Not really. In most cases, they are chasing a stolen car. How do you catch the guy if you back off from the pursuit and he ditches the car two miles later and fades into the weeds.
And what if you are in hot pursuit of an escaping felon; a bank robber, for instance? Your departmental policy kicks in, you back off, he ditches the car a couple of miles up the road and carjacks somebody else’s ride, shooting the driver in the process. Yeah, I can just see that one in court.
Is this thread entirely composed of opinion? I see very little in the way of sober facts, statistics, or cites. Can we have a mod move it to a more appropriate forum, perhaps?
Sailboat
Well then, the factual answer to the OP would be because there is no law compelling the manufacturers to limit the speed of cars, and apparently the manufacturers have no reason to voluntarily do so. 
Thank you for your contribution, or lack thereof. Perhaps you can move it for us, seeing as how you’re a mod and all…
…oh, wait, you’re not a mod. So stop acting like one.
KTHXBYE
It’s also possible that it may save your life to have a speed limiter on your car, or for someone else to have one on their car.
They already do that, by setting speed limits and penalizing some people who drive faster than that.
The same argument was used by car manufacturers against things like seat belts, padded dashboards, and other safety features. For better or for worse, driving is an integral part of our culture. That means that some people of less-than-average intelligence, reflexes, and so on are going to have to drive, or else not be able to support themselves and their families.
I wonder how much of ‘being able to go really fast’ is a function of being ‘really good at legal speeds’?
I refrained from inulting anyone or making it perosnal.
Just so we’re straight on this: I am required to keep my opinions out of this thread, and not respond to, for example, contemptuous characterization of old people.
But YOU are allowed to insultingly dismiss me?
And this is the factual forum, not the nasty one or the opinion one?
Is that a fair summary of the current situation?
Respectfully,
Sailboat
Because the speed limit is not absolute. It has crept up over the past few years and until recently Montana had no daylight speed limit other than a speed that was safe given the conditions. Limit cars to 80mph and repeal the speed limit law and you’ll have plenty of unhappy Americans.
That raises the question “Do you require the police cars to have the limiters?”. If not, you’re roasted when poorly justified high-speed chases kill people. If so, you’re roasted when a really dangerous criminal (who, being a criminal and all, will have disabled his limiter) escapes.
No no, I was proposing to not have limiters at all. Just simply make high speed chases against the law. You know, the idiots aren’t going to drive at 140mph for 40 minutes taking out everything in their path if you just… don’t… chase… them. People are often bewildered why people bother to try to run from the police (as an aside, the only person I know to have attempted this got away and then turned himself in the next day because he felt guilty). However, the exact same principle that makes the crooks run makes the cops chase, both the police and the criminal are probably endangering the public equally (the police are more trained in high speed driving on average, but there’s more of them) and are both equally contributing to the chase (the cops keep chasing, he keeps running away).
We’d better tack on some severe legal penalties for fleeing from police when we do that. Otherwise, there’s no reason why someone who’s drunk, has drugs in their car, or whatever shouldn’t flee from the police. Then you’ve got more people driving at dangerously high speeds.
I agree.
There are good reasons to be against speed limiters, but “so the government isn’t telling us how fast our cars can go” isn’t one of them.
Then respond. Nothing is stopping you. But saying this thread is meritless by virtue of it being “all opinion” is just as insulting to the people who have given good information and have offered good, valid reasons in spite of the fact that the question is all but unanswerable.
Offer something. You call me dismissive? Ha! Your first post is about as dismissive as it gets.
Well the penalties are already pretty high so there’s really no need to change that, and what are they going to do exactly? The way I see it is that the cops try to pull somebody over, if they don’t pull over after a few minutes, they give up and get an APB out for the car as “failure to stop” with severe ramifications for both the driver and the owner.
A good reason is that the government should keep its nose out of manufacturing and not tell the car makers what should or should not go in a car.
It’s a bit late to go back to that. The government mandates all kinds of things on a car, they could conceivably mandate rev limiters, too.
It’s never too late to keep someone from making another step, no matter how insignificant it might seem, in a direction you don’t want. I’m against mandating seat belts and airbags as well, but arguing for removing those laws is a lot harder than arguing for not adding rev limiters to the list. Besides, I want seatbelts and airbags, I just don’t want the government requiring them. I don’t want a limiter, nor do I want the government requiring one. My car has a speed limiter on it, it’s set somewhere above 112MPH and I never get an opportunity to go that fast. The fact that it’s there bothers the hell out of me, to the point of where I’m constantly considering getting a custom computer simply to remove the governor. No, I still won’t go that fast, but at least it’ll feel a little more like it’s MY CAR.
