Volvo is introducing a 112mph speed limiter to all its new cars starting 2020 - Sensationalist Headlines

Its an easy figure to get to from Albergaria to Aveiro, the road is incredibly wide, and theres never that much traffic. I don't quite like to do it because despite liking speed, it still feels like a lot of toll on the engine, but it sure is good to do a 30 min trip in less than 15. And you barely feel the speed because of how much space there is. The pavement is pretty good aswell. The A1 around Porto (I'm not familiar with the stretches) is pretty wide aswell.

That's only really slightly faster, though, as in a couple mph more. Also of note: Subsequent research suggests significant biases in the Solomon study, which may cast doubt on its findings.

You're completely failing to account for how staggeringly fatal crashes over 65mph get. Every 5mph increase increases the fatality rates exponentially. Cars are only designed to crash at a certain speed

So, what's your point? This doesn't means I will do high speeds everywhere just to get away from people. Also doesn't means people should do it either. You can also die from much slower crashes, and escape from violent high speed ones. I don't get what point you're trying to make.

Yes, but statistically, you or other people have a lower chance of survival the faster you go.

People have died from opening a bottle of champagne wrong, and some have survived falling from planes with no parachute. Does that mean that both situations are equally dangerous? Nope. So why are you bringing this up?

theres nothing to survive from if theres nothing to crash into

Not really, no. The priority is reducing the amount of crash-related deaths. Increasing the survival rate by lowering crash speeds contributes to that.

The Autobahn gods are very disappointed

Thats kind of shit. The priority should be avoiding crashes altogether.

You do know that a problem can be tackled in several ways at once, right? If we were to take your advice and only care about "avoiding crashes altogether", we wouldn't bother with seat-belts or crash deformation (since you don't need these if you don't crash), even though both of those significantly reduced the death rate on roads. In the real world, "avoiding crashes altogether" isn't as easy as snapping your fingers. Until you find a way to reduce the amount of crashes to 0 (good luck), then safety measures to reduce the fatality rate in crashes are primordial.

What, ofc we would. Seat belts aren't there just in case of a crash. They also fasten you to your seat and also grip you in case of emergency hard braking.

Just increase speed limits to 200mph that way we can react fast enough to prevent any crashes ever happening at all

Why 112? Just make it 85, since that's the fastest speed limit anywhere in the USA

Doesn't that study imply going the median speed of traffic is safer, and going faster or slower than the flow of traffic is more dangerous? I mean personally I feel safer going slightly faster just because I avoid bunching up and gave more space to react, but I don't think the speed is the determining factor making me safer but rather more space between other cars.

But the priority is to avoid emergency hard braking altogether, right? Trying to argue semantics won't change shit. Claiming that we shouldn't care about increasing the survival rate of crashes is simply stupid, I'd advise against doubling down on it.

I hear that phrase a lot. As if the range of speeds that people are "comfortable at" wasn't three digits long.

It's also one of the best maintained roads in the world, which plays a significant role in reducing the crash rate. Claiming that the greater safety stems from the lack of speed limits is nonsense. If that were how it works, the fatality rate in the speed-limited portions of the autobahn would be higher than in the limitless ones. But the exact opposite happens.

"Avoid ridicule"? The tone in which you say that is laughable, at best. We're already sacrificing crash survivability by allowing people to drive above 55 MPH anyway.

Right, saying that caring about increasing crash survival rates "is pretty shit" is not ridicule at all, my mistake. Making concessions on crash survivability by allowing speeds over 55MPH in some areas doesn't in any way mean that it becomes an afterthought, so I don't see how that's relevant. As for my "weaksauce" arguments, that's pretty rich considering you haven't addressed them, nor did you provide rebuttals for most of others' counter-arguments to your point for that matter.

Emergency hard braking comes in at any speed. It came in at 30km/h or whatever it was, and my car still got its front shoved inwards.

The point is that if you think that your argument of "just avoid crash altogether" is proper justification to not care about crash survivability, then "just avoid emergency hard braking" is a proper justification to not care about seat belts.

