My wife gets Veteran's Day off (this year celebrated on Monday 11/12) so we decided to take a mini-vacation in the Sonoma Wine Country. In the Slingshot. Storage bags & helmets ready to go, SS all gassed up ... and then the Butte wildfires hit. It's terribly smokey in Northern California, my wife is asthmatic, and so we will instead take her hardtop BMW 335Ii convertible. It can be shut down tight and cabin air filtered if necessary. (Plus it has a killer stereo.) Oh well, maybe next time. 
Belay that SS!
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You decided to take the car rather than the motorcycle in this case, sounds like a very sound decision to me!
Bill
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I would check the predicted wind direction first. That fire is growing at 80 football fields an hour. Nothing is close to containment.
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Lived in Riverside County, CA for many years - wildfires can be very scary. Folks have died in fires from driving past a blaze, and lack of oxygen has starved the engine and the "brilliant" computers and sensors shut the engine down because the fuel/air mix when haywire. Computers did this to protect the engine - but Bavarian engineers never envisioned driving to escape a fire.
Bottom line - be very careful! Have a plan - and a backup. As an asthmatic myself, I wouldn't drive in smoky territory - even with a cabin air filter. They work pretty good on particulates, but nasty gasses from the fire come right in past the filter - some of them you can't even smell.
Be safe!
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Lived in Riverside County, CA for many years - wildfires can be very scary. Folks have died in fires from driving past a blaze, and lack of oxygen has starved the engine and the "brilliant" computers and sensors shut the engine down because the fuel/air mix when haywire. Computers did this to protect the engine - but Bavarian engineers never envisioned driving to escape a fire.
Bottom line - be very careful! Have a plan - and a backup. As an asthmatic myself, I wouldn't drive in smoky territory - even with a cabin air filter. They work pretty good on particulates, but nasty gasses from the fire come right in past the filter - some of them you can't even smell.
Be safe!
A normal person would never think of that...sucking in a lot of smoke the computer probably thought the motor was blowing up...
California has too many dangers to make it worth living there....kinda like Florida...
