tomato coupe

I think you're confused about that. Your auto insurance will pay a claim if a tree falls and damages your car. "Act of God" usually comes into play if your tree falls and damages someone else's property, and the other party tries to hold you (and your insurance company) responsible for the damage. Unless it can be shown that the tree fell due to your negligence, the accident was "an act of God" and you (and your insurance company) are not responsible for the damage.

Alan K

Only in a discussion on the internet would one see someone telling you after you lost a car that you are confused about how insurance works. Normally, one would assume that the person would have looked into all valid possibilities to recover some money.

Of course you assumed that the tree was on our property, it wasn’t. The tree was our neighbor’s, it was a very large oak tree and about 40% of its branches were over the boundary of property line.
We ended up sharing the cost of cleanup. Our neighbor is a nice guy and we get along quite well.

Jay Turberville

Yes. Only those entities running the simulation have any actual control. :^)

PeteHski

I don’t encourage anyone else to buy a Tesla. I quite enjoy having a massive power advantage over pretty much everyone else on the road. Eventually it will all be normalised again when everyone is on the same page. But for now I don’t have to worry about getting cut up by the average Tdi or hot hatch. It’s also good that VAG are crippling the performance of their EV daily drivers so they don’t compete too much with their ICE counterparts.

Alan K

You wouldn’t be telling us that you get into street races with nuts on the road!
And here I was imagining all/most serious bicyclists to be very “safe” drivers.

My children at times remark about my driving when someone cuts me off and I give them room to let it happen safely, that I drive like brain dead (old) people.

PeteHski

I don’t even notice if they are trying to race, the advantage is so great. It makes roundabouts (which we have a lot of) a breeze.

Alan K

I should think so… electric motors have fantastic torque starting from rest.

In my younger days, I used to enjoy pushing my mostly gutless cars but not after we had children. I became a completely different kind of driver.

Last year a nephew bought an Audi R8 and he has asked me several times to take his car to a track for fun but I have politely turned him down. The same had happened about 4 or 5 years ago when he bought his first sports car, a Ferrari, which he still has. I was trying to persuade him to start switching to family friendly safe cars, now that he has a couple of kids of his own. But like bicycling, owning and driving sports cars must be addictive.

Alan K

By the way, roundabouts are all the new rage ‘round here too these days, though other than Amish no one is going about in horse-carriages.

PeteHski

That and more precise traction control. Ignition ****** and cutting cylinders is no match for electronic torque control. The difference in the wet off the line is a joke, especially against front wheel drive cars.

Alan K

My nephew seems to like the loud rumbling noise of his Ferrari when punches it, which I think is absurd, but there’s that about internal combustion engine aficionados - EVs can only whine.

tomato coupe

Your post implied that your auto insurance didn't cover the damage to the car because it was an act of God. Did they reject the claim?

Alan K

That was our home insurance, when our son tried to get them to pay.

tomato coupe

Your homeowners insurance rejected a claim for damage to a car?

Leisesturm

Actually, I've had a VW Turbo Passat past 135mph with my kids sleeping in the back seat, showing the hooligan in a BMW one lane over, who had the bigger pair. He did. I knew the Passat had more left, but so did his Beemer, and it seemed best to leave it for another day. Which never came. Got divorced, and had to give up the Passat. Then I started losing my vision and had to give up driving. Speed by itself isn't dangerous. Even as a family man I never thought it particularly bad behavior to crush the normal ETA of a Brooklyn to Queens run down the Belt Parkway at 80mph, with or without the kids. Despite driving like that week in and week out I was never pulled over. Not once. HOW you drive fast is key to keeping your insurance premiums affordable.

Jjust the other day I was in a Lyft and it happened to be a Model 3 and the driver was an extrovert type and treated me to a couple of Ludicrous Mode dragstrip launches. Great fun. I'm not understanding why more isn't made of the insane amount of torque that electric motors can make. Just recently Dodge did a reboot of one of its old muscle cars and I think the thing had 1000hp. It needed special tyres flown in from Saudi Arabia and in a test against a Tesla shod with standard all season radials the Tesla humiliated the Dodge. Why oh why is there still any debate about the need to migrate to all electric transportation yesterday!!!

