Like many of you, I have spent hours and hours racing along public highways at 180-plus km/hour.

At that speed on the typical German autobahn, I usually stay in the middle lane. That allows me to safely pass slower vehicles to the right, and stay out of the way of the 240 km/hour screamers on the left.

Porsche’s Boxster Spyder is beautifully engineered for high speeds — but so are all sorts of thoroughly mainstream cars…

I’ve done this in German and Italian sports cars, Korean SUVs (sport-utility vehicles), Swedish sedans and American runabouts. All new models today are engineered to safely handle 180 km/hour — as long as the road and traffic conditions allow for it and the driver has the skill. Plenty of cars are drama-free at 240 km/hour or more.

But in Canada, if you drive like you’re on the autobahn you’ll be arrested, slapped with massive fins and have your car impounded. Your life will be torn apart for doing something completely legal in Germany, the richest and best developed country in Europe.

A city runabout like Volkswagen’s Golf is as happy on the German autobahn at 180 km/hour as it is in the city doing grocery errands.

Here in Canada, when a provincial government raises the maximum speed to 120 km/hour, it becomes a national event, perhaps even a crisis in the eyes of some. They are the ones who argue that 120 is excessive and uncivilized. They are the ones who say such speeds are dangerous to the general public and wastefully burn fuel. Drivers in Canada, their argument goes, are not as well trained as those in Germany – and the licensing standards in Canada are lax if not criminally weak.

Government agencies such as the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia trot out claims such as the one we saw today: “On average, 94 people die every year in B.C. in crashes involving speeding.”

We have good reason to believe this sort of claim is misleading at best and fearmongering at its worst. Speeding in and of itself is not a killer, not if you’re in the right vehicle, if you have the proper training and if you’re driving behavior is governed by the road and weather conditions.

Speed is a symptom of bad driving — going too fast for the conditions in an ill-suited vehicle.

Bad driving, on the other hand, is deadly. And excessive speed is a symptom of bad driving, not the cause of car crashes. Speed alone is just a factor in the physics of motor vehicles in motion. If the ICBC and its ilk just came out and said bad driving is a killer, we’d all be better off.

But singling out speeding? Well, as Sensebc.org pointed out in a video that has been seen by about 1.6 million people in two years, absurdly low speed limits in Canada exist to enrich governments at least in part.

Speed Kills Your Pocketbook (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BKdbxX1pDw) is 14-minutes of research and logic intended to shame regulators, the police and lazy members of the news media – media types who parrot the phrase “speed kills” without thinking.

“Many speed limits are set far too low for conditions and that seems to be where the majority of the ticketing is,” says filmmaker Chris Thompson. Thompson cites a B.C. Ministry of Transportation report that argued “speed limits should be set so that a majority of motorists observe it voluntarily and enforcement can be directed to the minority of offenders.”

Seems reasonable enough, if safe motoring is the priority. What if it’s not? Thompson’s argument in part is that speed enforcement in Canada is often about revenue generation, not just safety. Well of course it is. Speeding tickets are worth millions to governments across Canada.

Thompson, me, many others often point out that the vehicles we drive today are brilliantly engineered. Today’s Ford Focus econobox has far better braking, steering and handling than the best sports cars of my youth; it is perfectly happy on the autobahn at 180. As well, Thompson’s video does an excellent job of illustrating how our roads are wonderfully well engineered. So we have good roads and great cars.

Given all that, is seems reasonable to conclude that many posted speed limits are arbitrary, there only to catch drivers going a little too fast so that the local cops can bring in some extra cash for the government.

We’re entering the summer holiday driving season, which means you will now be bombarded with messages about how “speed kills.” Bad driving, dangerous driving is the enemy, however.

If you’re a good driver in a modern car, I’ll happy to see you at 180 on the autobahn this summer.