Should I be mad at my husband?

[doorhinge]

@Blue_Mood

We let our 13 year old son choose our last car rental - it was a Camaro SS. All was fine but my husband took him for a little spin on the interstate and exceeded 90 mph several times, topping out at 103 mph at one point. I felt sick when they came home and told me somewhat gleefully. What if a tire had blown out or worse? Or what if he had been caught going 33mph over the limit, with a child in the front seat? But maybe it’s no big deal and I’m worrying over nothing - after all, they did make it home okay.

So, should I be mad at my husband?

A Camaro SS will only do 103? What a POS. OTOH, learning to drive safely takes experience. The more experience the better. Age thirteen is fine. Illegal on state roads, but dirt roads/offroad/private land is fine.

Learning to break the law is another matter. Speeding in a car you know nothing about is just plain cRaZy. Brakes good? Steering good? Tires fair? Road hazards? Stalled trucks? Moose crossing? Old muffler lying in the road? Whooboy, there are lots of things that can make for a wild ride at 70mph, let alone the high side of 100.

Yeah, you should be mad (and mad is the proper word) at your husband. Let’s call it a “stupid tax” because they did something stupid and it’s not acceptable. Then let it go. Encourage the young and old Mario Andrettis to find someplace safe to indulge their hobby/habit.

[pulykamell]

@Procrustus

I clearly have to turn in my male gene. I don’t see driving over 80 mph as anything other than reckless.

I really wasn’t exaggerating when I said the traffic was flowing at 80-85 on I-94 to I-294 last week from Wisconsin. It’s pretty common for certain interstates around here to, outside of rush hour, settle in on a common speed in that range. And I don’t mean just the left most (aka “fast”) lane. I mean at least the two outer lanes. Last week it was the leftmost three lanes. The rightmost lane is the only place you had a chance to do the speed limit (65 mph) without cars shooting up your ass.

[Stonebow]

@Skara_Brae

So he paid you lip service, then went out and flagrantly went against your wishes and then came home and bragged to you about it in front of your son? I’d be beyond pissed about that (even more so than the unsafe driving).

Does he openly disrespect you like that often?

This was the part that set me off as well. I get it, he took the kid out and had fun…and then came home, told you about it, and dared you to be the killjoy. If you don’t think your son saw that as a bit of added ‘spice’ to the adventure, you are mistaken.

It’s up to you to communicate that clearly to Dad and then have Dad communicate that to the kid, through the lens of a grown-up who likes fun but who also respects boundaries (both legal and personal).

[running_coach]

@doorhinge

A Camaro SS will only do 103? What a POS. OTOH, learning to drive safely takes experience. The more experience the better. Age thirteen is fine. Illegal on state roads, but dirt roads/offroad/private land is fine.

No, that’s as fast as the driver cared to go. Or the circumstances allowed.
Unless Hertz(or whoever) severely neuters the engine on their high performance rentals.

[Magiver]

@Pork_Rind

Fun fact: The UK uses MPH for speed limits.

No one has been able to convert to kph when driving on the left side of the road.

To the op, my inclination is to say Dad didn’t set a good example. With that said the speed is really not that fast given the car. It’s literally a few seconds on the pedal if you’re already traveling 70 mph. You wouldn’t even need to floor it. It’s stable at that speed.

This falls under a bad example for a kid who is looking forward to blowing past that speed given the opportunity. Insert my story of HS kid who got a Camaro for his birthday. Got his picture in the back of the yearbook as did the kid he took with him.

[jz78817]

@Dag_Otto

That’s funny, because I thought that was exactly what happened to a red Mazda in front of me yesterday at 80 mph on the interstate. If that driver had know that this wasn’t 1955 he could have kept driving, despite the fact that his right rear tire was absolutely shredded and beating the hell out of his fender. Or maybe we hit some time portal and it was 1955. Daylight saving time is funky at times.

what you saw was someone who drove on a flat or mostly-flat tire until it was shredded between the wheel and the road. that does not mean it blew out (i.e. a sudden, unexpected catastrophic failure of the tire sidewall.)

in the '50s and '60s, blow-outs were common because of the particulars of construction of bias-ply tires. the cord plies in the tire were arranged so each ply was at an angle compared to the plies immediately above and below it. Which meant while driving with a load on the tires, the cord plies would attempt to “scissor” across each other. this enormous amount of internal stress meant that it didn’t take long for the constant “scissoring” to cause the plies to separate, tear, and let the sidewall of the tire burst.

radial tires don’t have this problem since the lay of the cord plies is, er, radial. apart from manufacturing flaws, radial tires almost never blow out. If one fails on the road, 999/1000 times it’s either severely underinflated (if not almost flat) or severely worn out.

bias ply vs. radial

[echoreply]

There’s a place for this kind of behavior, and it’s a track day event. Public roads are not the place for demonstrations of speed. It’s not that the car is unsafe, it’s that the cars ahead aren’t expecting to have somebody close on them at 30+ MPH. Somebody can change lanes, because that car way back in the mirrors isn’t even an issue, and then it’s on top of them.

