Living your life one quarter mile at a time might work for you if you’re Dom Toretto. For those of us who aren’t fictional characters in action movies, though, it’s preferable to approach life with a bit more caution. At the very least, engaging in illegal street racing is something to stay away from — particularly if the car you’re racing isn’t actually yours.
Unfortunately, a pair of General Motors engineers did not heed this advice. Jalopnik reports that the Kentucky State Police arrested two GM employees in Bowling Green, Kentucky. That’s where Corvettes are made — and it turns out that the cars that these engineers were racing were C8 Corvette test vehicles.
The article states that the two were arrested for “reckless driving, racing motor vehicles on public roads, and exceeding the 45 mph speed limit by traveling at least 71 mph.”
Street racing might look like fun when you’re watching it in a movie. Doing it in real life is likely to get other people injured or killed. (The Fast and the Furious franchise also features a car being driven out of the middle of a skyscraper. This is also not behavior anyone should emulate.) Jalopnik has details on the status of the cars (towed; recovered later) and a very terse and unamused statement from GM.
That isn’t remotely surprising: there are all sorts of ways employees can get away with bending the rules on the job, after all. But effectively stealing a test model of a not-yet-released sports car and then doing something illicit with it goes far beyond “roguishly charming” and into “illegal in multiple ways, and also dangerous to everyone in the vicinity” territory.
Reports suggest that no one was injured in this particular incident — one of the few bright spots in this whole situation.
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