On 12/05/2013 02:47, Arfa Daily wrote:

... It's probably time that
motorway speed limits were looked at. It has been at 70 mph since the
days of Moggy Minors and Vauxhall Vivas. The technology in all areas -
tyres, braking, engines, steering, traction control, ABS etc - has
advanced massively since those days, and a modern car doing 80 mph, is
probably safer than they were at 50 mph....

Except that the national speed limit never had anything to do with the
capability of the vehicles. It was based upon a RRL report published in
1962*, and the justification was a number of accidents that had been
caused by the inability of many drivers to cope with widely differing
traffic speeds. The point was not to get vehicles to travel at 70mph on
motorways, but to get them to travel at more or less the same speeds.

* Two years before the high speed car testing on the M1 that popular
myth has as the reason for the NSL.

Colin Bignell