The fastest speeding motorist ever caught in Britain was jailed for 10 weeks today after he admitted driving a Porsche at 172mph.
Tim Brady, of Harrow, north-west London, was caught in a random speed check as he drove a £98,000 3.6-litre 911 Turbo, Oxford crown court heard. Brady was also given a three-year driving ban and ordered to pay £474 costs.
“Your driving was criminally self-indulgent and utterly thoughtless of the danger you might be creating for the innocent,” Judge David Morton Jack said.
And he borrowed the car!!!
>>WHY, OH WHY do they make civilian cars able to go 175 mph IN
>>THE FIRST DAMNED PLACE???????? THEN they write people
>>tickets (or put them in jail) for using what is sold to them as
>>“STANDARD EQUIPMENT” every day!!.
Hey, are you Mrs. ECA?
Mr.Mustard, it’s guys like you who bypass the safety switch on a 10 ton press, chop off your hand, and then sue the company for your own stupidity. We have the technology for making the operation of a vehicle safe for everyone, and people like you just slow down progress.
>>Mr.Mustard, it’s guys like you who bypass the safety switch on
>>a 10 ton press, chop off your hand, and then sue the company
>>for your own stupidity.
Son, you’re only revealing your own stupidity. If I were to bypass the safety switch on a 10 ton press, it would be because I knew what I was doing, and would do so at my own risk.
I have never been in an accident because of (or witnessed on caused by) excessive speed. I’ve seen a number (and been in one myself) caused by blue-haired grannies pulling out of a side street, cutting across two lanes, and then going 30 mph in the passing lane. What kind of sensor do you recommend for that?
As to the “danger” of driving fast, I’d be interested in seeing some stats on accidents and/ or fatalities caused by speeding WHERE ALCOHOL WAS NOT INVOLVED. Prolly too low to even bother summarizing the data.
35. As to the “danger” of driving fast, I’d be interested in seeing some stats on accidents and/ or fatalities caused by speeding WHERE ALCOHOL WAS NOT INVOLVED. Prolly too low to even bother summarizing the data.
It really doesn’t take a lot of statics to work out the fact that the faster you are driving, the longer it takes to stop. So if you are driving fast, a child runs out onto the road, you will more likely kill the child. Same things goes if an animal runs out on the road. Or a car stops suddenly. Or you hit some patch.
While I am sure you can come up with some compelling arguments in line with global warming being a natural phenomena that just happens to have started around the same time as we started using the internal combustion engine, intelligent design over Darwinism and that there is ‘no direct link between smoking and lung cancer’ I think you may just have to look at the facts and realize that the faster you drive, the more likely you are to have an accident.
I can tell, Ben that you know as little about statistics as you do about driving.
Does it ever occur to you to think back on your own experience? Try and recollect how many kids you know of that were hit by cars doing 170MPH. Or 100MPH. Or 70MPH, for that matter.
None.
You see, it doesn’t happen. When child pedestrians – or adults – get hit by cars, it’s invariably in resedential neighborhoods, not out in the middle of the Charlotte Motor Speedway or the Autobahn. And it happens at low speeds.
When, exactly, was the last time you heard about ANYONE crashing a car at those kind of velocities? Of course, you can’t remember.
There’re reasons for this. One is, the kind of people who own extreme supercars rarely – if ever – drive them at even 5/10ths of the cars’ capabilities. Conversely, except for the occasional rich, overindulged kid, the people irresponsible enough to drive at high speeds in places where it is thoroughly inappropriate and dangerous cannot afford that kind of car.
When a supercar gets wrecked, it makes the news, because of the rarilty of the event and the cost of the vehicle. And when it does happen, it’s nearly always a one-car wreck, far from civilization – usually, in the US, out in the desert.
People who, as Mustafisto there notes, are NOT drunk, and drive at three-digit speeds are seldom seen. They don’t do it on city streets, they don’t do it in commuter traffic – that’s why you never see them. Which is ALSO why they present NO DANGER to you or yours.
BIG difference between a drunken fool or reckless, irresponsible teenager, and the typical owner of an extreme automobile. Another aspect is that the kind of person who can afford to buy a $250,000 car didn’t get to that point by being an idiot.
“I think you may just have to look at the facts and realize that the faster you drive, the more likely you are to have an accident.”
That’s simply not so, and you’ve presented zero evidence to support that contention.
A skilled, consciencious driver on a controlled-access road, in a capable car, doing 100MPH is considerably less danger to others than a typical citizen, in a typical car, on surface streets, going about their everyday business at half that speed and less. They are the ones who most often kill others.
