Doing the Math


Here at the Lab, we pride ourselves on going the extra mile in our news analysis. Thus, when we heard that Don Johnson was caught by German police with $8 billion in bonds and other securities on him, ostensibly on his way to a DaimlerChrysler factory near Stuttgart to buy a car, our job was clear.

Other blogs might harp on the irony of the Miami Vice star being involved with what looks, on the face of it, to be a money laundering scheme. Not us. We're more interested in investigating the mathematical plausibility of his excuse.

According to Yahoo! Autos, the most expensive car made by DaimlerChrysler is the Mercedes-Benz CL600 Coupe, at $124,900. Dividing that figure into $8 billion tells us that Johnson could have driven off with 64,051 CL600s.

True, that may sound like a large number, but keep in mind that Mercedes sells at least ten times than many cars each year. So in the scheme of things, it's not as though Johnson was asking the impossible. Maybe he's just with cars the way Jerry Seinfeld is with sneakers.