What the hell is the matter with deer? Or, more specifically, what is the matter with deer running in front of my car? What do they stand to gain? Last night, I’m driving home on a dark two-lane highway, when yet another of North Carolina’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of idiotic deer decided to bolt across the road, right in front of my little Pao, like a big bag of tick-studded venison without an ounce of sense under its big dumb antlers. Once again, I saw a flash of Nature’s Dumbest Large Mammal, hit the brakes, but then ended up clipping the jerk’s meaty butt. Ugh. Again!
Luckily, the damage isn’t as bad this time, limited to a smashed headlamp and some damage to the corner of the fiberglass hood and a bit on the fender. I’ve already got a new headlight sourced, and hopefully insurance will come through and I can get the fiberglass work done locally. Ugh, what an ass-pain, though! How are deer like this? Shouldn’t natural selection have weeded out all the ones too dumb to know how to cross a damn road already by now? Who are the does still mating with these morons? It’s not all about antler size, ladies! Stop fucking idiot deer!
Man, I’m so very cross by this whole thing, though it’ll likely force my hand to get some of my other cars roadworthy again. Also, anyone want to take bets on how long that exposed halogen bulb will last without its protective lens?
I feel like I should do something to avoid this in the future. Should I put a bull bar on the Pao?
I mean, it seems crazy, but I’m sick of replacing lights. Maybe I should look into something like that.
Oy.
I’m so sorry, Torch. That sucks.
Living in similarly-infested PA, I’ve been lucky, with only one minor encounter 25 years ago. It was not entirely the deer’s fault: it actually noticed me coming and changed course, but the road curved, and so the deer’s course-change still led it to hit me. But it kind of brushed down the side of my Saturn, knocking off the driver’s mirror and kicking a bit of plastic off the trailing edge of the door. I ended up off the road, but fortuitously not in a ditch: another 100 yards down the road was great big ditch that would’ve swallowed my car, but I basically just ended up in a front yard.
I’ve had plenty of close calls, living in deer-infested parts of eastern Iowa, even getting sizable bucks running through my yard and the younger deer treating the back yard hosta garden like an all-you-can-eat salad bar in summer. Lots of deer splats on I-80 this time of year, enough that there just needs to be a deer crossing sign at the state line, for the next 300 miles.
At night, use every available photon from your lights. Use those brights, consider more auxiliary lighting. Find a way to enable fogs AND brights and use them together. Even still, be vigilant and ready to stand on the brakes. Hard.
Closest call I had was in the middle of the day on an open stretch of county highway. Little deer jumps out of the deep ditch and sprints across the road. Stood on the brakes, and still caught the back hoof with the lower corner of the XJ8, chipping off a bit of paint off the bumper cover. I’m good with that.
I’ve never hit a deer, but I ran over a dead armadillo on my PC800. It exploded all over my boots and the underside of the motorcycle. Thought I was gonna get leprosy hosing it off.
Early one morning, I was riding it into work, and a pickup was in the opposite lane approaching me. An owl was in the ditch on his right. As our vehicles were about to pass by each other, this owl, who was in ZERO danger from either of us, absolutely EXPLODED out of the ditch and flew between us. Neither of us hit him, but he ditched his prey trying to escape. The mouse that he’d caught just starfished on my windshield, bounced off, and disappeared.
Then, ANOTHER early morning, as I was riding in, a horse had escaped from the field on the SAME ROAD as the armadillo and the oil incident. The horse was kinda freaked out and ran alongside me for quite a ways. Scared the crap outta me!
I don’t drive that road anymore…
The same happened to my wife and I, coming around a corner and a huge hawk flying up out of the woods next to us, with a squirrel in it’s talons. All I could see was Hawk, and it somehow missed us. The squirrel hit the top of the car.
Not quite sure how we missed it.
Oof, poor little Pao! I’m glad you’re OK though!
A buddy of mine once owned an early ’70s Datsun 1200 with a pair of I beams welded on as bumpers. Very handy for those times when jerks boxed him in while parallel parked on the street. I imagine a deer would not have fared well either.
