Does this make sense?

imported post

Well.. I don't have a lot of experience running into cars, but the one time I did (1976 Honda CB750F, car pulled out in front of me from a stop sign) I hit it at maybe 15-20 mph - I was hard on the brakes. The front end was pretty much trashed, along with the handlebar-mount fairing.
Since impact energy is the square of the speed ratio:
155/20 = 7.75, 7.75^2 = 60 times the impact energy (of my 20 mph crash) - that bike should have been wadded into a ball with that much kinetic energy.
I'm sure that there may be mitigating factors - that's why I thought I'd ask on the forum & see what the pro's think!

imported post

Wow! OK, I'm convinced - no matter how fast the guy was going, he was a fool. What frustrates me the most about this is that things such as this are too common. I remember many years ago riding with a friend from work. He had a 500 Suzuki twin, and I had my 750F. As we went up a windy mountain road, he was passing cars in curves, sometimes 2 or 3 at a time, and he couldn't understand why I wasn't keeping up with him. Another co-worker had a friend with a first-generation Goldwing who would lane-split at 80-90 mph, and was eventually killed doing this.
My son worked for a time as an ICU nurse in Reno, and had a bag-full of stories about the motorcyclists they brought in, often drunk, but typically damaged from "failure to negotiate a curve" injuries.