Sustained high speed damaging?

sports_brah

sports_brah

sports_brah

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This popped up the other day, and I'm curious if anyone has any input.

Does reaching the max speed of a car put significantly more wear on the vehicle?

For example driving over a few hundred miles, having 5 min stretches of reaching the top speed of the car (say for the sake of argument 240km/hr) with the rest of the journey varying from 100km-160km/hr.

Is it one of those things you are not really meant to reach, and should stay like within 20% of?

And before anyone asks, this isn't about myself, I'm just curious, especially since cars like BMW seem to be restricted to 155mph.
 
The working parts will obviously be under more stress when operating at their physical limits. This of course shortens the lifespan of the car. The extent will depend on various factors that will change from car to car.

For a lot of machines demand:wear is exponential in scale.
 
sports_brah said:
I remember reading somewhere you've got a BMW? Therefore you being at 155mph probably wasn't your cars top speed?
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I'd imagine that it isn't far off top speed for a 530i.

As long as temperatures don't start rising I'd imagine that maxing your car out in top gear wouldn't do too much harm. Some cars only hit their max speed in lower gears and I'd imagine this would do more harm due to the higher revs.
 
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sports_brah said:
I remember reading somewhere you've got a BMW? Therefore you being at 155mph probably wasn't your cars top speed?
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This is true, once de-limited 530i's have been known to go on to 155.4mph, sometimes 155.6mph :p

It's not going much, if at all, faster than 155, limiter or no limiter. It's not powerful enough. The auto tops out at 152mph and is limited by gearing not a limiter, so the manual has a few more mph in it but not much.
 
[TW]Fox;25303016 said:
This is true, once de-limited 530i's have been known to go on to 155.4mph, sometimes 155.6mph :p

It's not going much, if at all, faster than 155, limiter or no limiter. It's not powerful enough. The auto tops out at 152mph and is limited by gearing not a limiter, so the manual has a few more mph in it but not much.
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Ah fair enough, didn't have a clue. :o

So general consensus, every now and then it's not going to kill the car, and it won't do serious damage.

Thanks, was just curious. :)


edit: What bearings would it have on the oil in the car, or does the oil not care? ^^
 
Yes. and No. If you sat at 30MPH in 1st gear bouncing off the limiter and sitting at 140 mph bouncing off the limiter, the engine would be under the same amount of load.

Other parts would obviously wear faster, such as bearings in the pulleys, gearbox and heat would put tyres under more pressure. and brakes if you're stopping from a high speed.
 
When I first got the car and I had a play with a mate in his RS. Slowing down and changing gear gave me a horrible turkey noise, completely ripped open the recirc valve.

Obviously this was done on a old airfield.
 
It's just like wear and tear - the faster something spins/moves, the quicker it'll wear.

A well maintained car will be impacted less by pushing the car to the limit, but still, driving a car at 100% of its mechanical capacity will accelerate wear over driving it below it.

I don't chase the red line, and take it easy over bumps and run regular maintenance on the car to allow me the option of "going mad" from time to time.
 
I agree doing it every now and then isn't going to do any harm (providing its not into a childs face)

For family illnesses couple years back, I had to travel back from Amsterdam to Southampton as fast as possible and I had my car with me.

I know for 2 hours of that journey I didn't go under 120mph - The joys of motorways at 4am.

Now, that did the car absolutely no good at all. After that journey back the car just felt absolutely dog awful and tired... and that was after having to replace all the oil it burnt off, exhaust mounts, rear bushes and engine mounts that all broke as a result of that journey.

Yes, this was a 12 year old BMW at the time, but still.. it did it no favours!
 
Sounds like your car was just a shed. There is no way that just doing 120 would have done that to an otherwise good condition car.
 
Yeah It wasn't as pristine as it should have been without a doubt.. But it was in a much better state before hand.

Obviously a lot of those faults I said would have happened anyway down the line abit as they were clearly parts warn out anyway. Just doing that journey at those speeds accelerated the process.
 
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