Alan K

Many serious bicycle advocates blame drivers for many things that affect them and the environment, the planet etc. They want them punished for going 1 mile over the stated speed limit, reduce the number of cars on road by whatever means it takes, ideally force everyone to only use battery operated cars etc. And then there you are getting into a race with another driver who no doubt thinks he is more talented than you, and has a better car than you - but you have children in your car!
I guess bicyclists are really rational thinkers.

Leisesturm

What?

PeteHski

Top end speed is not really something you can exploit in the UK these days. Not without risk of a major penalty anyway and our motorways are highly monitored by cameras. But instant torque is still very useful in many situations and makes driving more effortless. Traditional luxury cars have large capacity, powerful engines for effortless torque and EVs (well some of them) have made that easy to achieve without the associated high running costs.

I have owned some fast cars in my time (mostly Porsche and BMW) but my current Tesla beats them all as a daily driver. It’s just so effortless to make rapid progress without all the fuss. In the past I would typically drive a 3.0 turbo diesel for daily use, but those all now seem….. sluggish. Recently I drove a BMW 535d and it honestly felt slow and unresponsive. Even a Porsche 997 C4S feels pedestrian compared to a Model 3. You would have to rev the balls off it just to hang on! The Porsche has higher top end speed, but it is totally irrelevant on our roads. Only performance up to 100 mph max matters here and my Tesla is still pulling like a train at that point.

EVs are a game changer for effortless daily performance. For me that was enough to make the switch back in 2018 and I’ve never looked back. My wife followed suit in 2020 when she was sick and tired of driving her Nissan turbo diesel. The contrast driving it back-to-back with my Model X was simply too big to live with!

Jay Turberville

Sure. But speed is never "by itself". There is always something else involved. Another car, mechanical failure, road conditions, weather, etc. For instance I use to live across the street from a machinist who built and ran his own top alcohol dragster. While he helped up to hot rod our cars (400 ci small block in a Triumph TR7 for my friend) he also said that racing was for the race track. Years after he was no longer our neighbor we heard that he died while racing his dragster. His drag parachutes failed after deployment and he crashed into the netting at the end of the track. If the track would have been a lot longer, he'd have probably been fine. Even on a racetrack with only one other driver, there's always something other than just speed.

PeteHski

It’s all about calculated risk. The potential consequences of something going wrong at high speed are always worse, but the risk itself may still be relatively low. For example I would quite happily take the risk of driving at 100+ mph on a clear stretch of motorway in a modern high performance car. The only thing that stops me is the potential court visit and driving ban. On the other hand I’m not too keen on driving around in old cars that are often lethal death traps in any collision with modern cars or roadside furniture.

Ultimately travelling at speed is a risk, but often not the biggest risk on the road. Driving unusually slow can be a much bigger risk in many situations. One of my pet hates is drivers merging from motorway slip roads at less than half the speed of traffic flow on the main carriageway. Do they not understand how much easier and safer it is to merge at the same speed as the traffic?

Alan K

My apologies for what I hope to be the most disjointed post made during a sleepless night.

If it would make the rest of thread thread more readable, I would be happy to delete this one - please let me know.

[I got a good couple of hours of bicycling done already after taking Naproxen and feeling much better. ]

Alan K

We see a fair bit of that on this side of the pond too. On major multi lane highways, it is easier and safer to drive on the second lane and leave the first (slowest) lane for automobiles that are entering or exiting (some drivers do slow way down before exiting). On two lane highways, we change the lane about a quarter mile before the entry to highway and come back to slow lane afterwards.

I-Like-To-Bike

You did seem to be confused when you mistakenly assumed that posters on A&S whose rhetoric routinely includes diatribes are representative of serious bicycling advocates or are rational, or are people likely to be taken seriously by anyone else except members of their own echo chamber. Their "advocacy" message may be useful for people who want examples to point to in order to label bicycling advocacy as the the rhetoric of eccentric know-it-alls that can be safely ignored by more rational people.

Alan K

Yes, a lack of sleep or very limited sleep for two days in a row is no longer something I can handle too well at this point.

jon c. 

When correspondents speak of the fear of being forced to do one thing or another it reveals a great deal about their mindset. I expect I'll have an electric vehicle at some point (if I live long enough), but I have absolutely no concern that I will be forced to do so.

PeteHski

I remember way back at school 40 years ago reading a book about the predicted future of automobiles that was introducing the idea of electric motors eventually replacing the ICE. Meanwhile, the milkman was crawling around at 10 mph in a noisy electric milk float. At that point EVs were not looking very appealing! But times change and the technology moves forward.