’s Cookie Monster Warlord BMW— this time they raced with a vehicle turned into a gigantic googly-eyed Cookie Monster. Due to the fact OMShenanigans did this, we have been able to watch an Alfa Romeo Milano with a giant Pepperidge Farm Milano cookie on the roof duking it out with a 4,000-pound Cookie Monster on a legendary race track. For that, OMShenanigans earned a nicely-deserved Organizer’s Decision trophy. The Index of Effluency, LeMons racing’s best prize, went to Spank the Builder for his Mini Moke-turned-Caterpillar backhoe, which completed an incredible 34th spot overall and created a credible run at Class C. This car ran the third-slowest best lap occasions of the complete 93-entry field, and so finishing so high in the standings is an remarkable accomplishment. On Sunday, Spank did an iron-man 6-hour solo driving stint with no stops, which would have been a flag-to-flag run if he hadn’t run out of gas 5 minutes prior to the checkered flag. Somehow, Spank and his teammates discovered the energy to re-theme their auto as a John Deere tractor in time for Monday’s race session. A effectively-deserved Index of Effluency for Spank to add to his massive collection of LeMons trophies! We race once more in a couple of weeks, this time at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama, so check in right here for all your LeMons news if you can not make it to the track.
As the premier auto show in North America, Detroit is where automakers can be expected to pull out all the stops. At Car and Driver, we mobilize our worldwide staff to attend and report on the 20-plus automaker press conferences in addition to covering a lot more than a dozen evening events. And we do it all in service to you, the reader. From Sunday afternoon via Tuesday, it’s a blizzard of activity, which afterward starts to coalesce into clear themes—and pounding hangovers. Here, then, are our 5 takeaways from the 48 Hours of Detroit:
The Horsepower Ratings Are Unreal
Advances in technology—such as the widespread adoption of turbocharging—are fueling an extraordinary horsepower race. And it is getting accomplished with smaller sized engine displacements. Ford’s GT supercar concept debuted with a twin-turbocharged V-6 that is stated to make far more than 600 horsepower. The V-8 isn’t dead, of course: The 2016 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350R promises much more than 500 horsepower from its naturally aspirated flat-plane-crank V-8, and Cadillac’s CTS-V ultra sedan’s supercharged 6.2-liter LT4 V-8 proffers an insane 640 horsepower. That latter figure, with each other with the BMW M5’s 560 horsepower and the Mercedes-AMG E63’s 550 ponies, set the bar at such a nosebleed level that the new Lexus GS F, which also produced its debut at Detroit, was immediately dismissed for having just 467.
The power madness extends to trucks, as properly, with the new Raptor anticipated to deliver 450 to 500 horsepower—again, from Ford’s EcoBoost V-6—easily surpassing the 411-hp figure from the preceding model’s 6.2-liter V-7 And overmuscled SUVs are represented, too, with Porsche taking the wraps off the 570-hp Cayenne Turbo S and Mercedes trotting out the 577-hp GLE63 AMG (which will be sold right here only in extrapotent S kind).
Plug-In Hybrids Are a Issue, Too
But for practically each large-energy beast that blitzed Cobo Center, there was also a plug-in hybrid introduced—and often from the very same brand. The purpose is straightforward: Companies require these electrified models to meet ever-tightening fuel-economy requirements both here and abroad. European producers are specifically keen on the technologies, even as numerous of their executives have gone on record as hating it, due to the fact PHEVs can accomplish ridiculously lofty—and almost unobtainable in the real world—fuel-economy numbers on a special Euro test cycle. But plug-ins also offer bonus credits for manufacturers in their quest to meet U.S. CAFE regulations.
The headline PHEV was, of course, the all-new Chevrolet Volt, which has increased EV variety and a new 4-cylinder range-extending engine. Honda also announced a stand-alone plug-in model set to arrive by 2018. The VW Group, which significantly prefers diesel technology to hybridization, plugged in with the Volkswagen Cross Coupe GTE notion and the production Audi Q7 e-tron, whilst Mercedes countered its wild GLE63 AMG SUV with a sensible plug-in C-class sedan. Finally, Hyundai added a Sonata plug-in to its lineup to counter corded loved ones sedans from Ford and Honda.
Truckin’ Trucks to Motown
It utilised to be that, on the automotive calendar, the Chicago auto show was known as “the truck show.” It was there that manufacturers for whatever purpose decided to debut their latest and greatest workhorses, industrial autos, and boulder-bashers. That seems to have definitively changed here in Detroit: With gas costs still hovering about $ 2.00 per gallon in the location, this year saw not only the gnarly second-gen Ford Raptor take the stage, but also new trucks of all sizes from Toyota (Tacoma), Nissan (Titan), and Ram (Rebel). And what’s this? Even Hyundai showed a truck? And it was shockingly cool and probably headed to a dealer close to you? It is true—as is the truth that Motown is down with trucks.
Detroit Diesels
Regardless of the truth that nearby gas stations were promoting unleaded for significantly less than $ 2.00 per gallon, Detroit was a hotbed of diesel enthusiasm this year. The largest headline came from Nissan, whose all-new—and somewhat curiously styled—Titan XD packs a 5.-liter turbo-diesel V-8 built by Cummins. Nissan’s betting large on purchasers who want massive-time torque (555 lb-ft of it in this case, alongside 310 horses) but do not want to step up to a heavy-duty pickup.
Nissan wasn’t the only automaker showing off compression ignition on the show floor, even so. Land Rover introduced the Variety Rover and Range Rover Sport powered by the JLR Td6, a torquey powerplant promising up to 28 mpg in the posh SUVs. Hyundai got in on the game, as well, sneaking an oil-burner beneath the hood of the charmingly wacky Santa Cruz concept. And there had been a lot more-familiar diesel-powered faces, as effectively, like Volkswagen’s Golf TDI SportWagen and Ram’s EcoDiesel 1500. Someday, anthropologists may refer to the 2015 Detroit show as a turning point in Americans’ acceptance of diesel technologies.
No Indicators of Forced Entry, But Ford Clearly Stole the Show
Just 2 hours into the show, with only a handful of vehicles debuted, Ford ushered a horde of journalists and sector insiders into Joe Louis Arena—home of the Red Wings and adjacent to Cobo Center—dimmed the lights, and blew us all away.
Ford may as nicely have turned out the lights in the entirety of Cobo, since after introducing the wicked F-150 Raptor, sliding the flat-crank-V-8–powered GT350R across the stage, and right after dropping jaws with the mid-engine GT hypercar, what was left to see? Even at a show positively packed with crucial and impressive debuts—including the new Acura NSX and the stunningly beautiful Buick Avenir concept—everything paled in comparison to the Blue Oval’s power trio. While the rest of the automakers file a police report for this theft, we’re already wondering what subsequent year’s event will hold and no matter whether anyone can prime Ford’s utterly dominant Detroit displaying. A mid-engine Corvette, perhaps?
