[CARDEEP]

Apparently the US President's Secret Service will have a long list of follies with "The Beast" by the time young Obama paves way for a new president.

First in scrapping the bottom at US embassy gate & getting struck at in Ireland; & now Petrol instead of Diesel fuel tank in Israel.

I am sure the American forces have gone dumb since 9/11... can't get small things done properly... & are just a mode of mass destruction like their opponents.

[VIPER_SRT]

Originally Posted by CARDEEP

Apparently the US President's Secret Service will have a long list of follies with "The Beast" by the time young Obama paves way for a new president.

First in scrapping the bottom at US embassy gate & getting struck at in Ireland; & now Petrol instead of Diesel fuel tank in Israel.

I am sure the American forces have gone dumb since 9/11... can't get small things done properly... & are just a mode of mass destruction like their opponents.

All right! Now lets not get offensive here against a particular country and talk about mass destruction. Lets just keep it to car talk.

[volkman10]

All about The Beast,



And in India:





Link

[ads11]

The time Mumbai heat got the better of the Beast, and it gets fed the wrong fuel

Amusing story from a former US Secret Service agent on Obama's detail for his 2010 visit to Mumbai. You can find his comments in the clip below or the following article:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvSJyl-Z-WQ

TLDR:

• As is the case with most POTUS visits, the motorcade arrives ahead of time.
• A few hours prior to Obama actually arriving, the 30ish degC temperatures and humidity of Mumbai proved too much for the Beast to handle and they had to stop for about 15 minutes to let the engine cool down.
• The other interesting factoid is where some foolish agent topped up the petrol powered Beast with diesel, an understandably embarrassing faux pas anywhere, more so if you're driving the most visible man on the planet around.
• This is where it gets interesting - to no surprise it turns out the presidential motorcade travels with a cohort of GM mechanics who managed to do the full engine overhaul and bleed the diesel out in a matter of hours, all before the main event of actually transporting POTUS.

Caveats:
Now our agent definitely embellishes his retelling a fair bit. He makes a point of saying the vehicle overheated in the slums of Mumbai but I think we all know there's a snowballs chance in hell any foreign leaders motorcade, let alone POTUS's, would go somewhere like Dharavi. While I haven't ever visited Mumbai and am unfamiliar with the geography, I would imagine what he's called slums are in fact perhaps a low-middle class residential neighbourhood.
And feel free to roll your eyes at John Wayne over here going on about the prospect of having to "start wasting Indian civilians" when our countrymen and women naturally gathered to witness the spectacle as Indians oft do.
My only other concern is with the diesel shenanigans, more specifically - wouldn't something like a US presidential motorcade use a military or police filling station. The way Agent Gage retells it, it's like they pulled into a run of the mill Indian Oil pump. I find this a bit hard to believe.

[avishar]

Both these stories sound like it has been through the re-telling thousands of times with a lot of BS added on to it. I wonder which slums were these guys driving through?

"So, we land, and, for whatever reason, we had to drive through the slums of Mumbai," he recalled. "It was hot as a m-fer, man, that day in India."

The temperatures in Mumbai were in the low 90s between Nov. 6 and Nov. 9, 2010, according to Weather Underground, in line with average temperatures there for that time of year.

"Well, dammit, the thing overheated on this Indian road through the slums. It overheats, like steam is coming out of the engine," Gage continued. "Nobody's in it, we're driving an empty motorcade to get to this storage facility, this embassy offsite, and the driver comes on and he's like 'guys, I gotta stop, this thing is like redlining it's so hot.'"

So they do and "thousands of Indians are coming around and this is a classified piece of U.S. government property," he said "The [CAT] team leader, he was like 'guys, let's take up positions around the limo so this thing can get cooled off.'"

"Thousands of Indians are coming out of these slums, man, and we're like 'what are we gonna do?' We can't shoot these people," he added. "We can't just start wasting Indian civilians because they want to touch this limousine, but it ended up cooling down enough and we were able to get to this offsite

I find it very hard to believe that their logistics team do not carry around their own fuel. It is a single-point failure for any car, incorrect fuel, incorrect octane and especially so when the prime purpose of this entire charade is to be totally non-reliant on local transport/logistics.

Later in the trip, disaster nearly struck again just four hours before the motorcade was due to take Obama to an event, according to Gage. They had stopped at an Indian gas station to fuel up beforehand and the Beast's driver had inadvertently begun filling the car's tank with diesel, despite it having a gasoline-fueled engine. Diesel doesn't work properly in engines designed to run off that fuel and can cause significant damage to the internals.

"I remember turning to him [the driver], his first name started with W, and I was filling up the CAT truck with unleaded, and I remember looking at him, and I was like, 'hey, W, that's diesel, man,' and the panic on his face," Gage remembered of the incident. "He said every cuss word."

"We had to get an Indian tow truck and Obama was supposed to go live, man, in like four hours to this major event," he continued.

Gage explained that the Secret Service's Transportation Section has an entire staff of highly trained mechanics with certifications straight from General Motors. However, he added that, while a contingent of them will travel where ever the presidential motorcade goes, they rarely get called upon to do anything.

"The look on these guys' faces," he said. "We were like, 'listen, man, we filled this thing up with like five or six gallons of diesel,' and they were just like so excited."

"These mechanics, unbelievable, in like four hours took this whole engine apart, drained all the fuel, cleaned the fuel pump," Gage continued. "Brand new fuel pump, brand new fuel filter, got this thing up and running, it was amazing ... in the heat of Mumbai, India."