Never really got the attraction of getting to 60mph as fast as possible. How often do you attempt that in real-world use?
#1 Merging onto the freeway from a stop in LA, Atlanta, and other cities where you have fast drivers, traffic, and short freeway entrances or entrances with stop lights. Remember it’s your job to prevent the flow of traffic from yielding.
#2 Accelerate from danger/to safety. Misjudged your gap in a turn? Accelerate to safety. Person just ran the red? Accelerate from danger. Stuff happens and it’s nice to have the power available.
If someone hits the back of you, it's a them problem.
If you prefer to end up driving into the side of a truck and getting squashed, then I guess that's your decision.
It is a two lane (same direction) road. The tractor trailer is to your right. There is a car behind you.
The tractor trailer begins to merge into your lane.
What do you do?
I don't get what's hard to understand about this.
Have you ever driven a car? On public roads?
There are plenty of circumstances where you can accelerate out of danger. If you intend to continue driving you would do well to consider this fact. Start with low speed situations like parking lots, and move up from there.
Obviously things aren’t so clear cut but your argument is nonsense.
Edit: I’m sure a bit of calculus on the physics of it would reveal the location on the truck where acceleration was more likely to prevent a crash.
The kinetic energy in an accident between two vehicles is their relative speed, not their absolute speed.
If you are doing 80 mph and hit a truck doing 70 mph, there's not 80 mph * vehicle mass worth of impact energy.
And that's not even breaking things into directional vectors and calculating the fraction of velocity in the direction of impact.
Given that you use the phrase "driver's ed" I suspect you may be American, in which case you live in a country with one of the worst standards of driving in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
My BIL was waiting to turn left on a two-lane road with 55-65 MPH traffic. He looked in his mirror and saw a car coming at him and clearly not slowing down. He floored it, and got rear ended with a speed differential of probably 35MPH rather than 60MPH.
Edit: Here’s another I just remembered. My father was driving 70 on a divided highway. Looked in his mirror and saw somebody coming up fast, so he accelerated, trying to get out of the way. (There was no space to get over.) The driver behind continued coming apparently in a big hurry, and my dad realized too late that he wasn’t going to slow down. Even having accelerated he got rear ended, but the speed differential was not bad, and it meant my dad didn’t lose control in heavy, high speed traffic. (The other driver had fallen asleep.)
In neither case is there an example of putting yourself in danger. Just proper driving. In both cases pressing the accelerator was the single most important safety action taken.
I don't know how to parse that, so I'm going to go with your base belief around acceleration.
For an average sedan these days, we're talking ~3,500 lbs. Say 175 hp. 0.05 hp / lb.
Now, let's say your average loaded semi runs about 50,000 lbs.
Do you think semis have 2,500 hp engines?
(Generalizing hp/torque as correlated)
It sounds like you don't drive much.
Trucks are quite slow though, if you have a reasonably fast car you can absolutely get ahead of them before they close out your lane. Especially if you are alongside them to start with and not behind them.
When it can be done quietly, according to John Carmack speaking about driving his Tesla Roadster vs. past modded Ferraris, at practically every light.
How often do you tow a range rover with your range rover?
During the winter I regularly tow stuck vehicles out of the snow, biggest one so far was a fully-laden 28-tonne curtainsider.
Obligatory: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eYxwgmACJMY&t=1m26s