Why are the majority of cars able to drive nearly double the maximum speed limit of most countries?
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When it’s getting close to its maximum physical speed, a car’s performance gets bad. It’s efficiency goes down, and it’s acceleration is terrible, taking forever to slowly creep up a little faster. Driving it in those conditions for too long is bad for the car, burns through fuel like mad, and gives you no wiggle room for accel/deccel maneuvers if there’s an emergency need to do so.
So the car’s max sustainable cruising speed is quite a bit lower than its maximum possible temporary speed. Since the cruise speed is always lower than the max speed, designing a car that can cruise at the legal limit all day on the open highway also means having to accept that the car’s max temporary speed will end up being well over the legal limit.
And as long as the car *can* temporarily go that fast, they may as well make the speedometer capable of measuring it, since it’s better to have the information and not need it than the other way around.
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