Speed Doesn't Kill... Impact Does We need to change how we talk about speed and safety. The familiar warning "Speed Kills" is both technically wrong and practically ineffective, and drivers know it. I drove 110 km/h (68 mph) just the other day and lived to tell the tale. When drivers regularly travel at 110, 120, even 140 km/h (68, 75, 87 mph) without incident, they learn to dismiss safety messages that don't match their lived experience. The truth is more nuanced and more important: speed doesn't kill, but impact does. And the real danger isn't speed itself. It's primarily the lethal combination of speed and insufficient eye lead (how far ahead the driver is looking) time that leaves drivers unable to stop before impact. The Invisible Two-Thirds of Stopping Ask most drivers how long it takes them to stop, and they'll vastly underestimate the distance. That's because stopping actually happens in three distinct stages, but our brains are oblivious to the first two stages: 1. Perception Time (0.75 seconds): The time it takes to recognize there's a problem. Something enters your field of vision and your brain must process what it's seeing and identify it as a hazard requiring action. 2. Reaction Time (0.75 seconds): The time it takes to get your foot from the gas to the brake. The car is still travelling at full speed. (The faster you are moving, the further the distances are that you will travel in that 1.5 seconds). 3. Braking Distance: Finally, the moment your foot hits the brake until the vehicle stops. During those first 1.5 seconds of perception and reaction time, a vehicle at 110 km/h (68 mph) travels approximately 46 meters (150 feet) before the brakes even begin to engage. At 70 km/h (43 mph), that's still 29 meters (95 feet). The distance travelled during perception and reaction are invisible distances to most drivers, who believe they can stop within whatever space it takes, once they press the brake pedal. This fundamental misunderstanding of stopping distance is rarely, if ever, made clear to new drivers. Most driving instructors do not understand this well (it's not required knowledge for typical driving instructor training/testing). We are certainly not making sure our new drivers understand it before we hand them their licenses. And because the ability to maintain proper eye lead time at any given speed isn't on road tests, the vast majority of driving schools don't teach it in a meaningful way. It is any wonder that so many new drivers die, driving really fast? Looking Ahead: The Critical Skill We Don't Teach The distance you need to be looking ahead isn't arbitrary. It must accommodate the complete stopping sequence at your current speed. That means scanning far enough ahead to account for 0.75 seconds of perception time, 0.75 seconds of reaction time, plus the full braking distance. Most drivers aren't looking far enough ahead consistently for 70 km/h (43 mph), let alone 110 km/h (68 mph). Often, drivers believe the most important thing is just keeping the car between the lines and you don’t have to look very far ahead to do that. This is why the horrific crashes we see at higher speeds tend to follow the same pattern: by the time the driver finally sees the problem (a stopped vehicle, a pedestrian, an obstacle in the road), it's already too late. They were travelling faster than their eye lead time could support. When Keeping It Between the Lines Kills This same fatal assumption causes every single pileup on icy highways and in foggy conditions. Drivers assume nothing bad will happen if they just keep it between the lines. But visibility and road conditions don't care about lane markers. Consider a driver in dense fog on a highway. Visibility has been reduced so much that they can just make out the lines of the highway directly in front of their car. They might slow down a bit, perhaps from 110 km/h to 80 km/h (68 mph to 50 mph), or maybe to 70 or even 60 km/h (43 or 37 mph), thinking they're being cautious. But at 70 km/h, that driver will travel 29 meters (95 feet) during just the perception and reaction time, before their foot even touches the brake. Add in actual braking distance, and they need roughly 70 meters (230 feet) of clear road ahead to stop. At 80 km/h (50 mph), those numbers climb even higher. If you can only see the lines on the road directly in front of your car, perhaps 10 or 20 meters ahead, your brain won't even make it through perception time before impact. There will be no slowing down before the crash. The driver's foot won't even reach the brake pedal. On icy highways, the problem multiplies. A driver sees tail lights materialize in the fog ahead, or spots a stopped vehicle. By the time their brain registers the hazard, their 1.5 seconds of perception and reaction time have already closed most or all of the gap. Then, when the brakes finally engage on ice, the stopping distance can be two to ten times longer than on dry pavement. Another car joins the pileup. Then another. And another. These aren't "accidents." They're predictable outcomes of driving faster than your eye lead time and road conditions allow. The Mathematics of Impact Here's where speed becomes deadly. Every time you double your speed, you quadruple the force of impact. This is basic physics: kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity. A crash at 100 km/h (62 mph) doesn't deliver twice the impact force of a crash at 50 km/h (31 mph). It delivers four times the force. At 140 km/h (87 mph) versus 70 km/h (43 mph), you're looking at four times the destructive energy. These are forces the human body simply cannot withstand. So while speed itself doesn't kill, the impact generated by speed absolutely does. And that impact becomes inevitable when drivers combine speed with inadequate eye lead time. The Real Safety Message We need to stop telling drivers that "speed kills" and start teaching them something more useful and more honest: You must always be able to stop within the distance you can see, including the invisible perception and reaction time. This principle applies at any speed, in any conditions. Whether you're driving at night, in a blizzard, in dense fog, or on a sun-drenched highway, the rule is the same. If your eye lead time doesn't extend far enough to allow you to perceive a hazard, react to it, and bring your vehicle to a complete stop before reaching it, you're driving too fast for conditions, even if you're under the speed limit. The speed limit tells you the maximum legal speed. Your eye lead time and visibility tell you the maximum safe speed. They're not always the same number. Until we make this fundamental understanding part of driver education and testing, until we teach new drivers to constantly calibrate their speed to their visual scanning distance, we'll continue to see the same preventable tragedies play out on our roads. Not because speed kills, but because inadequate eye lead time combined with speed guarantees a deadly impact.