Datsun 1200s are delightfully low in mass. And steel-bodied. John Wayland chose them for his EV conversions with good reason. His fastest one, “White Zombie”, could run 10s in the 1/4 mile roughly a decade ago, and for over a decade straight was the fastest street-legal EV in the world. Even in the year 1999, it was running 13s in the 1/4 mile.
http://www.plasmaboyracing.com/zombieHistory.html
An interesting project. I’m kinda surprised the car can handle that power without crumbling.
Forest rats are the worst.
You should just move that deer crossing sign, so they go somewhere else.
Talk to someone knowledgeable about that bull bar first!
A major issue can be directly transferring the impact force to where the bar is secured to unibody. I personally know of a 2000 Jeep GC and a 96 Toyota Land Cruiser which fared worse because impact was channeled away from bendable bumpers/fenders. The Jeep was totaled by the adjuster because the tow hitch protruded and he told me that, without it, my gf would have been looking at just a bumper & beam. Instead, it bent the whole rearend down from wheel arches back. The LC had a cheap bull bar on it which messed up the hood & both headlights. The adjuster said he thought that without it, it probably would have just been a fender headlight, & bumper cover—and wouldn’t have needed to go on a frame jig.
obviously ymmv, but it’s definitely worth talking to a knowledgeable body shop person
Ok, I was just thinking of an alternative. You take a bale spear (they use those to move the round haybales on farms) and mount that to the front of the car. Then you can spear deer and take the meat home for dinner.
Being a fan of late night runs on the Blue Ridge Parkway, I’ve long evangelized for a state program under which participants are provided with bright/fluorescent/luminescent paintballs with relatively fragile shells and encouraged to shoot deer from their cars—especially ones on any road.
Wait: hear me out.
You aim for the body, not head. The idea is to make deer more visible and make them associate the minor pain/splat of the paintball with the sound of cars so they run away rather than toward them.
>obviously this is frankly fraught with problems, ethical, moral, and legal, so it’s just been my rant whenever I dodge deer. Hmmm. Maybe mount recalled Takata airbags on a minimal bull bar?
I get why you say this is a “fraught” solution, but ultimately it seems more humane than the alternative. I know many solutions have been attempted or suggested over the decades and have failed, but I still think there must be a way to modify deer/road interaction with some type of (harmless) negative reinforcement. It’s pretty basic behavioral science, and we do it all the time with other kinds of animals.
I know tall (like 8 foot or more) fencing paired with Animal crossing under / overpasses are effective, they’re also blooming expensive of course so are insurance costs;
this may be a solution where public (i.e.via taxes) and private funding (from insurance companies) could come together for targeted areas that experience the highest car / animal accident rates
https://allthatsinteresting.com/animal-bridges-wildlife-crossings
Huh
would also add a whole new dimension to a game of chicken! 😉
Was going to post the same thing… usually most of the cheap bolt on bull bars are really damage multipliers, because instead of taking out just a head light & quarter panel it adds the bumper beam extensions, hood, grill, and bumper to the bill. They only work for moving bushes out of the way.
I clipped a small deer a few years ago and kept that a secret from my insurance because I knew they would total my car and give me a check for $2500 or whatever they thought it was worth. Little spotted fawn took out my bumper cover, headlight, washer reservoir, horn, and bent my front fender. I patched it all with solder, jb weld, spray paint and ebay parts.
A friendly farmer pulled up to help me and the first thing he said when I told him I hit a deer was “You wanna go shoot it?”
I’ve never hit a deer before in anything. I had a close call once driving the 300 SDL down I-44 through Oklahoma. A deer was trapped in the highway running back and forth and I narrowly missed it by a foot or two while doing 70 mph back in 2013.
The biggest thing I ever hit in the “bicycle”/microcar thing was a raccoon. I was riding down Ferguson Ln at night doing 40 mph, and a large raccoon ran out in front of me. I didn’t have enough time to react to it nor did I want to turn hard enough to tip over at speed, and ramped it. I went airborne about a foot or two in height, landed right-wheel first, fractured the right-side steering spindle, and had blood all over the underside of the vehicle especially where the threaded ends of the bolts that all of the body pieces were held together with were located. There were individual trails of blood and fur underneath the threaded sides of the bolts sticking out on the underside of the vehicle. There was also a trail of blood in the road going into the woods from where I hit it.
