170
American Drivers Think Speeding Is Okay Because Everyone Else Is Doing It
(www.jalopnik.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
170 points (92.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
16516 readers
638 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
That is not universally accurate. Even at the time, there were vehicles that were more efficient at higher speeds than 55mph. But those weren't American designs, of course so they were of course ignored in favor of the general majority. And those vehicles that were more efficient at higher speeds, got screwed for simplicity.
I did wonder about that actually, questioned it.
It seems odd wind resistance would be higher at higher speeds and not linear to me as well. Idk why but it's counterintuitive to me.
Drag is not linear, it is proportional to the velocity squared.
However that is only one of the big factors. Vehicle shape and aerodynamics have a large effect on drag. This is one of the reasons for the flush door handles on some vehicles, lowered drag means increased efficiency. Then you also have the efficiency of the engine and power train at various speeds and power output.