Also, I don’t know how you’d expect to maintain control. The autobahn is not perfectly straight it has curves and the curves are easily made at a normal speed, but staying on a road that is not dead straight and which also has other vehicles becomes much more difficult when you are in the area of land speed record speeds.

        Q said:

So wouldn’t it make sense that if fast means less accidents REALLY FAST makes even less and CRAZY FAST makes for nearly none?

I think this is true, but mostly because (1) such vehicles are build (or built?) with stringent safety and quality requirements, (2) they tend to be used in places which don’t have much circulation (such as the sky) and (3) the pilots have to be well trained before they are entrusted with such a money eating thing.

So wouldn’t it make sense that if fast means less accidents REALLY FAST makes even less and CRAZY FAST makes for nearly none?

Your vehicle would need to approach the physical limit of how fast you can get a land vehicle to go within the space and layout avaliable. You’d have to get at least close to the speed of sound to feel you had really experienced the road. It’s a given that a regular wheel-driven car would not do. You need something better like a ramjet, a solid fueled rocket, a liquid fueled rocket or pulsed-nuclear-detonation.

        Vjatcheslav said:

Belgium is a small country, as you’ll have remarked by this time. We’re just not used to great distances.

Yes, but you’re reasonably close to the Autobahn, which I’ve always wanted to drive on. It’s somewhat hard for me as an American to fathom that it does not have a speed limit though. I’d figure it would be really not that interesting to use my current car on the Autobahn, I mean what is the point? The car actually has a governor on it that will start to cut back the power after you get past 110 mph and won’t let you go above 120mph. However, it can be removed relatively easily.

Even so, the maximum theoretical speed is well under 150 without the governor. I’ve heard of the car being taken as high as ~135 on a flat track. With a supercharger you can bolt on enough horsepower to possibly break 150. But really, it’s not designed to be a race car.

But the thing is the autobahn has NO speedlimit, so it seems like it really is pointless to even bother with a standard car if you want the real experience. Even a dodge Viper on a good straight shot is going to struggle to keep over 200 mph. A McLaren F1 can supposedly do 240, but still if there’s a headwind or something it’s going to be hard to get that high and forget about 250.

If you want to do the autobahn (which I really do) I figure you’d have to do it right and go a lot faster than that. The problem is that axle driven vehicles top out at about 300mph. I’m wondering if it is legal to take an afterburning turbojet on the autobahn (Because it has no speedlimit. That’s unfathomable… how can you not see that as an invitation to go as fast as possible)

Something like the J79 off of an F-104 would be ideal. They used that, IIRC in one of the more resent land speed record attempts. It seems like the autobahn would be the logical place to try to break the land speed record. If you throw out the fact that guiness requires you to complete it two times in a given amount of time in the same vehicle, then you might even do better with solid rockets. That’d be cheaper too. a vehicle with some surplus solid rocket motors should be able to go supersonic at a reasonable price.

I guess the saying is true, that in America a hundred years is a long time and in Europe a hundred miles is a long way. When I’m in Texas with my family we can drive 45 miles to see friends “across town” and not be in traffic the entire time. I also have a flat in Belgium (my husband is in graduate school at Leuven) and the idea of going that far seems like a major project to our friends and neighbours. I hardly think anything of going up to Holland for the afternoon, it’s only an hour and a half by train after all! I can read on the train, the view is really nice and it’s actually quite cheap, but to some people that is just too far to go for a pleasant afternoon looking at medieval architecture. To each their own I suppose. (Actually, most people on the train seem to be going for the shopping, and more power to them.)

Anyway I’m glad you’re enjoying the Chrysler! If you ever come out to the Bay Area, you should rent a convertible and go tooling through the mountains along Skyline Drive, it’s so pretty up there and the roads are an interesting challenge if you like that kind of thing.