Remember: most traffic deaths – UNDER 45MPH, within 5 miles of home.
…and when they quote a figure of ~50% of traffic deaths involving drunk driving, consider the other side; ~50% of traffic deaths do NOT involve drunk driving. Doesn’t say much for sobriety, does it?
Fact: the VAST majority of traffic deaths are caused by – drunk or sober – BAD DRIVING. Doing things wrong. Not knowing the right thing to do in an emergency. Taking foolish risks.
The kind of person who is capable of driving a Porsche at 170 is, by definition, not your average driver – and not prone to the kind of mistakes that cause fatal wrecks.
What he did was highly inadvisable – but, in case you didn’t notice, he and the car came back in one piece, as is usually always the case.
Your kid is in no danger from Porsches driven flat-out. If he or she gets hurt or killed in an accident, it’ll be by being hit by a distracted soccer mom in her armored SUV, running a stop sign – or veering into oncoming traffic as she yaps on the phone while reaching around to hand one of her rug rats in the back seat his juice box.
THAT is what kills people. Incompetence. Inattention. Ignorance. Whether fast or slow, bad driving, not speed, kills.
As it turns out, this guy worked at a luxury rental car agency and had been bugging the boss to let him drive the Porsche. After being told no a number of times he decided to take it out anyway. He no longer works there.
>>It really doesn’t take a lot of statics
Is that your subtle way of saying you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about? I have driven over 120mph quite a number of times (on secluded highways), and have NEVER gotten in an accident, run over an innocent child, or killed myself.
On the other hand, I HAVE been in an accident where a blue-hair pulled out in front of me as I was going 5mph below the speed limit (50mph), cut across two lanes of traffic, and settled into the passing lane going 25mph below the speed limit.
I’d rather be on the road with somebody who can do 170 in a Porsche than with you, any day of the week. And chances are the speed demon wouldn’t make up bullshit straw-man arguments with no data to back them up.
Next time you have nothing to say, don’t say it.
TIA
#36 I can tell you that my cousin and his fiance were killed by someone and it was pure speed that did it. I can look up the exact date but that isn’t the point. I saw the aftermath of the accident as I was on the scene before they cleared the wreckage. Due to the speed involved the full sized Olds was smashed to the point where all you could tell was that it was was by the plate.
It was on a section of road that people routinely went too fast and it was out in the country on a straight stretch (including myself when I was older).
People can and do get killed by people speeding and to say that they don’t or that it doesn’t happen is bullshit.
>>People can and do get killed by people speeding and to say
>>that they don’t or that it doesn’t happen is bullshit.
People can and do get killed when a bug flies in their eye, when their car is struck by lightning, or when the roller-coaster car goes off the tracks..
However, being killed by “pure speed” (without any alcohol involved) is extremely rare, and certainly not worthy of the sort of self-righteous outrage proffered up by the slow-but-shitty drivers who cause most of the accidents and deaths themselves.
#39 – Steve
What you don’t say – because there’s likely no way for you to know – who was actually at fault.
Was your cousin just driving along, completely legal, in his own lane? At a reasonable speed for the place and conditions? OR – did he, like so many do, just ‘decide’ to abrupty pull into the next lane without signalling or looking? Or just wander into the next lane, due to inattention?
You don’t know. But one thing I know is this – either your cousin or the other guy DID SOMETHING WRONG. One of them was DRIVING BADLY. And THAT is what CAUSED THE COLLISION. “SPEED” DID NOT CAUSE THE CARS TO COLLIDE. ONE – or even, possibly, both! – OF THE DRIVERS DID.
Speed compounds the forces involved in a collision. But it does not CAUSE collisions. One driver – or both – FAILED TO CONTROL HIS VEHICLE AND CAUSED IT TO HIT THE OTHER.
Speed doesn’t cause accidents. Alcohol doesn’t cause accidents. Youth doesn’t cause accidents. Cars don’t cause accidents. PEOPLE ARE THE CAUSE OF MOST ALL ACCIDENTS. Defective equipment is next. But the velocity that a car is travelling at does not cause a car to hit another one. If the car is travelling too fast for the driver to take evasive action or stop before colliding with another car – IT IS THE DRIVER’S INCOMPETENCE.
And I’ll once again refer you back to FACTS: MOST DEATHS OCCUR AT SPEEDS UNDER 45, AND NEAR HOME. AND THEY ARE NEARLY ALWAYS THE RESULT OF SOMEONE NOT KNOWING HOW TO DRIVE.