There Is No Substitute

The widow of Roger W. Rodas, who was driving a Porsche sports car that crashed and killed actor Paul Walker sued the automaker on Monday, claiming design flaws caused both men to die in a fiery crash in November. The wrongful death lawsuit by Kristine M. Rodas says her husband was driving at fifty-five miles per hour. Not at unsafe speeds as law enforcement investigators determined before it crashed last year killing her spouse and the star of the Fast and Furious. Mister Rodas was driving a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT, which is capable of doing more than two hundred miles per hour, but his wife's lawsuit says the vehicle lacked a proper crash cage and safety features in the gas tank that would have saved both men's lives.The suit also insists that a failure in the car's suspension system forced it to careen out of control and strike three trees while driving down a street in Santa Clarita.
Okay. Let's start with that last little bit. "Driving down a street in Santa Clarita." While it is the third largest city in Los Angeles County, the posted speed limits inside the city limits is under fifty-five miles per hour. Even though city officials raised the limit on that particular stretch of Hercules Street from thirty-five to forty-five miles per hour last year, Rodas and Walker were traveling in excess of that. “It’s a great road for racing your car up and down because it’s a sweeping curve," a resident of the area said. "If you come up here at ten or eleven at night, you’ll hear the performance cars racing in the area.”
Add to that the results of an investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and California Highway Patrol released in March that concluded it was unsafe speed and not mechanical problems that caused the crash. But subtract that this investigation was aided by engineers from Porsche, who evaluated the wreckage of the rare car. That rare car in all its many pieces. 
I know this one by heart. When my son plays his racing games on his Xbox, and he rolls his virtual Carrera off the side of the highway, he looks down in disgust in his controller. He doesn't blame his hands. He blames the machine.