This Frightening Car Lasso Lets Cops Rope Wheels During a High-Speed Chase

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High speed pursuits often drag on for hours, with news helicopters following the chase from overhead. The goal for cops is stop the chaos as quickly as possible, but that isn’t always easy (see the Speed franchise, for starters).

But now there’s a contraption that ostensibly allows authorities to catch fleeing motorists like runaway livestock. Called the Grappler Police Bumper, it’s like some terrifying Mad Max stuff, only marketed for actual use by the police. A video made by the company Stock Enterprises shows how this thing works in pretty graphic detail. The cop car basically drops a Y-shaped yoke from its grill, which extends a long webbing that traps the pursued car’s back wheel, like a lasso for the highway.

Stock Enterprises presumably wants this to be the standard bearer in vehicle pursuits, instead of shutting down highways and cops surrounding pursuant vehicles in a much safer capacity.

Predictably, the car ensnared by the Grappler skids almost out of control, and then both cars are linked up, hurling down the highway, possibly in a chaotic mass of metal and momentum. But hey, you know, at least the whole thing looks cool.

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Sam Blum is a News Staff Writer for Thrillist. He's also a martial arts and music nerd who appreciates a fine sandwich and cute dogs. Find his clips in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The A.V. Club and Vice. He's on Twitter @Blumnessmonster.