Lol A: you CLEARLY didn't read what I wrote or somehow got it entirely wrong, or maybe I got what you just said super wrong, and B: you are so invested in this its outright funny at this point You do know you'll have to brake hard with sudden dangers coming onto the road, even if you're doing below the speed limit right? And THE POINT is that this limiting is USELESS. You're still gonna get fucked hard at 180km/h, hence why limits emposed by law are a whole lot shorter. And guess what, you're still allowed to do extra speeds on any road, precisely for overtaking, unless overtaking just isn't allowed, which defeats your idea against going faster than most people.

The latter option seems to be the most likely, to me. Quote where I said that speed limits protects drivers from any and all dangers. It sure will only limit retards who drive over 180km/h. However, in those few cases, it will still increases safety through higher reaction time windows, better adherence, and better control over the vehicle. While the risk of crash remains high, it will reduce the risk of the driver dying and (more importantly) the risk for other drivers who actually respect limitations. Never said you should never increase your speed if you need to overtake? If you need to overtake, you're already going faster than the car in front of you. If you're respecting limitations, why would I have a problem with that?

I think what a lot of people also forget about the Autobahn (and highways in general) is that all lanes go the same way, and that you don't really have any side roads sans the exits of course, but they're all on the same side and paralel to the road

That very slight difference seems to be within the margin of error. Additionally it doesn't seem like that much of a reduction in collisions at all - only about 3 miles an hour faster resulting in like maybe 50 less collisions per 100 million vehicle miles. Going 5 miles faster seems to be "about as safe" as going the flow of traffic. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/208523/558799c4-d565-45a1-b2a8-f3abff4b4f9c/solomoncurve.png The issue is that for most people, like me, going 10 or 20 miles faster than the flow of traffic feels safer, because we're making more distance between ourselves and other drivers, but we're going faster meaning we have less time to react to random shit like people switching lanes fast without signalling, spilling coffee on their laps and slamming on the brakes, or deer deciding it's a good day to die. Funnily, it's still about as unsafe as going 10 or 20 miles less than the speed limit, which confirms my suspicions that assholes going less than the speed limit are a huge cause of accidents. I swear when people are on an on-ramp to the highway in front of me doing 40 and I need to swap lanes before they run out of room I'm rolling the dice to see if I get flattened by a guy doing the speed limit of 65. Going the flow of traffic or slightly slower to overtake is safest; Overtaking constantly might feel safer but its not.

What an utterly pointless piece of marketing wank. * Electronic caps are nothing new. Ford was doing it in the early 1990s, and the caps were lower than 112 besides. IIRC, 95. * 112 is not going to make any dent in road fatalities. Very few of them occur at speeds that high to begin with. Most of them happen at speeds between 55 and 85. * I guarantee you there will be updates for tuners that will let people remove that cap within a month of these cars hitting the roadways. The people who would be most affected by the cap will just remove the cap. I can go to a used car dealership and buy a clapped out POS Ford or Chevy from 1992 that has a lower cap. It's also utterly pointless. You can die in a crash at just 55MPH, and bypassing electronic caps is so laughably easy it's no more effective than simply putting a sticker on the dash saying 'DO NOT EXCEED 112 MPH'. Laughably easy, actually. You'll be able to plug a laptop into the OBD-II port, download an ECU program off the internet that has the cap altered(Or removed outright), and flash it. Itt'l take you all of 5 minutes to do and itt'l be available within a month of these cars reaching the public. If you wanted a speed cap that was actually difficult to bypass you'd, funnily enough, make it out of technology we haven't used in 70 or 80 years. You'd put a flyball governor on the transmission input shaft or somewhere in the crankcase attached to the crankshaft which would mechanically close throttle blades via linkages contained entirely within the engine. Bypassing this would still be possible, but it would require dismantling the entire front end, pulling the engine and/or transmission, dismantling that, installing modified springs/removing the weights, then reassembling the whole shebang. You'd be looking at 20+ hours of labor to remove that governor from the car and nobody's going to go to that much effort.