I have a hot take. All road-legal cars that are sold in India should be mechanically limited to a top speed of only 140 or 160 kilometers an hour. There is no need for a vehicle to do speeds excess of this on a public road. Every day we read and hear about horrible accidents caused by drivers doing 160, 180, even 200 and above on public roads, killing themselves and many others in the process. First, there is no need to be doing such speeds on public roads. Let us leave speed to the trains. Also, there is no road in India that legally permits private cars to exceed speeds of 120 kph.
To be honest, it is rarely possible to achieve even allowed top speeds on the roads that are rated for them. Our road infrastructure is terrible even when the roads look smooth and fast. Most of our highways are shoddily constructed by contractors trying to make a quick buck. Roads are heavily undulated and wear away quickly. Speed breakers, cuts in the median, potholes and animals can appear out of nowhere. Even expressways are terribly designed both in terms of road quality and entry/exits and integration with other roads.
The biggest factor for this is our driving habits though. They are not even worth calling a “diving habit”, Indian traffic is nothing more than a mess of vehicles trying to go in all possible directions all at once. There are no rules, nobody is trained to handle high speeds.
You’re doing 100 on an expressway and out jumps a cow over the median where its owner had led it to graze. Or there’s the guy who missed his exit and decides to reverse and drive on the wrong side to get to it. Boom! You’re dead. Anyone who is attempting to go above 80 kph is a daredevil with a death wish.
And then there’s the drunk brat in the Mini Cooper or Porsche who doesn’t know his ass from the accelerator and goes about the night moving down people on scooters and then brags that “Daddy will handle it”. There’s no excuse to be handing 200 bhp monsters to 19 year old kids.
Our justice system and administration does jack all to make our country safer. Until we clean up our streets taking the bullets away from the gun is the only way.
