Eli5 why drivers lose control and crash powerful cars, often rentals, so often.
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Driving a high power car requires skill. Renting a high power car requires money. It is possible to have money but not skill (and vice versa, of course, but that’s not the question).
“Rentals” aside, powerful cars are just that: powerful. Push the gas pedal down too far and maximum power goes to the 2 back wheels (typically). This is most prone to causing oversteer, where loss of traction causes the car rotates more than expected causing a loss of control and presumably this crash you refer to.
By contrast, most people are accustomed to front wheel drive, and much less powerful cars. With less power it’s harder to lose traction. If you do they’re prone to understeer meaning if you lose traction the car will rotate less than expected when turning.
Powerful cars sound cool, but they are just machines. They do as they are told and don’t care about property damage. Someone who doesn’t know how to operate them safely can absolutely make a mistake that causes a serious accident because they don’t know how to recover and haven’t practised that.
I suspect physics isn’t the culprit here. When you drive a rental, it’s probably a car you’re not used to. Powerful or not, it handles differently from your usual car. So here you are, trying to drive Car X like it is Car Y. Mistakes are more likely.
Plus a lot of people think differently about a rental car than they do their own car, and feel like maybe they can get away with things they normally couldn’t. Anything bad that happens won’t happen to “their” car. It’s kind of the same psychology behind why some tourists act like jerks even though they’re better behaved at home.
Most often it’s because they are turning…or in a turn. Better success with gunning it in a straight line 🙂
To paraphrase Jeremy Clarkson’s brilliant take on rental cars on Top Gear “The fastest car in the world is a rental”.
The joke being that people don’t own rentals, and thus don’t feel responsible towards it, and thus drive it like they stole it. The insurance will take care of any damage, right?
Cars depend on traction between the tires and road for control. Unskilled divers don’t usually consider this fact. The Honda Accord they normally drive cannot produce enough power to easily spin its wheels. So when the unskilled driver tries to accelerate a powerful car too quickly and spins the wheels (which in powerful cars usually means the rear wheels) they are caught completely off-guard by the sudden handling changes which occur the moment the drive wheels lose traction.
Inevitably they over-correct, let off the gas too quickly, and crash.
People who can buy a 2 million dollar car will generally learn to drive them at a special driving school first. The cost of the school is much less than the cost of the car, and the dealers will often recommend a particular driving school. People who rent those cars, though, usually have just enough money to rent it once, and they’ll want to get the most bang for their bucks, so they just take the car out and drive it hard. Those cars are capable of performance far beyond what most drivers are ready for, so they end up in spectacular crashes. Those crashes make the news, because people want to read about the idiot who smashed up a Bugatti more than the one who wrecks a Camry.
Of course, they’re not all rentals, because some very rich people are also very stupid, and a lot of them think that buying a fast car automatically makes them a great driver.
Actually, I think the short answer here is “People are stupid.”
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