My kid is currently taking driver’s ed classes, in the hopes that soon he can contribute to traffic congestion, like all good Americans. The written/classroom part of driver’s ed is now done online, unsurprisingly, and takes advantage of this modern age of multimedia by combining text, images, and, yes, moving images, complete with sound, into a form known as “motion-enhanced pictures,” or “motile pictures” which is shortened to “moties,” if I understand correctly.
Anyway, as you may suspect if you were part of the American educational system over the past few decades, you probably won’t be shocked to hear that the quality of these materials isn’t, um, great. The still images mostly look like they were taken from a clip art CD found wedged between an unused fax machine and a wall, and the videos appear to be 3D simulations rendered on a Sega Dreamcast.
It’s clear that the quality of these images and videos wasn’t especially important to the makers of these materials, likely the lowest bidder, and some of the automotive choices made are quite strange. For example, the car used to show how braking/accelerating affects the pitch or weight balance of the car is a 1998 Saturn SC2:
That’s a peculiar choice, but at least those were around here in North Carolina. More exciting and strange is this car, which shows up in multiple videos in the course:
Yep, that’s a Skoda. I think it’s supposed to be a second-gen Skoda Octavia, which was on the same platform as the Mark 5 Volkswagen Golf. The company that makes these videos seems to be based in Montréal, though they have a US office in Raleigh, NC. Did Canada get these Skodas? I’m not sure. I think they most likely just used whatever free car models they had around.
There’s also this car in one of the videos that I can’t identify at all:
It feels like a cross between a mid-’70s Ford LTD and maybe an Australian Holden, but that tailight/bumper setup is all kinds of strange, and a rear wiper on a sedan like that? This is madness.
Okay, but let’s get to the real madness here, which is something I saw on the school bus model used in the videos:
As you can see, this bus is very clearly labeled “School Bus” and is an appropriate yellow color. The model itself seems more like a city bus than what is usually used as a school bus, but in the context of these videos, it works. But there’s something odd here. Let’s look closer at that panel just aft of the rear axle. Computer! Zoom and enhance!
The hell? That looks familiar. Very familiar. There’s one on the rear of the bus, too, and on the other side of the bus, it’s not reversed:
That’s the Cutty Sark logo. You know Cutty Sark, right? It’s that whisky (I was just reminded that it’s not a whiskey, with an ‘e’ because there’s a difference) that I always think of in terms of cases you give to your union shop steward when you want to grease the palms a bit. My dad had a rarely-touched bottle of the stuff in the laundry room cabinet where our liquor was stored when I was growing up.
Point is, it’s booze, and as such, may be one of the last things I’d expect to see printed on the side of a school bus!
The question here is, of course, why. Why the hell is there a Cutty Sark logo on a school bus in these school-system-provided driver’s ed videos? I’m not scandalized or anything – I’d suspect that the vast majority of students using this system have no idea what Cutty Sark is, and, even if they did, I bet they’d find it pretty gross. Kids are a lot more likely to start their booze journey with almost anything other than Cutty Sark, like one of those hard lemonades or a White Claw or something.
No, I just want to know how the hell it ended up there in the first place. Was this a re-skinned city bus model that had ads on it, and Cutty Sark was one of those ads? If so, why was it still there after the rest of the skin had been changed to be yellow and read “School Bus” on the side? If the whole texture had been recolored, how would just that one ad be spared?
It seems an improbable oversight, really. Could it have been a joke? Maybe whoever had to make the school bus texture to re-skin the bus left it in there deliberately? Just to see if anyone would notice?
If so, then mazel tov, friend. I noticed. Thanks for making the driver’s ed journey a little weirder.
Cutty Sark is also the name of a pretty famous ship; specifically a clipper that set many records. But that is practically that booze logo copy pasted…
Yo Torch, I didn’t realize we lived in the same state, let alone the same city! As someone from Detroit, presently renting in Chapel Hill… I can’t figure out how people afford to own homes in this city!
Obviously, you haven’t cleaned the monitor before taking photos: seeing the hair on the screen and thinking it was my monitor…
> My dad had a rarely-touched bottle of the stuff
Not surprising. Cutty Sark is thin, flavorless lighter fluid.
There’s a place that still has drivers education?
Canadia?
The subliminal message is “if you drink, you better take public transport”.
Look up Jam Handy productions. He (Jam) made a lot of bloody drivers ed videos
Shouldn’t a modern school bus have a Polymarket ad on the side? “Kids, think you’ll get to school on time today? Bet on your beliefs.”
Maybe it is the actual Cutty Dark frigate the whiskey is named after. I doubt it but can’t be sure without seeing the wording more clearly
I don’t recall driver’s ed being offered at my HS back in the 70’s. Then again, it was an inner city school and nobody much cared to get a license. I did pay for a private course since the insurance discount made up for it. Drive throughs were a new novelty around here, so my instructor insisted I practise going through those a lot while he ate copious amounts of soft serve ice cream. It’s probably best I didn’t learn all that much from him.
That’s not even a good whisky. Yikes. Lowest bidder syndrome strikes again!
It’s pretty gross. Even Ballantines is better.
Even Clan MacGregor has notes of MacGreorness. Cutty shark just has notes of wood fish.
The Skoda has plates from Istanbul, Turkey, for all I can see.
3D artist here.
It looks like a city bus, not a school bus. A lot of the time textures are exported in grey scale so color can be multiplied over the texture for quick variety. Judging by the font, someone just slapped School Bus on the texture without even bothering to look for an appropriate font, tinted the material yellow, and called it a day. I’m guessing they sourced the model from turbosquid or another 3D model marketplace. It has the look of a shitty free or sub 50 dollar model for sure.
The reason that logo is there is likely because they farmed out the 3D aspects of the project to an overseas lowest bidder who would have no idea what that logo was. The deliverables were probably just the finished renders. When they finally got them there may have been no time to redo them and remove the logo, if they cared that is.
To those curious, the reason the logo is backwards on one side is due to something called UV stacking. You essentially slice a model down the middle and use the same texture for both sides. You see it all the time in video games though usually text is done with a decal or transparent geometry on top of the base model to avoid backwards text.
I haven’t thought of Cutty Sark in years, used to be my buddy’s go to.
Did anyone have to do simulator time while taking driver’s ed? I took it in the early Nineties (OK, OK, 1990) and to cut down on the amount of hours we had to do on the road, we did a number of hours in the simulator (great idea Ohio!)
I told my son this and his eyes lit up, thinking it was something cool. But no, we sat in a trailer that had driving stations down each side and we “drove” to films and were scored on various elements we were supposed to be working on. The only one that seemed remotely useful was the accident avoidance lesson we did, since it’s a lot batter to “crash” in the simulator than anywhere else.
I’ve told this bit of driver education history to a number of people and they all look at me like I’m out of my mind. Maybe it was an Ohio thing? I don’t know. I did take driver’s ed through the school district, so that was at play too.
I don’t know, but driver’s ed simulators might be worth a blog here!
Yup, semi trailer full of “simulators”. Outside of Cincinnati in 1997.
I had the trailer thing in CA in the early 80’s. Figured out early on that the speed each pod was going was not detected by the simulator. I’d get in and keep it floored whenever possible (brakes were detected so you’d have to use them at the appropriate times) trying to see how high I could get it to go. IIRC it was a GM style speedo and I was able to get it up to 120mph at times.
We had the same set up in the early 70s. I remember the steering wheels were amazingly hard to turn. I swear it took about ten pounds of effort. Students with no driving experience had a hard time adjusting to the real driver’s ed car. Talk about oversteer!
We had that early AI simulator with its balkan level realism. I wasn’t impressed and encouraged a contest in crashing.
So I was banished from fake driving, and the coach in charge of driving, who has a sense of humour, or possibly drank Cutty Sark himself, or both, just had me drive him around every day.
Possibly he was destressing from students that couldn’t drive?
He did teach me not to wave anyone through an intersection.
Honestly, hawking mid-shelf blended Scotch to kids is one way to help them think twice about getting a head start on liver disease. If that’s their first taste of the hard stuff, they might rightly say no when someone passes a bottle of Jäeger. Even better (but just as umlaut-y)… plaster school buses with ads for Malört and watch youth alcoholism rates plummet.
Just don’t take money from the Country Recess people. They’re worse than Joe Camel.
https://liartownusa.com/country-recess-childrens-whiskey-ad/
P.S. – Beware… much of what’s in the Liartown rabbit hole is very NS for W… or a bunch of other settings.
At the beach bars I’ve frequented that offer well specials, Cutty Sark is invariably the well scotch and is also invariably referred to as “Crappy Sark.” If you need to buy someone a drink to avoid a fight, you get back at them with doubles of that crap. Calling it mid-shelf is far, far too much praise.
It’s so very bad.
I first tried it at 21. I finished the bottle, but I last tried it at 21.
It’s a shame that Otto won’t get the joy of watching old driver’s ed filmstrips from the 60s and 70s like we did.
Oh yes, my early ’90’s driver’s ed was a vast selection of ’60s to ’80s film strips – maybe a VHS if lucky. Check out those dirty hippies!
Otto’s father runs this site from his network of old ’70s computers. I’m sure he has the appropriate projector already and some contacts who can get him those old filmstrips too.
How will the yoots learn without “Red Highway” and “Blood on the Asphalt”?
I prefer “Blood on the Tracks” anyway. It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry.
Well, if he’s not being subjected to ‘Signal 30’ (or ‘Dead is Dead’ for other purposes) like we were, that’s at least a step in the right direction.