CORRECTION, 11:49 am: While the instructional video and gif appeared last week on Sina Weibo and has since spread to TV shows such as Society of Transparency, the incident itself happened in 2010 in Taiwan. Pudong Highway Patrol stripped out the timestamp in the original footage, but the reportage error is mine and I regret it. (H/T Jalopnik commenter)
Last week, a car in the Pudong district of Shanghai was driving along, minding its own business, when it drove over a metallic object that blew up its tire and sent it hurtling into a guardrail. You can watch the sequence above, which comes from a popular show called Society of Transparency (or “Transparent Society”).
Surprisingly, we’re not told what became of the driver. He seems incidental to the real story, which is the fact that Pudong Highway Patrol actually broke this news on its Sina Weibo via GIF, perhaps the first time that’s ever happened. What’s more, the gif it posted featured instructions on how to keep a car steady when a tire bursts. Useful, I suppose. And timely. Tasteful? Not so much. Among the images shown — again, for instructional purposes — are two dogs on leashes at the beach, near water. It’s supposed to illustrate the difference between tapping one’s brake and braking suddenly, though I can’t see how.
Also, it’s apparent that whoever runs the Pudong Highway Patrol Weibo account has a real fondness for gifs, because there are two other traffic incidents that appear in that form on the first page. We’re not surprised. News shows here routinely show traffic accidents, even those that involve fatalities, because they’re instructional. That they happen to attract a lot of eyeballs is a secondary reason, we’re sure. Fun stuff after the jump.
Here’s another of Pudong Highway Patrol’s fun gifs of traffic accidents:
