I love this story from the Daily Mail today!
Umit Tuncel is 7′ 1″ (seven feet one inches) tall, has size 15 feet, and he is learning to drive with BSM in one of their new Fiat 500s.
When you look around the BSM forums, and listen to the rhetoric in the test centre waiting rooms, you’d be forgiven for thinking that only people under 5 foot can even get through the door. An inside leg measurement of greater than 22 inches and you’ll be crippled for life – and a hundred Polar Bears will die if you try. Oooh. And several hundred metres of Arctic ice will disappear.
What nonsense!
The pictures clearly show that even someone this big can safely drive a Fiat 500. However, I’m sure some of the ex-BSM-know-it-alls will explain to us (via the forums) that he can’t possibly drive the car safely… just by looking at these photos.
If Umit can drive one, just about anyone can! If someone really does have problems driving a Fiat 500, I suspect they’d have trouble in quite a few cars.
Umit’s instructor says he is a good driver, and he has his test booked for February. Good luck to him.
EDIT 30/12/2009: What IS funny is that this story hasn’t been picked up on the normal forums (with one exception, and even there people are persisting with the ‘Noddy car’ gag). I guess it is because it goes against peoples collective beliefs – they want to believe the Fiat 500 is rubbish because they want to believe BSM is bad. But it does show that you have to be careful what you listen to when you scour the Internet. Information can be very one-sided as a result of this bias.