It’s a sunny weekend in San Diego and I’m with the family in my Mercedes E350, heading for brunch. I take the ramp to a toll road that’s usually light traffic and very high speed. To merge, I normally rocket-launch out of the toll booth.
This toll road is the reason I bought my V1 many years ago, after I got nailed here by a trooper hiding in the shadow of an overpass. “Never again,” I said to myself. My wife, however, never liked the V1. She always turned it off when she drove.
“It’s annoying,” she said. “How do you know it really works?”
This time, as I near the toll booth, V1 braps. My smartphone display shows 34.7 GHz, then all goes silent. It braps again and stays on as the car in front of me blasts away from the booth. As I approach the launch pad, V1’s arrows points to the sides and as soon as soon as I start away, the rear arrow glows.
Yup, all the signs are there, so I slowly pull away from the starting gate and my wife gives me a perplexed look; she knows how I usually punch it out of there. “There’s a cop around here,” I tell her.
As I merge into the lane, a highway patrol cruiser dashes out from behind the toll booth, swerves around me, and promptly pulls over the poor soul that was just in front.
“Wow, it really works!” is all my wife said. I haven’t seen her turn it off since.
Nathan Aguilar
Chula Vista, CA