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Alpine’s A110 sports car might not be the most powerful mid-engined machine, but it’s so much fun to drive you know you risk getting a speeding ticket every time you get behind the wheel. As one French owner discovered, however, you might even end up getting a ticket when there’s no one behind the wheel, the engine is switched off and the parking brake is firmly applied.
According to a Facebook post by EasyRad, like millions of drivers around the world the owner was the unwelcome recipient of a speeding ticket mailed to them, this one alleging that at 05.39 in the morning of March 12 his car was snapped traveling 79 km/h (49 mph) in a 70 km/h (44 mph) limit on the Peripherique freeway that circulates Paris.
And sure enough, there was the picture to prove it, an image clearly showing the white A110 displaying the owner’s license plate (blurred out in our image for privacy purposes). But if anyone in the Paris police department had bothered to check, they would have noticed several things very wrong with their evidence.
Related: French Gendarmerie National Police Force Orders 26 Alpine A110 Sports Cars
There’s no one behind the wheel, for a start, and you can see from the tires that the car is not moving, or at least its wheels aren’t rolling. The presence of tie-down straps and the metals sides of a trailer clearly show the car is being transported on another vehicle, or being towed on a trailer. And to top it all, the camera must be set to catch drivers from the back after they’ve passed it, yet the Alpine has been photographed from the front. So unless it was reversing at 44 mph down a four-lane highway, it can’t have been speeding.
The camera in question is an unmanned Morpho device, and you can bet that the entire process is automated, from snapping the picture to issuing the ticket. But someone must have to put that ticket in an envelope, and whoever that was failed to spot the error. Fortunately, with all the evidence in the Alpine owner’s favor it should be easy to get this one overturned. Which is good news for the A110’s owner, but potentially less good for the driver of the transporter if the original image shows his plate too.
Opening image by EasyRad.org