My experience is that people who come out with that line can't afford high-powered automobiles; as soon as they can, they change their tune.Dargos wrote:Can anyone explain to me why anyone needs an insanely overpowered car in the first place?
OK, I drive a high-powered muscle car. Reasons why are severalfold. One is that, driven properly (big caveat there) such cars are much safer than underpowered vehicles. Look at it this way. If you're driving at Interstate speeds (65mph) and your car is designed around a maximum attainable performance of around 75 miles per our, your vehicle is operating right at the top of its performance envelope. There's virtually nothing left in hand for emergencies. Twice in the last six years I've got out of potentially lethal situations (both caused by somebody driving and speaking on a cell-phone but that's another story) bu accelerating out of that situation. My car is rated for a top speed of 163mph which means that at 65mph, virtually the whole of the car's performance envelope is available to me. Also, its brakes, steering, suspension, transmission etc are all optimized for very high speed driving so at lower speeds, they also have great resetves of performance for emergenciesWhy have street legal cars capable of driving 200+mph?
Another reason is that there's a great deal of pride associated in taking a piece of machinery that requires skill and precision to drive properly and then driving it properly. In other words, not doing what the gene pool rejects in this thread did.
Another reason is that having high performance makes certain routine driving activities much safer. Case in point is entering an Interstate from a ramp. A car on the ramp is usually doing 30 - 40 mph, the traffic on the interstate is doing 65 - 75mph, possibly a lot faster. An underpowered vehicle accelerates so slowly that by the time its matched speeds, its running out of ramp room and has run out of options. In the same situation, for me accelerating from 35 to 75mph takes just a few feet when I have matched speeds, I have nearly all the ramp still in front of me. That gives me a lot of options to make a safe merge.
One drawback with driving muscle cars is that there are all too many men who are out driving their wife's minivans and who get the idea they still have to prove they have two testicles by overtaking me. I hate to think of the number of times I've been cruising dead on the 65mph speed limit (the comment made about experienced muscle car drivers being cautious and law-abiding is quite correct) and I've had a minivan desperately trying to do 66mph and swerving all over the road because in doing so the driver has pushed the vehicle beyond its design and safety limits.
In the case of this particular incident (its not an accident), we have a group of kids who simply had a vehicle they couldn't drive. They can ride in it, point it in various directions and change speed but they can't drive it any more than a passenger sitting in a jumbo jet can claim to be flying the aircraft. They simply didn't have the experience to drive that vehicle. That lack of experience was going to kill them sooner or later, all I can say is we should all be very pleased they did it when they just removed themselves from the gene pool, not when they took a few valuable genes with them.
Oh yes, and the parent's insurance company should pull their insurance cover. Any parent who can let an 18 year old kid drive a car like that is obviously too stupid to be allowed on the roads. But then an IQ test is, unfortunately, not part of the driving exam.
