on second thought, never mind, i probably know your answer.
"ban everything dangerous until there's no possible way anyone can get hurt" is not what freedom is.
that seems like a good way to increase road fatalities
but don't let that stop you from passing 20 more laws, and then banning people from driving altogether after you realize that, as it turns out, criminals don't follow the law.
which is already happening, just look at the autonomous driving effort. which i'm sure makes you very happy. soon, nobody will drive, we will all be living in a perfect harmonious utopia of robotic sentience.
first of all, a minivan can kill you doing 10mph.
second, cars with this much power (and more importantly, top speed), have been around for a long time. you can build an 8-second quarter mile car in your garage and drive it on the street.
more nanny-state nonsense. "think of the children".
I really think it boils down to that some people value their own personal enjoyment over other people's safety. The sad truth is that you could absolutely enjoy vehicles like that but without endangering safety, by going to a race track. There's literally race days even for road-legal vehicles.
I think the better metric is the number of deaths per billion vehicle-km. In your metric most European countries have half the deaths than the US, but it's mostly explained by the fact that we drive less. I guess people had fewer cars and drove less in the 1930…
EDIT:
I found the stats: in 1930 you had 15.12 deaths per 100 million miles vehicle, in 2014 1.08. So the reduction is not 2.5x, but 15x!
Don't assume that everybody will.
I guess the question is where the line is drawn between sensible and "nanny-state" regulation.
Electric vehicles are going to take something, once rare, and make it common. Once it becomes common, the accident incidents will be more than just statistical noise, and legislative action may follow.
The NHTSA and FMCSA are currently working on a proposal for large commercial vehicles that would artificially limit their maximum speed to 68 mph. So it isn't unheard of for legislation to be created to target new vehicles which aims to improve public safety.
Your argument is comparable to banning sharp knives because someone started selling them cheaper than butter knives. Both types have always been sufficiently available and dangerous that making one more common than the other isn't going to change anything
Velocity is a much more obvious policy knob to tune for the goal of less vehicular deaths and injuries.
Similarly, in most places, speed limits are actually a little lower than they would be in the ideal world where everybody obeys them, to account for the fact that most people actually go a bit over the speed limit. And there are still highways that have absurdly slow speed limits that date back to the 1973 oil crisis (federal law set a maximum speed limit of 55mph, and not all highways have recovered from that yet).
Zero to sixty in 2.5 seconds is fun, no doubt about it, but it is fun on a racetrack. You can go on YouTube right now and find dozens of people utilising Tesla's existing "ludicrous mode" on public streets.
And here's the thing, if people want to endanger their own lives that's fine. But they aren't just endangering their own lives, they're also endangering both other road users and pedestrians (when they eventually lose control).
I don't think anything has been done about this yet because Teslas are still pretty uncommon, and the features which unlock "ludicrous mode" are even more uncommon (like 1% of 1%). But once electric vehicles are the norm and the body count racks up, we'll see legislative action.
As an aside you could tie maximum acceleration into road conditions, including lowing it if the road is icy or wet, or increasing it on surfaces that provide superior grip (like freeways).