jimf

The French tried having a 105PS limit for a while. It had no effect on road casualties as most of them involve their teenagers on motards and scooters. We had the 55mph national speed limit in the US. When they finally loosened the restriction to 65mph the doom-and-gloomers all said there would be death on the streets; fatalities actually declined significantly, some 2,600 fewer (out of about 40,000). Now some states have relaxed limits even further and fatalities have continued to drop. The focus on speed enforcement always drove me crazy. In the US the average speed before a traffic accident is all of 29mph[1]. If you take the high-speed highways out of the picture it drops only 2mph, to 27mph. That implies quite strongly that very few accidents have speed as a significant cause. Very high rates of speed clearly increase the odds of fatalities if you're in a crash, but very high speed crashes are not very common. The majority of accidents occur as a result of a failure to yield right-of-way. Even at low speed this is very dangerous, as one vehicle usually broadsides the other or impacts at an angle. This is why they started doing off-axis crash testing and pushed for improved side impact protection. If they were really interested in safety, then, they'd be patrolling the intersections and writing tickets to e.g. red-light runners. Maybe they do this in other countries but in the US it's quite rare; you primarily see the cops sitting on long straightaways where accidents almost never happen. Whether this is done for revenue reasons (speeding tickets are big money and they can stop people all day long) or just because it's easy (sit there doing paperwork until the radar gun chirps) is debatable, but whatever the reason it's what they do. I think there's a place for that enforcement but it should be secondary. The only plus is that in most areas the relaxed speed limits in recent years have meant that it's no longer an obvious profit center to do enforcement on the highways, and enforcement is not as draconian as it used to be. Regarding voluntary limits, the major bike manufacturers had voluntarily limited their bikes to 300kph through the 2000s in an attempt to head off Euro legislation that seemed to be brewing during the top-speed wars in the 1990s. BMW broke that gentleman's agreement with the S1000RR. We don't seem to be back into a top speed war again, though; instead, it's who can lay down the most horsepower. A decade ago 150hp was a lot, today it's par for the course for literbikes and a number of bikes are pushing 200. Those are numbers that would have required a first-class rider to keep the bike on the road a decade ago, but with today's electronic aids the bikes are pretty docile unless you go out of your way to turn off all the safety mechanisms. What's more, most of today's safety mechanisms are relatively unintrusive -- the bikes are still bloody fast even with everything turned on. It's like we can eat our cake and have it too. [1] I've not tried to look up that data in more than a decade and it's possible it has changed since, although it had held pretty steady for a long time so I think it's probably reasonably close even today.

lawyers, always blame the lawyers although, it would be nice to able to get away with saying Americans just aren't man enough but it would be disingenuous to do something like that, directly anyway Indeed :-). Trust me, we've got people just as speed crazy over here as any that exist in Europe. 115mph is pretty quick for the roads where I live, and I don't get up into that range very often and other than philosophically I don't care that the FJ is limited that way, but out west there are places you could ride at that speed for several hours just to get between towns (and in some cases never encounter a single corner along the way). But we really are lawyer-happy on this side of the pond, and that does often affect whether or not widgetry gets locked down in one way or another, and you can certainly be suspicious of lawyer involvement any time a manufacturer has US-only restrictions. That's the one thing I always liked about Europe: It seemed to me that by and large adults are left to make their own decisions over their safety. Like, if you don't think you can walk up that medieval stairway without a rail without falling off, then you should decide for yourself not to do that.

Anything that makes the front end light could contribute to this. I used to get it regularly with my SV650S with the top case when running at triple-digit speeds. I could see a windscreen contributing, or even drag on the rider. I rather wonder if this is why US-spec FJs are limited to 115mph.

My first motorcycle was a cruiser and I bought a giant windscreen. I rapidly found that crosswinds made it unstable, and since it was above eye level the rain made it quite difficult to see. Since that time I've preferred enough windshield to take the air off my chest, but to leave my head out in clean air. Most sportbike windshields, tiny as they are, do this pretty well. Having said that, when the temperatures are in the mid-30s and it's raining like hell I don't mind something with a little more coverage.