Is it worth making cars that can go beyond most speed limits in most countries? The max speed in the UK is 70mph nearly every car made can exceed that, so why sell cars in the UK that can go twice this speed and more? Some motorbikes (road legal ) can do 200mph why are they allowed to be sold here ? Is the motor industry wrong for making and selling vehicles that are blatantly designed to be able to shatter speed limits?
because a car that could only do 100kmph would have a hell of a time getting up to that speed. cars have additional power to allow for quick acceleration, the top speed is merely a sideaffect of that. artificial speed limiters do exist(new japanese cars have an artificial limit of 190kmph), but anyone serious about speeding will just take them out. also, lets not forget those times when you need to go faster than the speed limit(eg, when overtaking)
There is no time when you can (legaly) break the speed limit, even when overtaking. Power to reach 70mph the legal UK limit is far less than that needed to reach 140mph, even 1000cc cars have reasonable acceleration to 70mph.
take my car for a drive, then get back into a 1L car and tell me it has any acceleration at all. i used to drive a 1.3l slushbox lancer, i got stuck behind a scooter doing 60k on the open road, and didnt have the power to overtake it in a gap which would currently give me space to overtake 5 cars.
You are not getting my point, a 1000cc powered car could be designed to reach 70mph quite fast enough for even motorway use. Obviously if you want air con, power steering, tv, sauna, more power would be needed, the same for towing a caravan, but power does not (have) to relate to speed.
yes it does. either you have a car that is hitting the rev limiter in top gear doing the speed limit, or you have a car that can cruise at low revs while doing the speed limit in top gear, of course that would mean if you did rev it right out then you would be able to speed. the only way to stop a powerful car from speeding is to install an artificial limiter, and theres no way anyone is going to let the government put 100k limiters in their cars.
some places here in US, are minimum 70MPH some places in Germany, the Autobahn (sp?) no speed limit Car manufacturers aren't going to cater to every country... plus, why would you complain? don't like power?Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Speed doesn't really do any harm in a lot of places, who cares if you're doing 120mph down an empty motorway at 3am? I think speed causes less accidents than people realise, it usually gets the blame for "not being able to stop" but if someone just pulls out infront of you then what does it matter? You could be doing any speed and if they're too close when they pull out you'll hit them.:shrug: Teach people to be better drivers THEN I'll start caring about speed. Anyway to answer your questions - As has been mentioned it's due to varying speed limits in different countries, and probably varying uses, who knows if you're going to race the car/bike on a track or not when they make it? Personally it doesn't bother me, we should have straighter roads and higher speed limits.
how about this fishtail, Regardless of how slow or how much manufacturers limit speed capabilities on cars, there will ALWAYS be someone, or a group of someone's modifying cars to go faster and drive faster too. I'm with anti-flag, if you're in a safe spot to go a bit faster, go for it. I hate speed limits (outside of school and residential zones). They are bullshit on the highway/autobahn, etc.
My last bike was a 180 mph GSX-R750. I got stopped in my car when someone had very thoughtfully kicked out the rear light. The copper that stopped me asked why I wore a leather jacket and I explained that I was used to the weight and comfort because I was a biker. His first comment was "seeing as I had a legitimate cause to stop you I'll check everything, but ignore the speeding points on your licence". Finding I'd never been pulled over for speeding he suggested it was because I was sensible enough to do my fast riding in sensible places. I agreed and his comment was "Good idea. Going fast where you're not interfering with other road users is okay, just don't do it on busy roads."
You have picked a couple of exceptions, i never knew there was a min speed limit of 70mph in the US, where is this? I have not said that speed is dangerous (it is in many cases) and few people are capable of reacting quick enough even on motorways, at speeds in excess of 70mph in an emergency. With the voluum of traffic in the UK where can you even reach 70mph? between traffic jams maybe, but then there is no point, your journey time equals out and there is little net gain. My main point is, that cars, motorbikes are made to be capable of smashing almost all countries legal speed limits.
When ever you exceed 70mph in the UK you are breaking the law, there is no way to refute that, so why does our government allow us to import cars that are capable of going far beyond this legal limit? There are after market manufacturers of go faster parts, but these could be made illegal.
