Quote:
Originally Posted by UFO
. . . On a drag strip, you are looking for that light to drop and the best anyone can do is 0.4 seconds to start. . . .
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That 0.400 seconds does include human reaction time, the vehicle's mechanical reaction time, and also the time to transit the roll-out distance (allowing the beam broken by the front tires while staging to be reconnected ).
Alert (key word
alert) human reaction times are common in the 0.170 to 0.180 second range. However, going beyond the binary stop/go decision to the processing and decision making of whether one is dealing with a superfluous brake tap, normal to moderate slowing, or heavy emergency braking can add significantly to the total time involved.
While the likelihood of contact increases (exponentially?) with closer following distances, the impact velocity decreases, since the velocity of the leading vehicle has had less time to change.