Volvo cars are to be speed capped at 112mph (180kph). Which is nothing to do with Volvo forever being the ‘dull-as-dishwater’ brand of ultra-‘safe’ Scandi motoring, but more to do with Volvo being… errrr… dull-as-dishwater and safe and… errrr…

I know about road safety. All about it. Because I did a SPEED AWARENESS COURSE last week during which I spent 4 hours being bombarded with scary but pretty meaningless statistics about driving speeds and driving safety in general. I know, f’rinstance that if I’m traveling at 30 mph it takes me, say (can’t remember the exact numbers) 50 yards to stop. But if I’m traveling at just 31 (as if) I reach that previous ‘stop point’, 50 yards away, at a speed of 8mph. Which is not good. But its true once you consider reaction time and the increased distance that takes. So every time I see someone about to step blindly into the road 50 yards away, I make sure I’m only doing 30. If they’re only 20 yards away we all have a problem. Because before I start breaking I’d need to do a lengthy calculation to work out how long, in seconds and metres, it takes to shout ‘SHIIIIIIIIITTTTT!!!!!’

I also learned, again these figures are representative rather than absolute because how many numbers can you remember after 4 hours of mind numbing, interesting though some of it was? So I learned that if you hit a person at 20mph they have a 25% chance of being killed. At 30 it goes up to about 60% and by 40mph they’re a gonner. I found that quite useful if I ever wanted to commit a murder using a moving vehicle. But precious little use otherwise. Because if someone does jump in front of a car, the driver is only driving at something like the speed of the road, be that 30, 40, whatever. Or are they suggesting that even on motorways we slow down to 20mph, ‘just in case’?

And so Volvo. Unable to respect the intelligence or common sense of their buyers, they feel they need to ‘nanny’ the world by imposing a blanket top speed on all their cars. Ok, its a speed in excess of any country’s maximum limit, other than Germany and some of their Auto-baah-baah-baahns, but still. It’s the principle. It’s the memory of when driving was fun as well as function.

I can’t remember the last time I drove above 112mph. But I’ll bet I enjoyed it. To really appreciate ‘speed awareness’, you surely have to be travelling at speed? No??

Happy slow-down Tuesday

A xxxx