My car is pretty slow. It's about 17 seconds to 60. Personally, I'd prefer something with a bit more grunt because I think it's safer. Overtaking is quite dangerous as it takes a while in my car. I know I could be patient and wait behind somebody, but still. There's a very short sliproad onto the motorway near my house and it's always an exciting experience getting on. Luckily I can get it up to about 60 to join the traffic that's all doing 60+ and very close together, but it isn't easy. I need to lose a couple of mils tread going round a tight corner and take the car to about 6000rpm in 3rd gear. Which isn't far off the redline. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! All of the while I'm doing this, I need to check my blindspot and mirror, and figure out what people on the motorway are doing. My sister had her tonsils removed a few years back and there were complications. They started to bleed a few days later at home. My parents took her to the local hospital, which apparently didn't have the equipment to deal with it, and left her with the useful advice to suck an ice cube. The bleeding got worse as they left the hospital, so the only option was to go to the nearest emergency hospital - about 30 miles away. Needless to say, my dad didn't really think about the speed limit on the way there and was doing up to 120mph. My sister lost about 3 pints of blood and the car looked like a murder scene. Any more blood loss and there's a reasonable chance she could have died. If it'd been my car, I would've been able to do 103mph and it would take an age to accelerate to that. Thank fuck it wasn't.
Tax? Insurance? Doesn't it make more money to have a car with a bigger engine(therefore faster)? Could be wrong about that but I'd have thought it benefits the countries economy not to alienate anything in such a way/makes more money for the government somewhere down the line, like the humble speed camera. Perhaps I just have a very poor opinion of the British government for some unknown reason.
Sometimes you need that power for safe maneuvering. I have an ancient diesel Mercedes that has a reasonable top speed (probably 100mph) but no "punch." I miss turns and exits because I'm not sure where to expect them and I can't accelerate quickly enough to pull into a hole in the next lane. We have a lot of steep two-lane mountain roads in the U.S. If you get stuck behind a couple of jerks in trucks ("lorries") or underpowered Italian cars who won't pull over, you need a lot of power to be able to pass ("overtake") safely, or you end up taking an hour for a twenty-minute trip. In the western states we have a lot of excellent highways where you can go for hundreds of miles without seeing very much traffic and it's perfectly safe to travel at 120mph if you have the right tires ("tyres") for it. Many of these states have 70mph speed limits to shut up the safety nazis, but they are not actually enforced. You don't seem to understand kinematics, the physics of velocity and acceleration. You don't necessarily need to break the speed limit to pass someone who is traveling more slowly, but you need rapid acceleration to do it safely. And that requires more power than the capability of a reasonable maximum speed. Sure. But how about their acceleration from 60mph to 70mph? You could run head-on into a bus ("omnibus") while making that languid dash. The National Motorists Association (not to be confused with the AAA which is a shill for the government) says that the three most effective tactics for reducing "accidents" are: Get the drunks off the road. Don't waste resources persecuting the people who have had two drinks and know it, do some serious police work and track down the ones who habitually get totally plastered. Everybody knows who they are so it's really not that difficult. Get the junk off the road. Go into any parking lot and measure the tire tread depth on a few older cars. Then extrapolate that to the way those drivers are maintaining their brakes, steering and suspension. Get the incompetents off the road. Again, this requires some serious police work but again everybody knows who they are. This may be a bigger problem in the USA, where practically anyone can pass the driving test and many states give licenses to 16-year-olds. You don't even have to know how to react to oversteer or understeer in a rainstorm. You don't even have to understand that you can't make a 90-degree right turn at 65mph to catch the off-ramp you missed. Good goddess, my diesel does better than that and it annoys other drivers. Cars like that should simply be illegal outside of congested urban environments. People are human, that's why we call them that. Technology has to take into account the fact that none of us has infinite patience. So does the shit-for-brains government.
In some areas (like those in the middle of nowhere) typically have no speed limit. After all, if you are going to get into a wreck there... it's almost a 100% chance it's only going to be a single car accident. I remember a few years back I was driving somewhere in Southern GA which was essentially the middle of nowhere. The signs simply said "Drive at a safe speed." Ha. 100 MPH ok?
Quite. It does cause some problems now and again. Once it's going I can keep up with everyone else, but getting there is a bit arduous. A car recently overtook me on a blind corner on a hill, due to impatience. It could have turned into quite a nasty crash if anything had come round the corner at any speed. Of course, being young and not very happy about his decision to do that I decided to tailgate him for a while. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The main reason I have an underpowered car is the prohibitive insurance prices here. Granted, I didn't do myself any favours by getting banned, but the prices are still high. Last year it cost me £1200 for the year, 3rd party, as a named driver. The car's worth £3000 maybe. This year it's £900, so hopefully next year it'll be £600 or 700 and I'll think about changing cars. But young people do drive like arseholes, myself included. I don't really have any reason to complain. I think over here driving is a little different than in the US. We have a lot more city centres that you can navigate by car, with a lot of pedestrians walking very close to the road. Everything's more built up and I suppose that increases the risks whilst you're driving.
Alot of people with fast cars drive them on a track on weekends. Cars aren't about what we need, but what we want.
Also, in matters of life and death you wouldn't get in trouble for speeding. Cars might as well have the capability of going fast. I see absolutely no reasonable reason that they should be limited.