Not really. If you accept that the government has a legitimate right to ensure public safety (hint: do you support the fire department? speed limits? the police?), then the government has a right to mandate, to some extent, products that pose a potential risk to public safety. Just about everyone in this country spends several hours in a car on a weekly or at least monthly basis. Cars are very large and can move very quickly. These features do make a difference on a public, statistically significant level. Furthermore, automobile manufacturers have previously demonstrated that they have little interest in including safety features if they are not government mandated. Things are improving now, in that regard, but we likely would have seen an even higher number of deaths in automobile wrecks annually than we see now, had not seatbelts been mandated back in the '60s. Things start to get trickier around occupant use of the mandated seatbelts in cars, but when it comes to the inclusion of safety features in an automobile, “personal responsibility” is a red herring - what use is responsibility if there are no safety devices to choose to make use of or to disregard? Consumers could shop for vehicles with safety devices, but that’s quite a restriction on the size of the market available to them.
I also think that it’s worth noting that personal responsibility is something that most people lack, either due to willful disregard of their personal safety or simple ignorance. If we have to mandate what manufacturers include as safety equipment to protect people from themselves, so be it - everyone makes errors in judgement, and I’d rather not see someone get killed because of a mistake made in innocence or ignorance. Sometimes people just forget. That’s a pretty stupid reason to die, too. Of course, part of the problem here is that cars are just outstandingly dangerous machines. They are incredibly heavy, even the small ones, and they move very fast. There’s simply a huge potential for damage in an automobile, and it seems utterly negligent to not require some means of ameliorating, even a little bit, some of that potential.
By the way, please don’t get me wrong - I think that personal responsibility is important, but it is NOT the holy grail of public or even personal safety. In some cases, the stakes are simply too high to rely upon it.
As to the OP, there’s a pretty simple reason that cars move so fast. It’s because of at least two things: first of all, people want them to. Second, they’re big! With a vehicle as massive as a car, powered by an internal combustion engine, you need an engine with a certain amount of power in order to accelerate it to traveling speeds in what most would consider a reasonable amount of time. This requires an engine with a fair amount of power, the kind of power that can propel a large, heavy object to speeds near to or in excess of 100 miles per hour. If cars were equipped with engines in the 30 to 50 HP range, they would top out at much lower speeds, but they would take (at least to your average motorist) an excruciatingly long time to reach even typical traveling speeds of 30-40 miles per hour. I don’t think safety is a good explanation for the acceleration and top speed capabilities of automobiles - if we had decided that all cars would have engines in the 30-50 HP range, the amount of acceleration required for safety would be much less! Anyway, this is a limit imposed, at least in part, by the way the internal combustion engine works. If you look at a human on a bicycle, traveling speeds are much lower, but a human is able to generate a lot more force (torque) per unit of power that they produce than a car, and they can do this best at 0 RPM. As a result, you can happily get your bicycle up to 15 MPH in a matter of a few seconds and cruise happily along at that speed, even though you are using a significantly lower amount of power than a car is capable of. Electric cars are a lot like this, too. There are a few on my college campus, the physical plant maintains them and uses them to get around. They top out at much lower speeds than ICE cars, but they can get up to traveling speed with no more fuss than the ICE vehicles - and unlike a human on a bicycle, they travel at roughly similar speeds off the highway. So the technology of the engine makes a big difference.
So, why aren’t cars prevented from reaching speeds in the 100 MPH range? I’m sure that I could come up with any number of explanations, but I think that what it amounts to is that people want them to be able to go that fast, and will resist attempts to slow them down. I don’t find the reasons given for this resistance to be very compelling, but I think that’s a separate matter… if I go any further, I’ll probably start injecting my personal ideology and political beliefs around cars and transportation into this discussion, and I think it’s best not to go there.
Would spped limiters harm the engine?
No. German manufacturers have a “gentleman’s agreement” to limit speeds to 155 MPH. When you have cars rated at around 500 horsepower and 500 lb. ft. of torque, that number isn’t all that hard to achieve. So they slap on the limiter (electronic in this case), which they can of course remove, but they generally don’t do so.
Car & Driver did some top speed challenge where one of their luxury cars hit 189, remarkably with only part of the electronic limiting removed. That car is available here in the states.
The point of all that, BTW, was to demonstrate that car manufacturers can use limiters with little issue. Some of them do so even now, although the threshhold is so high that you never notice.