A deer? That would have been the end of this vehicle and possibly me as well. No seatbelt and a body made of corrugated plastic and aluminum. The only meaningful safety of the first and second design iterations was from a rear-end collision thanks to a stoutly designed rear bulkhead and a tail that serves as a crumple zone, which in my 2nd body design it did its job when it got rear-ended by a truck while I was stopped at a red light, leaving me completely uninjured. The next one is going to have a roll cage and safety harness, with crumple zones all around. It will be better than nothing, although still not at all car-like in safety when compared to any modern vehicle. Repairing the tail was simple, albeit time consuming, and was done with pilfered election signs.
Have you ever posted a build thread with pictures for your ‘bicycle’ contraption? I would be interested to see how you built it.
Not a build thread, but I have posted it in the comments section a few times and shared photos on the discord months ago. It can cruise 30-35 mph for 150-200 miles, on only 1.5 kWh. At 46.8V, top speed was 50 mph.
Here’s some pics:
https://
imgur.com/1KvhZN8
imgur.com/j75uGn7
imgur.com/1aaEtdp
imgur.com/tzO209r
imgur.com/sPN7T9X
imgur.com/Jrz8rYc
It has since been upgraded to a new 1.7 kWh pack of Molicel P42A, and has become much faster. 0-30 mph in under 3 seconds. Top speed unknown, although calculated to be over 80 mph now at 72V. The next body upgrade is under construction. It’s wider and does away with the outboard wheels, and is based on a Milan SL velomobile, except scaled to fit the wider track of my trike.
Very cool. The front looks like a Zeppelin.
Re: “and a body made of corrugated plastic and aluminum.”
Man Toecutter you gotta start earing better! 🙂
I’m sure you know this, but check things over carefully. Years ago my wife clipped a deer in our Caravan. At first we seemed to escape with just some fur wedged between the headlight and the fender. But eventually the headlight filled with condensation and went out. When I tried to install a replacement, I discovered the mounting surface was bent, so I had to fudge that.
The best part came months later when we discovered that the fan had been knocked loose. It was winter and we rarely sat in traffic, so this surprise didn’t reveal itself until a warm spring day in Philadelphia with a van full of kids. Good times.
I drove from Niagara Falls to Philly for the Thanksgiving weekend. I have never seen so many dead deer as on that trip.
Drove from Bath to Raleigh late Sunday night two weeks ago. The deer carnage was incredible. I was exhausted from gripping the wheel, staring into the dark sides of the road and wondering how fast I wanted to hit one.
Please stop driving your nice toy at night!
But it’s his only reliable means of conveyance
I think he has the truck too
Which I believe is only registered for off road use.
Completely this. Sorry, Torch, this car is a museum piece that should only be driving in the right conditions. Also, the deer adheres to the same Never Nissan philosophy I do, albeit with a bit of suicidal tendency towards them, which I don’t quite have yet. I respect this deer, but feel sorry that you were the victim this time.
This car is meant to be driven.
Pao, biatch!
I agree, just not at night, in the rain, etc… Drive it when the time is right. It’s an antique. Embrace that. Remember, this is the 2nd time this has happened!!!
Truth. Drive them all, that’s what they’re for.
I only hit a deer once in (god I’m old) 30-plus years of driving in Vermont, and that was in an old Mercury Topaz that was starting to succumb to Ford Cheapout Syndrome anyway, so I spent $15 (in 1996) on a new sealed-beam headlight and turn-signal bulb, some lens tape, and drove it ugly until it finally gave up the ghost.
> drove it ugly
So basically new?
It’s odd to me how many people think deer are these noble creatures, royal guardians of the forest when in reality they’re just giant, stupid braindead rats. I live in an exurb north of columbus ohio and they are EVERYWHERE. No natural predators so they just keep on makin’ more deer. They’re in my yard constantly eating anything they can get, leaving lots of deer turd piles all over the place. You cannot drive anywhere without seeing at least three or four lurking near the road and wondering if today is the day you find the extra dumb one.
