Auto Repair Woes

I learned a lot of lessons about having a car with on-board gadgets from my first car, a 1982 Toyota Celica. It was my first experiment with gadgetry, and my first chance to capitalize on the childhood dreams of a spy car. Through these experiments, I learned which gadgets are easy to implement and which are near impossible. Early mistakes led to improvements in later cars, and some problems cropped up in instances I had never thought of.

The first gadgets I thought of were the obvious ones. I simply had to build an oil-dump, along with some sort of tire-puncturing system, smokescreen and rocket launcher. I was young, then, and these all seemed like fairly easy beginner systems. My first gadgets that I actually implemented involved practically rewiring the entire lighting system so that I could turn off the lights. I could turn off the entire rear lighting system with one switch, to help in a nighttime getaway. With all of the lights off, I could take a turn at night and a pursuer would have no idea which way I went. Having night-vision, I didn't actually need the lights to drive.

Putting together an oil slick system took several tries. Early models had a tendency to dump when the car went over a speedbump. My first try would dump if I slammed on the brakes too fast. Eventually, I worked out a system that would stay shut until I wanted to use it. When I did use it, I often had mixed results. Sometimes the slick would make no difference, other times a disaster. After the great bread truck incident, I thought seriously of removing it altogether.

Implementing a tire-puncturing system never worked out well. Like the oil-slick, it was nearly impossible to keep it closed when it wasn't in use. When I did want to use it, I ran into even more problems. The tire-pokers I designed never worked very well for one reason or another. They clumped together, got crushed under the tire, failed to puncture properly or, in one case, just rolled off the road. The dropping device wouldn't disperse the things properly, either.

For a smokescreen, I found that the best system was to drip oil directly on the exhaust system of the car. The oil would heat up and create smoke, but not a whole lot of it. If you've ever seen a car go down the road pouring smoke, you know what I'm talking about. It's an annoying amount of smoke, to be sure, but there's nothing obscuring about it. If anything, the smoke draws attention and leaves a big trail for the pursuer to follow. Once you stop the oil drip, there's still oil on the exhaust system for a while, too. Until it all burns away, you're still smoking.

If the fact that the smoke generator didn't work well wasn't bad enough, it also caused me trouble when I took the car in for some major brake work. I had removed all of the gadgetry that was visible from the underside of the car before taking it in for service, but that wasn't enough. When I came to pick up the car, the garage wanted me to leave it a while longer, because they couldn't figure out the source of the tar that coated the exhaust system. In addition, they had found wires and cables that went nowhere, and some strange stuff that was really hard to explain. According to them, the whole car needed to be worked on in one way or another, once they figured out what was going on with it.

You've never seen mechanics as confused as these guys. I'm sure, had I left the car for another hour or two, they'd have crawled all through the thing, and found more than they bargained for. It was this experience that taught me an important lesson. If I'm going to be a superhero, I'm going to have to learn to do my own automotive work.

This wasn't my only close call. My second super-car, a Ford Fairlane, broke down on the side of the highway. I was forced to call for a tow truck. I thought fast, before the truck arrived, and disconnected the extra equipment from the underside of the car in the front. I didn't want the driver to discover them during hookup. The truck arrives, and it's one of those flatbed rollup trucks.

The driver backs up to the car, lowers the ramp and hooks the chain under the front of the car. He engages the winch, pulls the car onto the truck and moves the flatbed back into the horizontal position. As he walks around the rear of the truck, he looks up at the underside of the rear of my car.

“What the Hell's That?”

You can't tell me that Batman ever had to deal with this.

Oh, and the rocket launcher? It worked.