The Danger of Driving a Car that Can Barely Do the Speed Limit

Across the west at (or slightly below) the (speed) limit.

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It was close to midnight when Danger Girl and I crossed the state border heading east on Interstate 40. In quick succession, we saw three signs: one thanking us for visiting New Mexico, one welcoming us to Texas, and one telling us that the speed limit was now seventy-five miles per hour.

I was behind the wheel of a mid-engined two-seater that had cost its first owner twice as much as a loaded Corvette. I turned to Danger Girl, my face lit saturnine by the dim red dash gauges, and nodded significantly. Then I floored the throttle. The speedometer leapt past the '70' mark… to 71… and 72… then back down to 71. Ahead of us, the road rose slightly and the engine moaned as the needle fell back into the sixties. I shrugged. We had a thousand-plus miles on our back and many more to go, but none of them would be passing particularly quickly.

Next week, I'll tell you all about the rare and slightly controversial Eighties luxury car that DG and I drove from Los Angeles to Houston this past weekend. (Here's a hint: it was built in Pompano Beach, Florida.) For now, however, I want to focus on the most significant aspect of our trip. Thanks to a transmission that had mostly forgotten how to shift and an engine that had never been particularly adept at motivating the car in the first place, our chariot du jour was unable to break 75mph in a straight line and it had considerable trouble getting up even slight hills at a reasonable speed.

I hadn't expected it to be fast, but when we started up the six-percent grade of the Cajon Pass on I-15 leaving Los Angeles and the speedometer immediately fell into the fities, I started to be actively concerned for our safety. As quickly as I could, I swung the ailing little coupe into the far right lane, only to be bullied back into the center by the blaring horns of big rigs that had worked hard to maintain momentum and weren't about to lose it on my account. Every few seconds I had to judge whether I was in more danger from the 18-wheelers in the right lane or the "bro-dozers" in the middle and then swing in what seemed like the safest direction. At one point I considered using the shoulder.

When the road leveled out and I was able to get back above the double-nickel, I said a silent prayer of relief. This was the slowest car I'd ever tried to drive any distance on the freeway. I'd once owned a 1982 VW Quantum Coupe with a five-speed stick that struggled to break eighty on flat ground, but if you were willing to punish the poor engine at redline for an extended period, you could easily stay above the speed limit up any hill in the Midwest. I've had straight-six Ford pickups and Land Rover Discoveries and even a box-body, Variable-Venturi-equipped Mercury Marquis. Hell, I even spent six months driving a Plymouth Arrow pickup with an aftermarket stakebed that gave new meaning to the word "leisurely." But nothing like this old two-seater, with its thirty-second 0-60 time and its feckless inability to trouble the Texas legal maximum.

It's common for modern autowriters, self included, to gripe about how pretty much every car money can buy nowadays is faster than all but the most muscle-bound sporting offerings of the Carter era, but you don't really stop to think about the true ramifications of that fact until you're being bullied around a Western freeway where every single vehicle on the road wants to do eighty miles per hour or more. We take it for granted today that even the cheapest rental car at the airport can blast up the Grapevine at triple digits with the A/C on and four healthy adults stuffing the passenger compartment. This is even true of pickups and SUVs. The 1995 Ford Explorer needed to reach down a couple of gears if you wanted to hold your speed on a hill but the current Ecoboost-powered models will accelerate up a steep grade like a rocket and have you at go-to-jail speeds if you floor the throttle for more than a second or two on the Interstate.

This kind of surplus power is like wealth; some people hoard it, some people squander it, and some people don't know what to do with it. Time and time again during our trip I'd be stuck in the right lane of the freeway, with GMC Yukon Denalis blasting by me at a speed differential of 30mph or more, only to see some moron in a Honda Odyssey or a Ford Fusion dawdling up the on-ramp ahead. These people would have no plans to merge at more than 45mph, usually without looking, trusting that the cars already on the road would move over and that they could accelerate up to 70 or so whenever they liked. But this was deadly for me, because it took our little car a full fifteen seconds to get from 45mph back to 65, and for that whole time we'd be exposed to traffic carelessly running up our tail and then swerving past in terrifying fashion.

"Every minute in this car," Danger Girl said, "is like running my Miata down the back straight at Mid-Ohio while the Corvettes come running up." It was a remarkably accurate analogy; she can do 125 and the Vettes can do 150 or better. West of Amarillo, we were regularly buzzed by lifted pickups doing ninety while we struggled to hold sixty up slight hills. The closing speeds were about the same; the difference was that we had neither rollcage nor helmet to protect us, and the potential impacts weren't trained racers who expected to safely negotiate slower traffic on every lap but rather any mook in Texas who could afford to buy a 6,000-pound pickup and fill it with diesel before being personally insulted at the failure of some crappy little car with California plates to stay off their freeway.

It took us two long days to get across half the country, during which I realized that the stakes on the American road have been perhaps irrevocably raised past the ability of many drivers to handle. Nobody's paying attention out there. I lost count of the times a car behind us went into a tire-squeaking stability-control incident because they weren't looking more than ten feet ahead of their front bumpers and therefore the sudden (to them) appearance of a slow-moving car ahead required a massive swerve into the next lane or onto the shoulder. You can blame it on phones if that makes you feel better but I didn't see a lot of phones in the hands of the people who were nearly killing me. I just didn't see any awareness of the road around them.

The reader will perhaps be amused by the fact that of the perhaps five passenger cars we passed during the whole trip, two were air-cooled VW Beetles and one was a Type 2 camper. The original pre-war KdF-Wagen was designed for a maximum of 62mph and although the later cars could sometimes touch 90 on a good day, they really weren't comfortable or safe much above fifty-five or sixty. That used to be enough to keep up with traffic; today you're a Bug on some trucker's windshield if you try it.

I can't say that I enjoyed my weekend as a second-class citizen of the Interstate system, but it was certainly educational. And it was a sharp reminder that although cars keep getting faster, the average driver's abilities have not kept pace with those improvements. When I got off the plane back home and found my six-speed Accord V6 waiting for me in the parking lot, I couldn't wait to hammer the accelerator pedal up the on-ramp away from the airport.

I don't normally think of my little Honda as a particularly rapid car, but this time it felt like a Hayabusa as I effortlessly blasted past the posted limit in third gear. There was an F-250 ahead of me. With the flick of a wrist I was around and by, the cartoonish grille shrinking in the rearview like a sad little shiny balloon with a big hole in it. This was more like it. And although I slowed down to a reasonable pace just a few miles later, it was absolutely glorious to consider the speed limit as a choice, rather than an inevitability. Choice, and the power to make that choice. Whether you're deep in the heart of Texas or crossing the fruited plains, isn't that what America is all about?

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