161
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
161 points (92.6% liked)
Cars - For Car Enthusiasts
3947 readers
1 users here now
About Community
c/Cars is the largest automotive enthusiast community on Lemmy and the fediverse. We're your central hub for vehicle-related discussion, industry news, reviews, projects, DIY guides, advice, stories, and more.
Rules
- Stay respectful to the community, hold civil discussions, even when others hold opinions that may differ from yours.
- This is not an NSFW community, and any such content will not be tolerated.
- Policy, not politics! Policy discussions revolve around the concept; political discussions revolve around the individual, party, association, etc. We only allow POLICY discussions and political discussions should go to c/politics.
- Must be related to cars, anything that does not have connection to cars will be considered spam/irrelevant and is subject to removal.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Car length per 10mph is much easier in my opinion. 2-3 seconds isn't based on any speed so by itself is quite useless. Your car's stopping distance changes with speed. It won't always be 2-3 seconds. Let alone counting reaction time at higher speeds.
Seconds is based on speed though. It's literally how speed is defined. Distance over time. At 60mph you travel 88 feet per second. So if you count out the seconds between when the car ahead passes say a road sign and you pass the same road sign and it's two seconds, there's roughly 176ft between your two vehicles. If you're going 25 mph, then two seconds equates to 73ft of space.
Which really gives you more space than car lengths per 10mph, so it's safer. 10mph=~14fps. The average length of a car is 14ft. So you end up giving double the space if you count out 2 seconds.
I cannot not think 14 frames per second when I see that.
The driver can only perceive 14fps
It is in fact, seconds. Not only is your own reaction time fixed, distance is speed × time so the distance you follow is farther, the faster your speed if you count out the same amount of time.
It works for all speeds, plus how do you know how far ahead 6 cars bumper to bumper is when you when going at highway speeds? The lines aren't always a good tell.
It's better to pick a bridge, a sign, an intersection or anything else interesting that the car in front passes, count 0-[x], 1-[x], 2-[x], 3... and so on where [x] is your favourite 4-syllable state or word. Count to 5 in a transport truck or in bad weather, count to 8 if driving a transport truck in bad weather.