I see two possibilities for car mounted paintball guns. One would be purely as a harmless display of anger. When cut off, you could actually respond with a vicious volley of orange machine-gun fire.
The second possibility is a lot more interesting. Each liscensed driver is issued five paintballs per month. They are allowed to shoot them at anyone they feel is driving unsafely, speeding, or pisses them off for any reason. If a cop notices that you have over 5 paintball wounds, they can pull you over and, if you don't have a really good excuse (I was rearended by a paintball truck and it spilled) they can give you a ticket. This would have two effects: a reduction of unsafe driving and also a reduction in offensive or Republican bumper stickers.
One problem, however, is buying black market paintballs, and also removing the paint. Either it would require some sort of solvent, which would suck, or it would just wash right off, which would also suck. Maybe a laser tag thing could be aranged.-- oooga, Feb 20 2001 Automobile paintball http://www.halfbake...bile_20Paint_20BallHalfbaked. [PotatoStew, Feb 20 2001] Car-Ma http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Car-MaAnd the electronic version. [PotatoStew, Feb 20 2001] No offense, but this rip-off of an old comedy routine has been on and off this site numerous times and it just gets less and less funny. What really needs to happen (and this is seriously half-baked) is for people to stress-out a lot less about driving and drivers. The person who just cut you off doesn't care about you and is probably not deliberately being a jerk to you. It is YOU who escalates thoughtless behavior to malevolence. Get. Over. It.-- centauri, Feb 21 2001 Um, that's sort of the point. They don't care and are not deliberately being a jerk. So you let them know without allowing the problem to escalate. By instituting a feedback program with actual consequences (as opposed to giving them the finger) poeple would (read: might) become more careful drivers and actually notice when they were being jerks.-- oooga, Feb 21 2001 "...I am the Nightrider..."-- iuvare, Feb 21 2001 didn't jutta at one time dismiss the idea of a road rage category, on the grounds that a collection of such obviously negative ideas need not collect at all and, further, need not be labeled as such?-- absterge, Mar 27 2001 Something like that. I don't like categories based on mental state of the posters, or categories where we put stuff we want to ignore.-- jutta, Mar 27 2001 I believe that a better idea would be for a camera system to record a short amount of video. Pushing a button on the dashboard uplinks enough video to a reporting center to identify the transgressor and the transgression (need buttons for front and back). The driver who pushes the button is billed a nominal fee for processing the video and to prevent swamping the system with gratuitous video. Vehicles with a lot of video coverage are singled out for observation by an unmarked car so that the driver can be fined if they always drive that way.
I have found that the best way to avoid road rage is to drive a delapidated land yacht ('76 Ford Thunderbird in my case). It guzzles gas at such a prodigeous rate that you cannot afford to speed and people steer clear of it because they assume it is driven by a grey haired driver that can only barely see over the steering wheel, who won't see them cut in front of it before the collision, which will total whatever it was in front of it.-- rlbell, Jul 11 2001 I like the idea, not to satisfy a road rage urge, but just for fun, like paintball itself. I thought paintball paint just washed off, so there'd be no permanent damage. They'd have to add something so it wouldn't be opaque if it hit the windshield, tho'. I want to get a black PT Cruiser and was trying to figure out how to have a 30's gangster type painted on the side of it holding a machine gun, but you'd only be able to paint the bottom half of him (a REAL half-baked idea) . Mounting a couple of paintball guns on it instead would be way cooler.-- noelieg, Jul 12 2001 With all the old paintball ideas that were around even when I first found this place (Sept. 2000), I'm very surprised this one wasn't already taken. Actually, I think it may be, there's been at least 10 car-paintball ideas.-- AfroAssault, Aug 14 2001 We all agree that road-rage is the unhappy consequence of the paintball gun routine: but it goes a good step towards satisfying the need for discipline/revenge that reckless/rude drivers so badly need themselves.
Go with the idea of a camera system to record offenders - but not only is the date, time, GPS coordinates, and nature of the offence, plus the licence-plate number of the offender, recorded and sent to police HQ - but microscopic "tags" with the information on it are deployed into the general area of the offender's number plate.
From there special readers installed into petrol stations recognise the tags and lift the price of petrol especially for the offender... parking-inspectors are given special readers to recognise the tags - and from there lavish the offender with a rate-increase and time-decrease... when the offender brings his car in for a service, special readers identify him as a very valuable customer who will instantly receive a higher level of service than they're prepared to pay for...
or if they go through a fast-food outlet's drive-thru, the person attending to their order will know to accidentally-on-purpose spill fizzy drink onto the driver, or the hood of the car where the heat will cause the drink to react with the skin of the car.
and the list goes on...
or in the event of a zero-tolerance campaign - instead of paintballs, throw out robots that are fitted with magnetic feet and acid nozzles that upon landing onto the target make their way to the hot underbelly of the car where they proceed to burn away at the catalytic converter or the exhaust system... when those two systems fail, the car will be forced to slow and stop without causing any collateral damage.
that or use a different type of robot that make their way into the wheels of the car - curl up into a ball and whenever the car moves, they'll rattle and roll around create a very distinctive and annoying clanking sound.
in a perfect world though - fit two retractable Fabrique National P-90 submachine guns (lightweight, VERY fast rate of fire, top loading, laser sights) on each side of the car - say over the front tyres - centered at the effective range of the smg's - so that you can let fly at the offending vehicle hopefully puncturing the target vehicle's rear-mounted fuel tank.-- twarp, Jan 23 2002 How about just making licensing tests tougher and requiring people to retake them every 5 years or so. That INCLUDES the driving test! Get rid of the bad drivers by educating them about what good driving is!-- timservo, Feb 01 2002 I really, really want one of these mounted to shoot through the front grill. The remote trigger seems to be the only technical issue. Anybody got a solution?-- benjaminsbox, Sep 28 2006 If you do this, it may cause the recipient to crash. That would be bad. It could be used for sport though.-- apocalyps956, Sep 28 2006 I heard they use paintball guns in Iraq to warn drivers away (potential suicide bombers driving up next to their tanks and trucks) before shooting them with real guns.-- omegatron, Mar 25 2007 random, halfbakery