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Local inventor hopes new car-stopping device will take off
By Elspeth Pierson
Banner Correspondent
Jim Costa is a man on a mission: to stop high-speed car chases, that is. Costa, a Provincetown native, is in the process of patenting an invention called the “Car Chase Stopper,” which he hopes will enable police to more safely and effectively end high-speed car chases. While high-speed car chases are infrequent on the Cape, at least one on recent record has clocked in at over 100 mph. Both police and driver safety are a concern, with high-speed car chases resulting in over 350 deaths annually in the U.S. In addition to the human costs involved in high-speed chases, property damage and lawsuits incur substantial economic costs.
Costa’s concern for those involved in such chases led him to start thinking about ways to cut down on these costs. “I was having trouble sleeping for a while,” he says. “And then one morning around 2 a.m., it just hit me — I had it.” Armed with an idea, Costa went to work in his Provincetown workshop and came out with the Car Chase Stopper less than two years later.
The device attaches to the front bumper of police cars. To operate the mechanism, the car driver fires two compressed air cylinders, which shoot a continuous loop triangular cable up to 25 feet forward towards the pursued car. If all goes according to plan, the cable catches the rotating tires and lassos the car. The police driver then applies the brakes, slowing and eventually stopping both vehicles.
Costa and his crew tested the Car Chase Stopper on a wet snowy day last winter. “They convinced me to try it in bad conditions,” Costa says of his crew, “because they figured that if it worked then, it would work even better in good conditions.” On the empty lanes of Route 6, Costa tested his invention on a car traveling 40 mph. “That’s a good average speed for chases,” he says, “since they generally start out slow and get faster.”
This past Sunday, Costa launched a website (www.carchasestopper.com) with a video of the test chase. In addition to the clip, the site also provides additional product information for potential buyers and a request for volunteers to get the word out. A Boston-based law firm, Goodwin and Proctor, is currently working with Costa to get the invention patented so that he can get it on the market. Currently, Costa says he would put an approximate price tag of between $1,500 and $2,500 on the device, but it is his hope that if the technology takes off he will be able to mass-produce it for a much lower cost.
While the aim of Costa’s invention is to save lives, however, there is some question as to whether or not the Car Chase Stopper can safely do just that. Provincetown Chief of Police Warren Tobias, for one, is not convinced. “I believe that there are drawbacks associated with this mechanism, and I am not interested in purchasing it for the Provincetown Police Dept.,” Tobias says, citing both safety and liability concerns.
Nevertheless Costa remains optimistic; Provincetown, where high-speed car chases occur rarely if at all, is not his target market. He plans to market his invention to police departments in the Midwest, where police chases are more of an issue, and to the military.
“It is too new to have a huge response,” he says. “It hasn’t gone totally public yet. There’s a big problem on major interstates and at military checkpoints, though, and I think it will have good civil and military application.”
Only time will tell. In the meantime, Costa is already tinkering with improvements.
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Sep 20th, 2007