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Speed kills - apparently
That’s the sticker I’m seeing on a lot of cars at the moment; SPEED KILLS. Seeing it last night for the umpteenth time got me thinking and I feel that it’s quite wrong. You see, it’s not actually possible for speed in itself to kill anyone. This morning I drove at 70 and didn’t die, I’ve been on planes doing 500 mph and lived to tell the tale, astronauts have reached speeds in the tens of thousands of miles per hour and still seem to be with us. So I think we can safely say that speed does not actually kill anyone.
“Ah-ha”, say the campaigners, “it’s crashing/hitting people at speed that kills.” Again, not technically true. Hit me on the head with a feather travelling at 50 mph and I think I’ll live, use a large hammer and I may not. So it would be more accurate to say that it’s force that is the real killer here and not the speed itself. For example, if I lower a large wrecking ball onto you the speed is frankly irrelevant, you are going to die. Sure, lower it really quickly and death may be swift and more messy yet the end result is the same. A more real world example is that of the cliff divers of Acapulco. These people dive from cliffs into the Pacific Ocean to entertain tourists. They all live, yet if they were to repeat this stunt off say a multi-storey car park and on to a concrete road they would die. Their speed is the same at point of impact, the difference is the force acting on their bodies at point of impact. The water offers less resistance than the concrete and allows them to walk (or indeed swim) away unharmed. So you see, the velocity is irrelevant. The same is true in your car. Hit a hedge at 70 and you walk away, hit a wall at 70 and you won’t.
So, if you have one of these “Speed Kills” messages on your car or, if you know of anyone that does you must encourage them to remove it immediately as it’s plainly wrong, it’s the force.