Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "US Auto Industry" channel.

  1. I grew up in Ohio and remember watching this film in driver's ed in 1962. I strongly doubt these films did any good in reducing accidents. All the kids in class just thought those that were killed were stupid and it wouldn't happen to them. 15 year olds are immortal, and they would never die. I later became an EMT and then a paramedic. It's instructive to see how on-scene care has changed in the 50 years since this film was made. You can see no one wears gloves. Just pick up the bodies, dust of your hands, and you're done. Those Cadillac ambulance may have given the injured a smooth ride to the hospital but you sure couldn't do any medical care on the way. Most of the ambulances were run by funeral home, and most of the attendants didn't have any more training than standard first aid so I guess it didn't make any difference that the old Caddy's were so cramped. No IV's, no portable EKG's, no defibrillators, no CPR. If you have to be stupid enough to drive like the people in this film, at least you have a better chance of coming out alive than you did in 1959.
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  2. Back in the days when there was a California State Police. They were absorbed by the Highway Patrol in 1995. They did a lot of dignitary protection, and this was back in the days of a lot of political kidnappings.I assume this film was made for the use of their department, other law enforcement agencies and civilians that were responsible for high value targets.
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  3. Yes, there were police hats at the time. It was common for police officers, mostly in California, to wear helmets at all times as a safety measure. By the mid-80's it was decided wearing a helmet as part of the duty uniform made us look too militaristic.
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  4. The bad guy's car was obviously a detective unit as well.
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  5.  @chloekit4861  Yes. Back then, there was an assumption that we weren't such snowflakes that we'd have PTSD from seeing the results of a traffic accident, and maybe seeing the IRL blood and gore from an accident might even get us not to have those kinds of accidents ourselves. IKR, weird!
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  6. I'm surprised to see Oxnard carrying Colt 1911 semiautomatic pistols in 1973. I started with another California department in 1978 and we were carrying .357 revolvers. We didn't switch to semi autos until about 1985. This was typical for all the surrounding agencies as well.
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  7. No, the autobahn was first engineered and some construction begun in the mid-20's under the Weimar Republic. The first public autobahn between Cologne and Bonn opened in 1932, a year before Hitler took power. Many more miles of these roads would have been built in the early 30's if not for the Depression. Hitler was an enthusiastic supporter of the concept. He supported the building of more autobahns, mainly as a way to put the unemployed to work. Nazi Germany did not build the world's first autobahn and Hitler had nothing to do with the idea.
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  8. Where's the rest of the commercial?
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  9. It was both. Many of the dealerships worked off flat rate estimates but independents were usually parts plus hourly labor Even flat rate shops had to charge additional hourly labor if the job was more difficult that shown in the flat rate book. Really, nothing much has changed since then in terms of shop charges. What changed is the simplicity of how cars were built. Almost every part of a car could either be cheaply replaced or was able to be repaired in the shop. For example, it was rare to actually replace a whole generator unless it had some kind of physical damage like from a collision Everything from the generator case to the windings could be rebuilt in the shop or from some inexpensive parts kept in stock. When I was a helper in the early 60's, I don't remember us replacing a whole generation with a new one. Now, if the right error shows up, you alternator gets trashed and is replaced with a new one. The days of the shade tree mechanic are just about gone.
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  10. That was about the most poorly dubbed movie ever. I don't think that 55' Chevy wagon was a real police car. The siren mounted on the front fender with the wires still hanging out and no other kind of warning light anywhere on the vehicle. Even in 1955, they usually did a better job with these kinds of details. Of course, it looks like the budget for this one was maybe two grand, so that didn't leave much money left for movie police cars.
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  11. Back in the days when civilians were allowed to wander around accident scenes wherever they wanted to.
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  12. It was a dummy, not a real person.
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