Why hello, I'm Adam ... I couldn't actually even get it out.
This is Adam Savage. I am in my cave in my shop in san francisco and i am answering uh
some questions from tested patrons about my show mythbusters uh these questions are so awesome
every single one is brand new brand new to me and i've been answering MythBusters questions
for for forever dungeon master 5 or mason or maybe it's done to master v dungeonmasterv
says you guys basically did stunt training for vehicles on mythbusters yeah we did
has that training helped you out of a jam in real life or have you been lucky enough not to need
it i have not been so lucky sir no uh at least twice the stunt driving that i got trained to do
at least once it saved my life and the other time it just helped me out of a jam
yeah yeah uh to help me out of a jam was uh my wife and i were back in
the east coast during a heavy winter a long time ago 2005 2006 something like that and i was
driving on one of the east coast highways and east coast highway is barely discernible from a lane i
mean on the east coast just gps doesn't even help you in some of the parts of new england at all uh
so we're driving through the back roads of westchester county in the winter time uh
about 15 years ago when i hit a patch of black ice and my car lost all traction and just started to
just started to green in a direction that was the direction i was steering in
and my wife in the passenger seat went
right deep inhale there's not a lot of time for discussion just shit's happening
but from the training we had uh of learning how to break traction on the driving in the rain can you
drive is there a speed at which you can drive fast enough in a convertible to keep rain from getting
into the convertible we we broke we broke a porsche that someone had loaned us for that
episode at any rate because of that training uh and some of the other that was the very that was
the training that really came to bear on black ice because we spent a whole day hosing down a
parking lot and driving on it breaking traction various wheels and learning how to recover
learning how learning how oversteer and understeer both work and learning how to exploit and utilize
them to your advantage if you can't stop them. And we hit that black ice and it was autonomic.
My hands just moved in the right direction and we just ended up pointing in the right direction and
I felt the traction back under the road. I stepped on the accelerator a little bit and
we drove home and we were fine. It was amazing. A week later I hit like my fourth patch of black ice
and I was actually kind of looking for it and my wife was like, Stop looking for the black ice;
I'm not enjoying this, but that's where my driving training just got me out of a jam.
It saved my life once in the Land Cruiser and it was literally less than a week after we wrapped
MythBusters so one of the very very last days of shooting was the day in which i drove that giant
truck through a mile of mythbuster props uh oh my god what an what a gigantic sequence that was uh
and just to remind you of what i went through in that sequence i'm driving a truck with a huge
uh uh like snow plow uh point on the front and a ramp so that as i hit stuff i'm splitting it
we had done the same thing a few years before jamie had always said it was like his favorite
stun he'd ever done um so we decided to do it for the mythbusters finale and we built up we
built a cow catcher knife blade for the front of this truck we buttressed it we protected the
truck with bulletproof glass etc uh and then i got up to speed 45 50 miles an hour and i
started driving this track through um through a mile of props that dennis kwon and our
other producers spent like seven weeks gathering thousands of pieces of stuff to make this sequence
really significant we've done test runs and everything and 20 seconds into this 90 second run
a piece of plywood comes up over my windshield and i can no longer see out the front of the
of the of the vehicle now this is problematic because i have two camera cars i have one over
here and one over here and a drone and there are people on the runway and now i'm driving
the biggest thing on that runway at 50 miles an hour and i can't see it in front of me but
we had also set up street signs on the left side one for each year and i immediately noticed
that i had just passed one and i kept on tracking to the street signs and i was able to complete
that run without seeing the road in front of me i literally hit that final mark i hit this
i mean it was it was great it was i'm super proud and i finished that run
again one of the last days we were filming the show and i said to myself that's the best driving
that's the best driving i've ever done amazing and and you know the contingency planning you do on a
show like ours what enabled me to take this brand new circumstance of like oh i can't see out front
oh well there's some other things that we could do because there's no stopping if i stop it's going
to cost us tens of thousands of dollars to reset and get get going again that's just that's not an
option the producer in me was like you cannot stop but that was not to be the most the best
driving i have ever done in my life because only a week later i was uh i had uh my partner and i
had taken our boys thing one into thing two down to half moon bay to for some burgers one morning
i think it was some burgers it was a good breakfast joint we went down there
uh and we were driving back and we were in two cars i was in the in the land cruiser
my uh 1982 bj42 land cruiser uh my i had one kid i had thing one and my wife was driving home with
thing two and we're on 101 heading north we sorry we're in 280 heading north we had just
we we were just about to get to the san jose exit not san jose california but san jose avenue uh
on 280 north if you know san francisco you know where this is and my cruiser just started to drift
and i steered in the other direction and nothing happened and it kept on drifting and car honks and
my son says what's going on and i said i have no steering i was at 50 miles an hour in full traffic
and the knuckle that connects my steering wheel to the the the steering mechanism sheared right off
it's terrifying so in that moment i'm thinking to myself what options do i have
i am moving down the road in a vehicle with my son at 50 miles an hour and i have no sneering
okay so i get my foot above the brake the only thing i can do is adjust my speed
so i just start attenuating my speed there's a car over here i'm attenuating to not bump into
him and then i remember that i'd recently put a pa into my truck because i always wanted to
come over to the left kind of pa it's not legal to do that in the city and i don't do it in the city
i used it for the show and i've used it while camping but you know i don't do it on city streets
but you can't buy a pa system for a car that doesn't also have a siren and that's
really not legal to use within the city limits to turn on your own siren if you're not a cop
but i remembered the siren and so i reached down and all this is happening in my head in less than
a second i reached down turned on the siren full blast and immediately the three or four cars that
are near me and they realize something's weird because somebody had hogged me and my speed is
changing they all the siren goes off and everyone starts to move away and now luckily i'm still
just moving forward and slightly to the left and because there was no one on my left i was able to
kind of move over into the left side of the lane and over to the meridian where i pulled to a stop
and the left side front fender of my cruiser touched the meridian barrier and i've got like a
one and a half inch scratch i'm never buffing out of that truck
we paused and my son was like that was terrifying and i'm like it's not over yet we're still in
danger we're in a car on the highway uh put your seat belt back on put a seat belt back on
uh and then i called aaa and said i have an emergency i am in live traffic need to get
here and to their credit aaa was there within 11 minutes to get me out of there uh oh boy you
should see what big chunky non-shearable never gonna break again steering knuckle that is now
in my land cruiser but the reason i was able to get out of that jam is solely because of all the
training i've had in driving uh on mythbusters that was a long answer i did not expect that but
thank you so much for these awesome questions tested patrons keep submitting your questions
and i will continue to answer them thank you guys so much i'll see you next time