Crash Fatality in Honda "Kart"

Texas has already banned dune buggies and home built exo caged carts; should we expect more of the same from other states?

IMO, these are the latest "Cool" thing to be popularized, and kids like this one are cutting up almost anything with wheels and scab welding jungle gyms onto them. I'm expecting quite a crackdown coming soon...

buy buy vette kart

SO, was this a civic that had been cut down, or a home-built cage-type car with the engine/trans from a civic stuffed midengine?

Found a better video

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

SO, was this a civic that had been cut down, or a home-built cage-type car with the engine/trans from a civic stuffed midengine?

The first video shows what appears to be the remains of an orange painted KROWRX xtegra:

It is definitely built off a hacked unibody. From what I have gathered on FB, it is a scab welded homebuilt. 

It said he was ejected from the vehicle in the link Cooter posted. Not saying it would have been 100% safe with being belted in (assuming he wasn't fully harnessed in or some kind of harness failure) but i feel like being thrown from the vehicle played a big roll in this being a fatality.

The welds on the "cage" failed, as did the seat mount. Photos on FB and the one above tell me I wouldn't trust anything mounted to that thing, including the harness, if he was wearing one. 

With such great fabrication, who's surprised?

Matt Farah drove the blue one and said it was terrifying.

Cooter said:

From what I have gathered on FB, it is a scab welded homebuilt. 

It looks like they tried making their own copy of the krowrx car with even worse welding.

That was the driver's compartment.  I don't see anyone walking away from that. 

Those welds are: 

side thought: the article reads that the “vehicle was dmv compliant, but not street legal”. If it wasn’t street legal, how’d the guy manage to drive it around without law enforcement stopping him? 

Another classic case of “we dunno our left from our right, boss...” 

i was once pulled over for riding a pocket bike on a back road. The officer told me “I don’t know what the law is on these things, but I’d appreciate it if you’d not ride in the middle of the road”. HOW DO YOU DO YOUR JOB AND NOT KNOW THE LAW?!?!?

Taking off the enthusiast hat and putting on the legal hat:

I'm honestly surprised at the lack of rules and enforcement around all vehicle modifications. This might be an extreme edge case, but DOT, NHTSA, etc. require all sorts of safety standards, testing, etc. People then take their vehicles and do all sorts of things to them which may, or may not be safe. Home built ghettocet cars might be what we're talking about here, but there are all sorts of other cases which influence safety. eg. raised pickup trucks with bumper height above a car's roof, "stanced" cars riding on the bumpstops and running 30 degrees of camber, etc. If the above suggested crackdown starts to occur there could be wide ranging ramifications.  At the very least, when someone is hurt there are often criminal implications. If a vehicle is modified, in some cases I could see that changing things into a negligence causing death type of charge. Are insurance companies on the hook? Probably not, so most owners are essentially engaging in fraud and endangering the well being of others (eg. someone crippled for life has no way to pay for necessary care).

For those who wonder how the welds looked pre-crash:

Please explain to me how, in a crash, a car like this is less safe than a motorcycle.

pointofdeparture said:

For those who wonder how the welds looked pre-crash:

I've heard of birdE36 M3 welds, booger welds, and now scab welds, but what are these? If there's no specific name yet, I say "popcorn welds."

nderwater said:

Please explain to me how, in a crash, a car like this is less safe than a motorcycle.

Exactly.

Also, what about the Slingshot and the like.

Same principle.

nderwater said:

Please explain to me how, in a crash, a car like this is less safe than a motorcycle.

For one, the tubing that the bike is made from isn't likely to impale, and/or crush you from failed "welds"  

That isn't even taking into account the likelyhood that this thing fell apart on the road in the first place, causing the crash. 

In reply to Snrub :

The rules are pretty much all in place.  It is the enforcement that is lacking. 

While I would love all police officers to be at least, if not more knowledgeable about modifications and what an obviously horrible weld looks like than I am, most people don't go into that line of work because they like working on cars or welding. 

One thing Farah pointed out in his drive of the blue car (I refuse to glorify it by using it's "110% JDM y0" name) is that doing this with FWD cars creates a weight balance that is something like 75F/25R and they are downright scary at speed.

He also easily got lapped by a Nissan Juke in the video, so it's not like this creates some huge performance gain. His assessment, which I agree with, is just "why?"

In reply to pointofdeparture :

"Because it's cool!"

Unfortunately, cars like this don't really fit in the realm of logic. I imagine some actually well thought out and built cars are going to go by the wayside because of incidents like this one. 

I’ve seen bad welds.  Those are worse.  It’s very unfortunate he got killed.  After seeing what happened to john hoops getting hit with a cage on the street, i think ghettocets and the like be they properly welded or not, probably are best kept on the track

red_stapler said:

Cooter said:

From what I have gathered on FB, it is a scab welded homebuilt. 

It looks like they tried making their own copy of the krowrx car with even worse welding.

From what I understand of the accident, this.

In reply to Cooter :

Exactly, I fear the exocet will be forced out of being able to make street legal kits.  

In reply to Trackmouse :

When I bought my last truck I drove it home with no plates and stalling the entire time. You can do whatever you want as long as you don't get caught.

As far as the pocket bike thing, the law on it probably didn't matter so much as driving something like that in the middle of the road being decidedly unsafe. You're not supposed to do it on bicycles or mopeds either.