Cadillac CTS-V Sports Car Measures G-Forces
When talking to non-coaster fans (like friends, reporters, and TV producers) I’ve compared the forces you encounter while riding in a car to help describe some of the sensations you experience on roller coasters. My five year-old daughter, already a student of Coasterology, recently noted a brief moment of air time while riding in our Honda Odyssey.
Cadillac’s luxury sports car, the CTS-V, has something that looks like a lateral g-force meter. I’m not a car driving enthusiasts, so I’m not sure why this would be cool to have. I’m guessing it’s because sports cars should be able to corner really well and it’s fun for drivers to see how the car handles through really tight turns. That’s just a guess. Feel free to enlighten me if you know more.
The g-force meter isn’t a new feature and it looks like it’s been on this car for at least a few years. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while. A well-placed commercial at the beginning of a Theme Park Review YouTube video reminded me.
I wonder if a dealership would let me test drive a CTS-V knowing that I’d just be doing so to take it around a few tight turns. The price tag for these puppies is a lofty $65,000!
Here’s a short promo video from Cadillac on their g-meter:
Adrià Sanz
I have an application in my phone that calculates the Gs. I think its available for android and IOS, I sometimes use it in the car and you can use it on coasters as well… only problem is that my phone can only show values up to 2G and down to -2G so for airtime its cool but for positives it gets stuck at +2G. Heres the link to download if you are interested 🙂
http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/t…
@mattmcirvin
When I was a kid, there were some hilly roads north of Route 50 in Chantilly, Virginia that gave noticeable air: not actual negative Gs or they'd be lethal to drive, but a definite reduction in weight as you drove over them at typical speeds.
They're all plowed flat and covered with condos and strip malls now, of course.
In my day job I'm an Android programmer, and at one point I had occasion to mess with the accelerometer interface. It was fun to have it print out the acceleration vector via USB debugging, see it read out at 9.8 meters per second squared, and watch it disappear when I dropped the device (onto something soft, of course). Einstein was right, I guess.
Somewhere in the operating system there's actually a table of characteristic surface gravities of different bodies in the solar system, I guess in case you want to make your tilt detection code work right on the Moon or Mars. It's not entirely absurd; most American Mars probes run VxWorks, but it wouldn't be so surprising if some device running Android went there eventually.
CoasterCritic
That's cool that you grew up Chantilly I grew up in Stafford, and I lived in Centreville back in 2002. Anyway, I recall a few airtime moments as a kid riding on Virginia's hilly windy roads. There were plenty of those in Stafford and there still are.
I've been curious about acceloremeters in smart phones and those apps that measure g-forces. I think I'd like to try one, but I'm staunchly against people breaking out cameras, phones, boomboxes, etc while riding coasters and I wouldn't want to promote that in any way.
CadillacAirRide
Very interesting topic. I guess everything you said has point. It really makes me think harder about it. Thanks!