What Dad should have done is take Son to a track day or racing experience, or something like that. Or even better, a go-cart track. The speeds will be lower, and kid can drive himself.

[Guinastasia]

Another point is that they did this with a car that didn’t belong to them. The kid’s already thinking, “oh, it’s totally cool we did this, because the car isn’t our’s, so who gives a shit if we wreck it?” This wasn’t just a father son moment, it’s screwing around with other peoples’ property, with a kid who already thinks “safety is for pussies”.

(Maybe you could mention to your son, “okay, maybe YOU’RE having fun, and YOU don’t care if you die speeding, but I’m guessing the people you might take out with you won’t feel the same way.”)

@Robot_Arm

I was going to make that comparison, myself, except to raise the opposite point. I’ve often heard it said (perhaps “speculated” is a better word) that the U.S. has a problem with college binge drinking precisely because alcohol is completely banned until 21. If kids have a sip of wine with family meals they find out it’s not some magic elixir or right of passage into adulthood, and they don’t overdue when they’re on their own for the first time.

Beckdawrek was NOT talking about letting kids have an occassional glass of wine on special occassions, but a parent allowing a kid to get hammered with Dad. There’s a big difference there. I was allowed to have a sip of my dad’s beer as a kid, or a glass of wine every now and then. We weren’t sitting around doing shots and or playing beer pong.

@doorhinge

What bill? According to the 2005 article -

*The Connecticut Supreme Court’s Ruling: An Illegal Contractual Penalty

Common intuition suggests the $150 charge - and, especially, the sum of multiple $150 charges - is too high. And fortunately, the court interpreting the contract here agreed.*
In California, for instance, car rental companies may no longer use GPS information to impose surcharges, fines or penalties relating to the renter’s use of a leased vehicle.
New York has a law that also prohibits car rental companies from using GPS information “to determine or impose any costs, fees, charges or penalties on an authorized driver for such driver’s use of a rental vehicle,” subject to an exception for the recovery of “a vehicle that is lost, misplaced or stolen.”
There are consumer privacy and protection issues that seem to prevent many applications of GPS tracking. State’s rights (this is not a federal issue) would require that you check the applicable state’s laws.

Blue Mood is in the UK, so none of these laws would apply.

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

Eh…I did this with my sons in my Mustang GT years ago. There’s a specific piece of highway on I-275 in N KY heading towards the Cropper Bridge across the Ohio River, heading into Indiana and after the last KY exit/onramp (Petersburg, home of the infamous Creation Museum) where it’s perfectly safe to speed, provided there are no cars in front of you. It’s perfectly paved and perfectly straight and flat. You slow down as you approach the hill heading down towards the bridge.

Mind you, this stretch is about two miles long, so it’s plenty of time to get up to speed, then rapidly slow down, with great visibility. On either side of the highway are tall limestone shale walls, so there’s not even threat of deer.

We’re not talking sustaining speeds that high for more than a second or two, nor going above 110mph. The joy is in the acceleration, not the top end.

I explained to my sons that we were just “having a moment of fun” and that it wasn’t safe to drive this way on almost all other normal roadways (because it isn’t).

In the case of the Camaro SS:

It has Z rated tires, so they won’t blow out
It’s 455 horsepower and capable of speeds up to 165mph at the limit. 103mph for that car really isn’t a big deal.
How did you rent a Camaro SS in the UK? I would probably never drive a big, wide car like that over there fast at all due to narrow roads and congestion. I thought almost all cars over there were on the small side (fuel efficiency, emissions) or diesels.

I would have certainly had some words with my wife regarding the message it would send and what, if anything she or he would have said to the child prior to engaging in that behavior.

Frankly, if a road like the one I described above allows for it, it’s safer to do drive at high speeds there on the interstate than it is to do burnouts, race other cars, speed or accelerate unnecessarily on surface roads.

[Northern_Piper]

I would have said it ruined the little kid’s life. Your friend is still living.

[Blue_Mood]

Thanks for all of the input. I am still less than pleased, but it sounds like 100 is not so rare (or unsafe) as I may have thought. And I’m sure my son will excitedly tell his friends all about it when we get back home (we’re in the US now, which is why we were able to rent that particular car). Which reminds me: I have an extra year until he gets behind the wheel as in the UK you must be 17 to drive.

