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Today for Car Affection, we're in Austria and we're driving the Nissan Nissan X-Trail, a crossover, the kind that Nissan are now kind of famous for, and we've had fun thrashing this thing off road a little bit getting it muddy and see what it can do and having a bit of a play on the autobahn and that's kind of Kind of what leads me to what I really want to talk about today and that is speed.
Nissan themselves are not alien to the concept cars like the GTR are blistering quick and they make some incredibly engines for motor sport.
But what is speed?
What do we understand is the concept of going fast?
I mean, the international space Space station travels over 17,000 miles an hour.
Yet i doubt the astronauts aboard feel themselves traveling at that speed.
Yet going down a hill at 25 miles an hour on a push bike can feel exciting and thrilling.
So really what does it mean to go fast?
It is not the numbers that Factor.
It's the feeling.
And pursuing that feeling, that thrill of speed is something that's kept me occupied for years.
Driving fast is a real passion of mine.
And I've been trying to seek out the experience of doing that for years and years and years.
And although cars are getting faster and I'm putting myself in more and more positions to be Be able to push cars to their limit.
Care are safe, cars are controlled.
Cars are there to make high speed, feel comfortable and safe.
When Alex drove the [UNKNOWN] Baron it felt like incredible speed but compare that to a Racing car 20 or 30 years previous, doing the same speed, and it would have been a completely different experience.
Seriously, when I drove my first car up to 100 miles an hour for the first time, it felt like the thing was going to rattle to pieces.
Yet now in most of the cars that we have here on the Autobahn you can d max almost anything and it still feels planted safe and secure.
So I'm still after a new thrill I'm after the next level of speed.
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So to experience a different type of speed, [UNKNOWN] invites me here to [UNKNOWN] in Austria to have a go on a toy they helped develop, the worlds first seven man bobsled.
To help celebrate the x-trail Nissan has worked together with one of the most experienced bobsled builders in the world to put together this all together more exciting prospect.
Like the x-trail this bobsled can accommodate seven passengers.
And the same design team that worked on the car designed a front end that shares a lot of the Nissan hallmarks.
But where the X- Trail itself can tackle a variety of terrains from perfect asphalt to more challenging off-road conditions, and handle them in even comfort, the seven man bob is slightly more limited.
It's built to do one thing and one thing only.
And today, that single function is Is to scare the crap out of me.
So the reality, what i'm about to do, is kinda just about kicked in.
Mainly because we've been here for a little bit already and seen other people go down the run in more traditional bobsled and there have been quite a few crashes and we've had our safety briefing on what to do if we crash and you might be the same as me.
the extent of your knowledge about bobsled may be limited to what you learned in cool runnings.
And they crashed in it as well.
So yeah, crash is on the brain.
Worried about that.
Seven people to a bobsled is very heavy.
Heavy means fast in bobsledding, unlike in cars.
In a car, I know what I'm doing, I'm in control.
In this bobsled, I'm literally going to be strapped to some skates and hurled down an icy mountain.
Okay.
This is happening.
I had every intention of talking my way through the experience as we made our way to the bottom of the run.
[UNKNOWN]
It was foolish of me to even think that would be a possibility.
Aah!
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Just before my body could be fully shaken to pieces it was all over and my brain could take a moment to process what had just happened.>> That was unbelievable.
That is a different kind of speed all together.
The violence of that is completely different to anything else I've ever done.
It's absolutely killer [INAUDIBLE].
As an added treat, just before we left I was given the opportunity to have a go in a more traditional four-man bob, starting from higher up the run, which promised to be faster, more violent, and even more exciting.
They weren't wrong.
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Woo hoo!
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[LAUGH] I have the best job.
Now, I have to say as much as fun as that was, I'm
I'm kind of glad to be back behind the wheel of a vehicle that I'm in total control of.
Even if it isn't quite the thrill I experience earlier.
In trying to describe what it was like going down in above sled, a lazy analogy would be to call it like a rollercoaster, you're not in control, you're there for the ride and it's fast And it's violent, and it takes your breath away.
But the bobsled is more than that.
It is violence to a much higher degree.
It has a genuine sense of danger about it.
And even though it's, by far, not the fastest I've ever traveled.
In fact, I even This is the fastest I 've traveled o this trip.
That exhilaration, that feeling of [UNKNOWN] down the hill, on ice, on skates, in a box, is unlike any I've ever felt.
The violence of it.
The Emotion and physical feeling of being thrust down there.
Your body getting squashed in the corners, only having the time of the straights to catch your breath again.
There is nothing in automotive like it.
There are other thrills to be had don't get me wrong and I love driving and I will always love driving but I don't think I will ever experience the Isle of thrill that is a bobsled run.
To be fair to the Nissan X-Trail, although the seven-man bob was designed to celebrate the crossover, they couldn't be more different.
I spent two days driving the X-Trail out on the autobahn, around twisty mountain roads, and had a good old play off-road, and it tackled it all with ease.
And not once that it make me feel like my spine is going to buckle like a Coke can getting stepped on.
Yes, they both can accommodate seven people but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't feel like I'm practically inside the person in front of me if we slowly loaded up the X Trail, unlike I did in the Bob.
Equally though, I am pretty sure you wouldn't be able to fit the Nissan down the bobsled run.
So horses for courses.
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