An interactive model that visualizes how vehicle speed affects:
- travel time per 100 km
- fuel consumption
- diminishing returns of speed
- remaining potential to gain time
- optimal driving zones
The goal is to provide a simple, intuitive tool for understanding why going faster doesn’t always save as much time as people expect, and why fuel and risk both rise disproportionately at high speeds.
Demno runs on GitHub Pages here: https://kai-probably.github.io/speed-kills/
The linked page will automatically render the interactive HTML prototype included in this repository within the browser – no backend, no build tools, no dependencies.
Travel time per 100 km follows a simple formula: time = 6000 / speed This makes it very clear how diminishing returns work:
- increasing from 60 → 80 km/h saves 15 minutes
- increasing from 120 → 140 km/h saves ~2 minutes
- increasing from 160 → 200 km/h saves less than 1 minute
The faster you already are, the less time you can save by going even faster.
To visualize diminishing returns more intuitively, we normalize “improvement potential” between two anchor speeds:
30 km/h = 100% potential left
200 km/h = 0% potential left
This shows how much benefit is still available by going faster.
The bar shrinks and changes color as speed increases.
A lightweight cubic model approximates the typical fuel efficiency curve:
- best around 70–90 km/h
- worsens above 100 km/h
- rises steeply past 130 km/h
This is not tied to a specific car but reflects general aerodynamic and engine-load behaviors.
The speed bar is divided into color-coded zones:
| Speed Range | Zone Description |
|---|---|
| 50–80 km/h | Win–win: fast & efficient |
| 80–100 km/h | Fuel-efficiency sweet spot |
| 100–120 km/h | Time-efficiency plateau |
| 120–140 km/h | Risk rising |
| 140–200 km/h | Crash severity increases super-linearly |
I used T(v)=6000/v and defined a cut-off where the next +10 km/h stops saving a meaningful amount of time; solving that gives about 93.7 km/h. The cut-off is roughly one minute saved per 100 km for the next +10 km/h. Below that, gains shift from minutes to seconds, which I defined as the “not worth it” point.
♥︎ Kai