[nightshadea]

on any given day the average speed on the 5/405/10 freeway is 80-90 mph the slow lane is 60/70

The CHiPs have been known to give tickets to people going slow enough to “impede the safe flow of traffic” even if you were going the speed limit and everyone else thought they were on an F1 track

[nightshadea]

The scariest thing ive ever seen was when me and a cousin were coming home and we were doing 90 about 3 am and ran into a slow down …the guy behind us passes bounces from lane to lane barley missing several cars and had to be going about 120 …we didn’t catch up to him until he slowed off long enough to exit at Palmdale an hour in a half later …

[harmonicamoon]

If you rent a Camaro SS, you gots to take it into the triple digits.

If you aren’t good with triple digits, rent a Ford Focus.

Problem solved.

[Dereknocue67]

No, there is no reason to be angry at your husband but you should have a serious talk with him about responsible driving when he turns 18.

[WordMan]

@Pork_Rind

It’s stories like this that remind me that I miss who my dad used to be. He had MS and the latter half of his life was a long, slow decline. Usually when I think of him, I remember the frail, easily confused old man who spoke little and needed help with everything. I forget the vital, young man he was in my early childhood.

He, like me, was a car and motorcycle nut, and occasionally he’d come home for a day with a ridiculous sports car of one kind or another. He’d of course take me for a ride, and the conversation always went like this…

Dad: “What’s the rule about what we do when we go for a ride?”
Me: "Mom doesn’t need to know!

Was it a good idea? No. Do I remember it fondly? Yup. Sorry for the partial hijack. This thread just brought back some super vivid memories that I thought I had lost. I’ll be laughing all day about thinking about those rides.

Yes. Nice. Sounds like a cool dad. I get the cognitive dissonance with this thread, but such is life. Hope you enjoyed the rides in your head after this post.

[Novelty_Bobble]

I have to say that hearing some of the replies in this thread I’m not too surprised that the death rate on USA roads is so very high (posting here from the UK, with just about the safest roads in the world)

[pulykamell]

@Novelty_Bobble

I have to say that hearing some of the replies in this thread I’m not too surprised that the death rate on USA roads is so very high (posting here from the UK, with just about the safest roads in the world)

The UK is extremely safe vehicle fatality-wise, but the US is on the lower end worldwide, too. Safer than average. If you go by deaths per vehicle distance traveled, the US’s traffic fatalities are lower than countries like Japan, Belgium, New Zealand, Spain (but twice as high as the UK. For every billion km traveled, the UK has 3.6 deaths, the US 7.1 deaths. I’m not sure I would characterize that as “so very high,” necessarily, but that’s subjective.) That said, about 30% of our traffic deaths are speeding related, so, yes, it is a factor.

[elbows]

We haven’t talked about it yet but I’m sure he thinks he was just having fun with the car. My son loves cars and has already said that if he crashes and dies on the Nurburgring in his Lotus Exige that he will get once he’s grown up I should not worry because he would have died happy!

If you haven’t bothered pushed back against this line, then you don’t really have cause to take exception to how Dad behaves, in my opinion.

Sounds like car culture rules at your place, and the need for speed is admired and appreciated. Which means it’s probably way too late now, to take exception to how this attitude will play out for your future teenaged driver.

I’m not sure any amount of driver ed or traffic accident footage can override a father’s obvious glee and pride at having disregarded both common sense and the law.

Even if y’all don’t care so much about burying your 17yr old because, ‘He died doing what he loved!’ How will you feel attending the funerals of his teenage girlfriend and he other schoolmates who were in he car with him that night?

Or do you imagine he’ll undertake speeding and ignoring the law, only before discovering booze?

[Robot_Arm]

@Guinastasia

Beckdawrek was NOT talking about letting kids have an occassional glass of wine on special occassions, but a parent allowing a kid to get hammered with Dad. There’s a big difference there. I was allowed to have a sip of my dad’s beer as a kid, or a glass of wine every now and then. We weren’t sitting around doing shots and or playing beer pong.

I know, but a lot of posters were treating the situation much the same as the U.S. treats alcohol; never, never, ever expose kids to it in any way. I think that runs the same risk as it does with alcohol, that it becomes even more enticing to do when they get the chance.

I wouldn’t have done it on a public road, though. I agree with those who’ve recommended a track day, or even better considering the son’s age, karts. I remember hearing Jackie Stewart once say that he tends to be quite slow and cautious when he’s driving. Whatever thrill or challenge driving was for him was only on race tracks.