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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What emergency do you have in mind where 90mph is too slow? The average driver is far, far more likely to cause another emergency at that speed than avoid one.
I think his idea is that there are times where the safest thing to do is to accelerate out of a dangerous situation on the road. Which is sort of true, but at those speeds most cars tend not to accelerate very quickly so I don't find it particularly convincing.
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there are a few reasons though, like life threatening emergencies when the road is basically empty
Most vehicles on the road can't really be safely operated at 90mph, especially by the layperson, no matter the need.
The problem is it doesn’t take much to become unsafe and physics is not very forgiving of bad judgement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
… empty and well paved country roads are a thing
Most vehicles (and most drivers) aren't capable of safely driving at 90mph, no matter how "empty" the road is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think his idea is that there are times where the safest thing to do is to accelerate out of a dangerous situation on the road. Which is sort of true, but at those speeds most cars tend not to accelerate very quickly so I don't find it particularly convincing.
Yeah, I’m really skeptical just because at that speed human reaction times are so limited. It seems like the guys who said they should have to pay for seatbelts because if they crashed into a lake it might be hard to get out without drowning - true at least once, somewhere, but orders of magnitude less common than the times where a seatbelt kept someone alive.
But ya, the statistical argument of how often does accelerating out really help, vs. often is someone driving too fast the cause of the danger, seems very relevant.
Laws to make cars smaller and drive slower will do 100x more to make crashes less deadly than fancy electronic gizmos. Not to mention all these electronics make the car much more expensive and harder to repair.
People don't want that. Butts are getting bigger and people don't want to drive slow. As a matter of fact I think forcing people to drive slower seems to cause more accidents. I mean moving away from 85th percentile engineering criteria - I mean laws making people drive slower ignoring engineering design. That said, I'll bet even if emergency braking fails to prevent a collision, even slowing down a modest amount wil…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most vehicles on the road can't really be safely operated at 90mph, especially by the layperson, no matter the need.
If you have a turbocharged v4 I a light vehicle it’s pretty dang easy to drive 100+ mph. If you’re paying attention, the road conditions are good, and you’re not aggressively tailgating or passing people, it’s relatively safe. The problem is it doesn’t take much to become unsafe and physics is not very forgiving of bad judgement.
This is pretty much it. All it takes is a pothole (you'll barely see it coming at that speed) or something else, like a deer or small animal. And oops, it's over.
Lots of people over-estimate their ability.
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The reason cars are so large today is because of safety laws
There are still small cars today sold that meet the safety laws. The prevalence of large vehicles is primarily from consumer choice.
Honda Fit 1,070–1,280 kg (2,359–2,822 lb)
Mazda Miata 1,058 kg (2,332 lb)
Mitsubishi Mirage 955 kg (2,106 lb)
Safety standards have driven a lot of that. Air bags, impact beams, high hood line for pedestrian safety, rollover protection, ABS, etc all add weight, which disproportionately impacts small cars. An SUV with a V8 doesn't care, but it's a pretty significant thing to add a few hundred pounds to what used to be a 1500 lb subcompact. It requires a bigger engine to keep performance acceptable, and now you need bigger brakes for the extra power, a better suspension for the higher center of mass, and it all just snowballs.
And that's where consumer choice comes in: people look at a "subcompact", and find that they're heavy, inefficient, and expensive, which are exactly the opposite of what they want in a subcompact car. Once you've already made those concessions, you might as well buy something bigger.