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A lot of American drivers are infatuated with neck snapping acceleration, to the exclusion of handling or breaking power. It's not an uncommon thing for high school males to time their time to 60 mph for hours on end.
I'm not sure why this is. We do have lots and lots of land to lay out straight, wide highways, with frequent stop lights, so you can have 10 mini drag races every mile. Also, drag racing to 60 is safer than high speed curves, the worst you can do is burn a little rubber and wear out your clutch, as opposed to flying off the curve into a tree.
That being said, I've almost always owned and driven underpowered cars (by American standards), Ford Escorts, Subaru station wagons, my 78 Fairmont 4 banger wagon(the 960 is an exception, though it still has a poorer power to weight ratio as it's a wagon), so I'm better at high speed turns.
So, to sum up, typical American's don't routinely drive fast, but will try very hard toget to 55 mph before the people in the lane next to them, and once they start cornering fast enough to hear tires squealing, they slow way down.
As an addendum, we do have lots of boats and trailers (caravans) here too, and people will pull them. Nothing like pulling 3000 pounds to take care of any extra horsepower you have.
A. Rightmann
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