I live in Chapel Hill for about two years and saw my fair share of these idiots, but when I moved here, it’s so much worse. We need to get some wolves or something up here. Would solve the deer problem and the people who walk around our unlit neighborhood at night wearing black hoodies problem too.
Totally unrelated, when I lived in Chapel Hill, I had two Torch sightings. Once in in the Pao on 15/501 near the Lowes; I was in my car honking and waving like a moron. He did not see me. Bummer. The other time, he was in the Changli and zipping down the alley next to Venable while my wife and I were eating dinner. Took me a second to figure it out, did not expect to see that thing out in the wild, but it was in Carborro which isn’t far from where I understand the Changli lives.
I guess when your car is named Pow!, it’s going to hit things.
This is how I feel about squirrels
I also feel this way, but have told myself that squirrels are so small that they might not be able to perceive something flying at them from such a distance.
Deer do not have this excuse. They will stare you down for 100 yards, then sprint right in front of the car at the last moment.
If I see a deer anywhere near the road I hit the brakes and put on my hazards. They have a nasty combination of size, speed, and terrible decision making. A deer that is moseying away from the road can become a deer on your hood very quickly.
Squirrels are rats with a good PR team
Wouldn’t the weight of a bull bar take the Pao’s 0-60 time from LOL to NOPE?
A steel one would lead to excess front suspension wear and turn it into an understeering pig. It would have to be aluminum for that reason anyway.
Or just pull the rear end right off the ground?
If not a bull bar, maybe a buckboard?
You can have the Scion back if it means you stop driving your fun car at night.
Time to test if those deer whistle thingies actually work, is JC Whitney still around to order from?
They don’t, sadly.
What does work is a deleted resonator and a Cherry Bomb ‘muffler’ along with a sharp eye & quick hand on the headlight switch. Under most conditions you can still easily see the road markings with your marker lights alone. Once the deer aren’t transfixed by the headlights, your noise will prompt them to flee. Note that your passengers won’t care much for this procedure. And the drone was tiring as hell.
I suppose that depends on whether you encounter any rain. 🙂
Re: avoiding this in the future, could you get some spare headlights and a spare hood and keep them handy? It seems that storing specific backup parts ensures you will never need those parts.
Glad you’re okay!
Maybe convert to sealed beams before the deer of Chapel Hill wipe out the entire right-side-traffic Pao headlight supply?
Oh dear (yeah, someone already got that pun in, early bird gets the worm and all that.) Right now a British YouTube channel (HubNut) is fixing up an older Mitsubishi Pajero Junior which is Jimny-sized and has an utterly adorable bull bar. Might be possible to fit such a bull bar on the Pao. Ha, maybe RockAuto (or Amayama) will have cross references for said bull bar.
Yeah, I had that happen to an old Cadillac – front end was demolished, hood, passenger fender, grille, radiator and support bracket. Deer was in as bad a shape, but still took 3 shots to the head. A few weeks after it came back from the body shop, a deer jumped over the road and clipped the same fender with its back legs, putting a decent dent in it, fortunately that was a paintless removal
I think the deer deer population of North Carolina is a bit to deering in their antics.
Although they do look endeering.
Rats on stilts!
I still remember when a deer ran full force into the side of my car and took out both fenders and the side view mirror.
Oh deer.
I bet you expect us to fawn all over you for this pun.
Doen’t start a big chain of puns, please. Can’t we buck that trend for once?
It can sometimes be fun, doe.
I’ve herd people who make too many puns end up perpetually going stag to parties.
That’s bucked up.
Doe my god, here we go…
Doe? A deer.
… a female deer. Tea, a drink with German bread….
Isn’t that Jam and Bread?
I hear what I hear. Next you’re going to try and convince me that David Lee Roth hasn’t been standing here with his back against a wrecking machine 😉
Diamond Dave is hanging out with Alex the seal.
Move along, the bathroom’s on the right.
His name is Dr. Rockso, and he does cocaine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUh2EYX-RPE
More like, “D’oh!”
https://youtu.be/VaU6pqhwur4?si=04HwzufyRJxlknCQ