Reply to "Will trade for Smart car"

Pope:

Are you implying that what David was doing was unsafe?

Because, if you are, I call "bullsh*t!"

I can guarantee he was safer in his properly sorted high performance machine at the speed he was going than the other drivers around him who were yacking on the phone while driving their indifferently maintained and mediocre performing cars. I don't hear you telling them to go play somewhere safe.

It really gets me when people delude themselves into thinking that arbitrary speed limits set for the lowest common denominator among drivers and machines are somehow a moral threshold for responsibility or safety.

Face it; at the speed he was going, David and his machine were capable of stopping in a shorter distance, or performing any emergency information faster, than the perfectly legal beater or truck next to him. Do you consider the trucker to be endangering anyone? No. You only point the finger at David because you have bought into the safety-Nazi hysteria that 'speed kills'.

The reductio ad absurdum of your way of thinking would have us all driving at a walking pace. Speed limits reflect what engineers reasonably expect the trucker in his 80,000lb rig with hard compound retread tires to be able to handle more or less safely. They are not set according to what a high performance sports car with an attentive driver can handle safely. Speed does not kill. That's a fallacy, plain and simple. Drivers exceeding their skill and the capability of their machine kill. There's a big difference.