Looking at most states speed limits top out at 70 mph. Some exceptions to that being Utah, Wyoming, Montana or Texas. So I understand that there are exceptions but the vast majority of roads won’t be faster than that. So why would engineers give them the ability to break the law?
In: Technology
Think of it like this, if you are running at your top speed, you can’t maintain that all the time, and it will be harsh on your body. The same idea applies to cars. A car that has 65 miles per hour as a top speed would be having to drive at maximum speed the entire time when traveling.
So instead, the car is made to have a top speed that is higher, so that the usual commute speed isn’t pushing the car to the limit the whole time.
Likewise, in case of emergencies, cars may need to break the speed limits.
It could definitely be made this way without “top speed”pushing it to the limit. Easily could have a hard stop on speed limit. Also even in emergency, exceeding speed limit is dangerous in itself. Therefore I propose that the huge revenue stream of speeding tickets and the cops very much supported by said stream are the reason.
1. Speed limits vary a fair amount by country and jurisdiction.
2. In order to have meaningful acceleration you almost have to build a car that’s able to exceed the speed limit by a fair bit.
3. You *can* put limiters on how fast cars can go, these are either mechanical or in the cars computers. Germany does/did this – they have/had limiters that prevented cars from exceeding 155mph. A quick google indicates this was a voluntary thing the manufacturers did to avoid more restrictive legislation.
4. But…If you put limiters *at* the speed limit you can create dangerous situations during overtaking or coming onto on-ramps and so on where a merging driver could suddenly lose further power and have to slam on brakes rather than being able to complete the maneuver.
5. Someone doing 90 on the highway is normally nowhere near as dangerous as someone doing 60-70 on a regular street. You’re creating a lot of other problems while doing fairly little to reduce speed related road dangers, which are themselves a small subset of other bad driving issues (DUI, aggressive driving, inattentive driving, weaving between lanes, etc).
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