Atlanta Man Shatters Coast-to-Coast Driving Record, Averaging 98MPH 666
New submitter The Grim Reefer sends this quote from CNN:
"[Ed] Bolian set out on a serious mission to beat the record for driving from New York to Los Angeles. The mark? Alex Roy and David Maher's cross-country record of 31 hours and 4 minutes, which they set in a modified BMW M5 in 2006. ... He went into preparation mode about 18 months ago and chose a Mercedes CL55 AMG with 115,000 miles for the journey. The Benz's gas tank was only 23 gallons, so he added two 22-gallon tanks in the trunk, upping his range to about 800 miles. ... To foil the police, he installed a switch to kill the rear lights and bought two laser jammers and three radar detectors. He commissioned a radar jammer, but it wasn't finished in time for the trek. There was also a police scanner, two GPS units and various chargers for smartphones and tablets -- not to mention snacks, iced coffee and a bedpan. ... The total time: 28 hours, 50 minutes and about 30 seconds. ... When they were moving, which, impressively, was all but 46 minutes of the trip, they were averaging around 100 mph. Their total average was 98 mph, and their top speed was 158 mph, according to an onboard tracking device."
Re:Too bad there wasn't a legal route. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Whoosh! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Insurance (Score:5, Informative)
No, they don't. I have a heavily modified vehicle. Much more done to it that what he did. I've axles from 2 different models of cars, different break booster, different engine and transmission, Disc break conversions, Modified computer, Modified transmission lines and coolers, exhaust and complete custom suspension... They inspected it and raised my rates on it slightly but other than that it's still covered.
Re:When will he be arrested? (Score:5, Informative)
Speeding fines are there to collect some money for municipalities. Otherwise they would be uniformly and much more strictly enforced.
Um... no. Speeding fines are NOT there to collect some money for municipalities, otherwise they would be uniformly and much more strictly enforced.
Re:When will he be arrested? (Score:5, Informative)
The first study you cite isn't related to lower speeds but lower speed variances and, in the first page abstract, says, "...accident rates do not necessarily increase with an increase in average speed but do increase with an increase in speed variance."
The third study really speaks about speed limits on urban roads, where the majority of accidents occur, rather than interstates.
The Solomon Curve [wikipedia.org] speaks more directly to the real issue of speed and accidents and relates to speed differentials. Solomon's results have been duplicated many times and the issue is that there is a higher likelihood of being in an accident as an individual's speed varies from the average speed. Interestingly, going much slower than the average speed seems to indicate a higher likelihood of being involved in an accident.
I spend a lot of time driving across country and the worst places in my experience are the interstates in urban areas. Those areas tend to have artificially lower speed limits to deal with maximum traffic capacity for rush hour. When driving through these areas during non-rush hour times I would feel that I would be run over if I drove anywhere near the speed limit. The first study you cite specifically talks about finding the ideal speed limit related to the highway speed design point and that artificially setting the speed limit too low related to the design point increases the probability of accidents.
Simply having a lower speed limit does not, in itself, result in lower accident rates.
Re:Insurance (Score:5, Informative)
Re:When will he be arrested? (Score:5, Informative)
no one ever cites those studies that show lower speed limits are safer... Because they don't exist.
Here's a study that shows lower speeds are safer. Among people who were wearing a seat belt, nobody driving 60 mph or less died. People driving over 60 mph died, because in an accident above 60 mph, the car rolls and the passenger compartment starts to fall apart. (Unfortunately the full paper is paywalled, but it had a nice chart of fatalities increasing with speed.) This happens to be a classic paper from 1967; there have been studies coming to the same conclusion ever since. You can look them up in the Engineering Index.
Driving fast is safe as long as you don't have an accident. When you do have an accident, the faster you're going, the more energy you have to dissipate, and the more likely the car is to crush in a rollover or tear apart and send you flying unprotected at 60 mph. It's pretty hard to hit the ground at 60 mph and survive. That's roughly equivalent to falling off a 15-story building.
http://papers.sae.org/670925/ [sae.org]
A Statistical Analysis of 28,000 Accident Cases with Emphasis on Occupant Restraint Value
Paper #: 670925
Published: 1967-02-01
DOI: 10.4271/670925
Citation:
Bohlin, N., "A Statistical Analysis of 28,000 Accident Cases with Emphasis on Occupant Restraint Value," SAE Technical Paper 670925, 1967, doi:10.4271/670925.
Author(s): N. I. Bohlin
Affiliated: Passenger Car Engineering Dept., AB Volvo
Abstract: The value of the three-point safety belt has been evaluated by a statistical analysis of more than 28,000 accident cases, which concerned mainly two cars only and in which 37,511 unbelted and belted front-seat occupants were involved. The safety harness concerned is the Volvo three-point combined lap and upper torso harness with a so-called slip-joint. The average injury-reducing effect of the harness proved to vary between 0 and 90%, depending on the speed at which the accident occurred or the type of injury. Unbelted occupants sustained fatal injuries throughout the whole speed scale, whereas none of the belted occupants was fatally injured at accident speeds below 60 mph. Slight injuries only, mostly single rib cracks, bruises, etc., caused by the safety belt were reported in some cases. The three-point belt proved to be fully effective against ejection out of the car. Almost all cars involved were equipped with safety belts, of which, however, only 26% on an average were used. The frequency of use increased with the age of the occupants.
Re:When will he be arrested? (Score:5, Informative)
The crush space was the same in 1967 as it is today. I remember an article in Automotive News which reported on a lecture by a Mercedes-Benz engineer on the problem of designing a car that would let the occupants survive a front-end collision into a barrier.
The engineer described the physical constraints. They had to decelerate the car at a maximum number of Gs. They had 50 inches of crush space between the passenger compartment and the front end. In order to decelerate to a stop through that distance, you couldn't be driving any faster than about 50 mph. It didn't have anything to do with the mechanical capabilities of the car, that was the maximum theoretical speed you survive at. The crush space increased as the square of the initial velocity, so it wasn't feasible to increase the crush space in the hood. You can't make a practical car with 16 feet of crush space.
I used to work for the Society of Automotive Engineers, and I worked on the papers that they used to design seat belts and air bags. (That's why I know about Bohlin's paper.) The lap-and-shoulder seat belts (which Bohlin originally designed) were actually safer in a collision than the airbags. The airbags only make sense if people aren't wearing seat belts.
There's a big difference in safety between a 1959 Chevrolet and the cars that came later. Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965. The lawsuit Larsen vs. General Motors was decided in 1965, and made auto manufacturers responsible for designing safer cars. And Volvo, which Bohlin worked for, were always designed for safety. Bohlin's study is only one of the best studies, but it was followed by many, many studies that all showed that the faster you drive, the more likely you are to die in an accident.
It's just basic engineering physics. 60 mph is like falling off a 10- or 15-story building. The faster you go, the more kinetic energy you have, and if that car becomes unstable, as it will in an accident, that energy has to get dissipated somewhere. The higher the speed, the less likely the occupants are to survive.
Don't take my word for it. Look up the engineering literature.
Re:Yes you can control for that (Score:4, Informative)
I said *in front of* the 18 wheeler. You can't see around a big truck. This idiot also averaged 100 mph. that means that he had to move far faster than that for a large fraction of the time.
The highways are filled with trucks, even in the boondocks and at odd hours. That means he had to pass countless trucks while going at speeds like 130 mph, not 100.
For Christ sake, I can't believe the replies I'm getting from people who try to justify this idiotic behavior. The amount of ignorance and stupidity out there is just mind boggling.