[Someone1234]

It wouldn't surprise me if they legislate maximum acceleration in the next ten years.

Zero to sixty in 2.5 seconds is fun, no doubt about it, but it is fun on a racetrack. You can go on YouTube right now and find dozens of people utilising Tesla's existing "ludicrous mode" on public streets.

And here's the thing, if people want to endanger their own lives that's fine. But they aren't just endangering their own lives, they're also endangering both other road users and pedestrians (when they eventually lose control).

I don't think anything has been done about this yet because Teslas are still pretty uncommon, and the features which unlock "ludicrous mode" are even more uncommon (like 1% of 1%). But once electric vehicles are the norm and the body count racks up, we'll see legislative action.

As an aside you could tie maximum acceleration into road conditions, including lowing it if the road is icy or wet, or increasing it on surfaces that provide superior grip (like freeways).

[Viper007Bond]

Most jurisdictions call unsafely accelerating reckless driving or street racing. I own a car that will legitimately do 200 MPH but existing laws cover it too.

[wavefunction]

Top speed is a different beast altogether than acceleration, and I doubt you drive 200mph on public streets.

[beachstartup]

certainly not 200mph, but he i'm betting he breaks the speed limit. should we ban cars that go above 65mph?

on second thought, never mind, i probably know your answer.

"ban everything dangerous until there's no possible way anyone can get hurt" is not what freedom is.

[RubyPinch]

should people have freedom to drive however they want, on roads used by plenty of other people too?

that seems like a good way to increase road fatalities

[beachstartup]

it's already illegal to do what you're describing. let me repeat that, for effect: already. illegal. it's against the law. you will literally be arrested and go to jail if you do that.

but don't let that stop you from passing 20 more laws, and then banning people from driving altogether after you realize that, as it turns out, criminals don't follow the law.

which is already happening, just look at the autonomous driving effort. which i'm sure makes you very happy. soon, nobody will drive, we will all be living in a perfect harmonious utopia of robotic sentience.

[RubyPinch]

what are you arguing against then? no body even came near the topic of banning cars, other than you?

[beachstartup]

sigh. knee-jerk reaction to ban dangerous things.

first of all, a minivan can kill you doing 10mph.

second, cars with this much power (and more importantly, top speed), have been around for a long time. you can build an 8-second quarter mile car in your garage and drive it on the street.

more nanny-state nonsense. "think of the children".

[Someone1234]

That "nanny state nonsense" witnessed road deaths fall from 25 per 100K in 1930 to 10 per 100K since 2010. We've halved road deaths per every 100K of population! I'll take my nanny state nonsense where people are still alive, over the libertarian wet dream where they're dead.

I really think it boils down to that some people value their own personal enjoyment over other people's safety. The sad truth is that you could absolutely enjoy vehicles like that but without endangering safety, by going to a race track. There's literally race days even for road-legal vehicles.

[carlob]

> That "nanny state nonsense" witnessed road deaths fall from 25 per 100K in 1930 to 10 per 100K since 2010

I think the better metric is the number of deaths per billion vehicle-km. In your metric most European countries have half the deaths than the US, but it's mostly explained by the fact that we drive less. I guess people had fewer cars and drove less in the 1930…

EDIT:

I found the stats: in 1930 you had 15.12 deaths per 100 million miles vehicle, in 2014 1.08. So the reduction is not 2.5x, but 15x!

[jstanley]

> I'll take my nanny state nonsense where people are still alive, over the libertarian wet dream where they're dead.

Don't assume that everybody will.

[sammydavis]

Your reasoning is extremely flawed. We have fewer deaths on the road because we added safety features and have road features designed to address what caused accidents in the past. Newer cars have way more horsepower and acceleration than in the past, yet deaths have gone down. You are arguing for something different, arbitrarily restricting acceleration.

[nrb]

Uhh... I'm pretty sure vehicle safety improvements have more to do with that than anything.

[sammydavis]

And obviously we all drive much much faster on average than people did in the 1930s, yet we are much much safer.

[UnoriginalGuy]

Which are enacted largely through legislation.

[nrb]

Crumple zones, seat belts, and air bags are a far cry from setting hard limits on performance characteristics of the vehicle, even if those same requirements may have had a negligible impact on vehicle performance.

I guess the question is where the line is drawn between sensible and "nanny-state" regulation.

[beachstartup]

to me, the rule of thumb is: does this regulation encourage innovation, or curtail it? it isn't black or white, but i think it brings it into focus a bit more.

[jackmott]

Cars that can go this fast or close enough have been around for decades.

[Someone1234]

Indeed. But people who own supercars and other kit cars capable of such feats were rare and expensive.

Electric vehicles are going to take something, once rare, and make it common. Once it becomes common, the accident incidents will be more than just statistical noise, and legislative action may follow.

The NHTSA and FMCSA are currently working on a proposal for large commercial vehicles that would artificially limit their maximum speed to 68 mph. So it isn't unheard of for legislation to be created to target new vehicles which aims to improve public safety.

[jfitbsidbfb]

The point is not that they're more common. Anyone that has wanted a fast car in the last 60 years could either buy or build one. Even a regular old car is plenty enough to kill yourself and plenty of other people if you're reckless enough. Besides that, it's much easier to create a stupidly dangerous car through sheer neglect of tires/brakes than to actually buy one that way.

Your argument is comparable to banning sharp knives because someone started selling them cheaper than butter knives. Both types have always been sufficiently available and dangerous that making one more common than the other isn't going to change anything

[threatofrain]

But isn't banning top velocity on the manufacturer-level much more lower-hanging fruit than banning top acceleration? Just make it so your vehicle can't even go over legal speed limit. It should be clearer to us today how speed kills in some of the most wide-reaching ways.

Velocity is a much more obvious policy knob to tune for the goal of less vehicular deaths and injuries.

[eridius]

Not being able to go over the legal speed limit can be dangerous (e.g. if the other cars on the road are, and you're not, you could actually be driving relatively slowly enough that it's unsafe, and you can even technically get a ticket for that under the right circumstances).

Similarly, in most places, speed limits are actually a little lower than they would be in the ideal world where everybody obeys them, to account for the fact that most people actually go a bit over the speed limit. And there are still highways that have absurdly slow speed limits that date back to the 1973 oil crisis (federal law set a maximum speed limit of 55mph, and not all highways have recovered from that yet).

[pascalxus]

Unthought, kneejerk reaction.

Driving while eating a cup noodles is extremely dangerous too, I don't see any laws on the books against that.