How much damage can you do with a car?

[UsefulPlayer 1]

I remember watching some talks about gun laws and there's always a person who says something about how cars can be just as dangerous in the wrong hands.

So just how dangerous is a car in the wrong hands? How much damage do you think you can do behind the wheel if you really wanted to?


I actually feel like I've killed more people in GTA behind the wheel than with a gun.

 

[DoPo]

Well, me, specifically, not much. I can't drive, I'll at most crash a car into another car, assuming the second car is directly in front of back of the one I'd drive.

Still, as for how much damage can there be - cars are sort of one of the top stuff that kill and injure people every single day. I do not know how the amount of car injuries compare to gun injuries overall but still, even if the cars are behind, it's still friggin a lot. Heck, I don't even know that many people who've had contact with guns as a whole, while I can immediately think of half a dozen that died due to car accidents. And another 20 or so who have been in car accidents. Even I've been in a couple (very, very minor ones) plus barely avoided another dozen or so. I'd rather not underestimate cars at all.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Quite a bit actually. Bicycling is a pretty big thing in my community, and the cyclists usually ride in big packs and refuse to get out of the way of cars. If I really wanted to I could easily find a group of 20 or more to plow into at top speed.

 

[madwarper]

A whole lot of damage.

Just consider all the unintentional loss of life caused by automobile accidents, pile-ups, hit and runs, etc. and how much more deadly they'd be when intentional.

Spoiler: Personal story

A good friend of mine, Steve, had a brother who was on life support. The family (Steve, his parents and sister) made the decision to go down and pull the plug. Steve and his father were in the lead car and his mother and sister were in the follow car.

While traveling to his brother's location, 2 students in a car traveling in the opposite direction crossed over into oncoming traffic, crashed head long into the lead car, killing all 4, while his mother and sister could do nothing but watch in horror. And then, still had to go down to pull the plug on the brother.

 

[Jamash]

A lot.

The most dangerous thing about cars is the massive amounts of momentum, inertia and potential energy that can be generated at speed, energy which can cause the car (or anything falling off or released from the car) to have a lot more destructive power than it's weight alone (they say that in an accident, an average passenger in the back seat can hit the person in front with the force of a baby elephant if they're not wearing a seatbelt).

One of the worst automotive accidents in history, the 1955 Le Mans disaster [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_Le_Mans_disaster], caused 84 fatalities and 120 injuries, because a car disintegrated at 150mph and individual parts ripped through the massed spectators like grapeshot from a cannon.

Once a car gain enough speed and momentum, it has the potential to be more destructive than a gun or a bomb, depending on what it hits.

Fortunately, most cars don't travel fast enough or hit groups of people to cause such high fatalities and most pedestrianised areas where people congregate have barriers and obstacles which will stop cars, so the majority of car journeys end without incident, but still the potential is there, just like a aeroplane has the potential to wipe out a village if it falls on it from the sky.