this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Did high-powered cars lead to more regulations? Why are such cars allowed in cities?
Power is irrelevant. Pedestrian crash severity = speed² × shape impacting human head.
Road-specific speed limits and weight limits have always been enough.
Fuck especially the laws that give 2- and 3-wheelers easier treatment than 4-wheelers:
https://xfwnofqagsnmdxuf.quora.com/Lawfare-against-tiny-cars-velomobiles
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/20/podbike-shuts-down-norwegian-e-velomobile-startup-files-for-bankruptcy/
And in bikes, power and if existant, motorization is what determines speed.
Speed limits are easy to force by GPS position.
If you're relying on GPS speed limiting, you've already failed at designing a safe roadway. It's a bandaid at best. Besides, how are you supposed to enforce the usage of GPS speed limiting on every bike? Regular bikes are just as capable of significantly exceeding, say, a 15mph (25kph) speed limit as e-bikes. It doesn't make sense technically, logistically, or politically in the vast majority of places.
And what do we have to do with cars? Completely separate infrastructure, signalized traffic control, speed enforcement, insurance, registry, safety inspections, etc. We don't want that world for pedelecs.
This reasoning is solely done in a vacuum.
You're forgetting the human factor of "people buy fast vehicles because they want to go fast".
The data shows that more powerful cars are involved in more accidents.
All that data shows is that BMW drivers are idiots, whether they drive high or low powered ones.
Are you not seeing a positive correlation between horsepower and % having had accidents, including BMWs? Are we looking at the same table?
The chart is divided strangely. Why is it by each manufacturer individually? Why do some manufacturers have a much higher percentage of accidents even though they don't make high power cars? Why are some manufacturers percentage of accidents in their high power cars lower than other manufacturers low power cars? This looks like a chart that was specifically structured to prove a point the researcher started from.
To show that this is a correlation seen across manufacturers. You provided an excellent example of why this is necessary when you singled out BMW drivers, when the data showed this correlation across all manufacturers.
Potentially because they're less safe, or they draw riskier drivers?
See above.
You'll probably need other slices of the data to reason about those questions. However what we see here is there is a positive correlation across all manufacturers between horsepower and accidents.
I imagine this data was analyzed with answering "do higher horsepower cars have more accidents" in mind, so the presentation of the data will naturally have answering that question in a comprehensive manner in mind. Please remember that you're not seeing a table with all of their data - you're seeing a particular subset that they believe is relevant to the question at hand.
So....at the end of the day, do you agree that the data shows there's a positive correlation between increased horsepower and percentage of cars having reported accidents?