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Comment by Bjartr | Hacker News Reader

Racing stripes would be a better example. Though negligible, a hand out the window does have a causal impact on speed.

On the other hand racing stripes have zero impact, but do correlate to the speed of the car.

We could pick a company car in my previous company (it's a tax thing). We could pick any color, apart from red, because the insurance forbade it - red cars get into more accidents. Somehow that must have made it all the way to the policy without someone asking "is it the red car or the kind of person that picks a red car that causes more accidents?"

I drive a "Victory Red" 2005 Chevy Silverado. I always thought it was a "safer" color for a vehicle.

I have always assumed that, being in a larger vehicle that is bright red, people would be more likely to spot the vehicle from further away, notice it out of the corner of their eye, or that I would generally be MORE visible to other drivers.

I'm sure the correlation insurance companies are looking at is that the driver's of red vehicles are the cause of the higher accident rate.

IDK. I got a hand-me-down sporty car when I was in high school, which was initially white, then I had it painted orange as a birthday gift a year or two later. Comparing the before and after, there was a noticeable shift in how other drivers responded to me, and not universally for the better. I was less likely to go unnoticed (think people trying to merge into me, or jumping out in front of me when they have a yield), but a subset of people (mostly other young men, sometimes older men driving minivans) would act significantly more aggressively. No one ever tried to race me when my car was white. It'd happen like once a week once the car was orange. People actively speeding up to avoid me passing them also increased substantially.

The anecdotes I picked up in my early driving days suggested that red being more visible also meant it was more visible to traffic cops and get more attention - and thus more speeding tickets even for relatively small violations. (No idea if this was supported by insurance data - in the most solid of the anecdotes, the driver in question had just traded in a bright red porsche for something comparably fast but "not red" and didn't have followup numbers yet :-)

The solution is clear: Offer the red car option as a trap, banning anyone who chooses it.

What about speed holes?

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