Quote:
Originally Posted by KIS
While reading the most recent thread on speeding and the very predictable responses by both the nannies on this forum as well as the guys with their hair on fire. Why is it legal to have cars that can easily exceed 80 mph? With technology you can manufacture cars that are limited to 80 mph on public roads, and that have gps that would eliminate the speed governor when you're on a recognized track. My point is simple. When you allow manufacturers to produce cars that can easily triple most speed limits, why are you surprised when people actually do it?
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#1 Speed limit laws are constantly changing, my state recently increased the limit 5mph past what was the absolute maximum a few years ago. If you designed cars that have a maximum limit that is relativly low this would possibly make them obsolete in the near future.
#2 New tracks are constantly being built, and people constantly hold autocross and special events on private property where you are supposed to exceed the speed limit substantilly. If manufacuters added a GPS based speed limit governor it wouldn't future proof the car or allow it to work in special events.
#3 Speeds that are greater than 80 mph, say 100 mph may be nessesary in emergency situations, if you set the speed governor to an unreasonably low limit that would case problems.
#4 Despite speed limits it's generally accepted that everyone goes faster than the limit on the interstate and cops wholeheartedly approve of it and never pull anyone over unless they're going riduclously fast, which makes it a gray area depending on how strict your state enforces the law. Some states espetially with wide open spaces tend to have very lax laws.
#5 Some states don't have maximum speed limits so it makes no sense to limit them if the upper limit is anything that's safe and this is a free country where we can travel from state to state.
The vast majority of cars that are caught for substantially exceeding the speed limit are not fast cars, but slow ones like honda civics. Cops will back this up. While once in a while you'll get a street racer generally the worst speeders are regular people in boring cars. What we can conclude from this is that fast cars aren't responsible for speeding irresponsible people are so it doesn't matter if we make fast cars or not.
I'm a race trained driver, and I'm used to going 0-100 in 4 seconds and pulling 4g in the corners so anything on the street is as slow as a semi truck to me. The reason I own fast cars is so that I don't have anemic acceleration. I haven't gotten a speeding ticket in 6 years. Not one. My weekend car has 800 hp and can reach just under 230 mph though.