In Finland, the top speed on the expressways is 74 miles an hour. Motorsports is very popular, and the Nordic country is known for some of the best racing drivers in the world. Like a lot of European countries, Finland loves its cars. “Finnish motorsport drivers have speed in their genes,” one headline reads.

And—speeding tickets are calculated based on income. “The minimum is six euros per day fine so it is always at least that, but it can go all the way to tens of thousands.”

I first learned about this seeming contradiction—very tough on motorists, but in love with the car—because, improbably maybe, my wife and I have been watching old episodes of the motoring journalism show Top Gear on the BBC, and its successor in America, through Amazon, The Grand Tour.

These three guys—Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond—may not be responsible drivers—but they’re damn good drivers. And I suppose that buys you a little bit of irresponsibility, especially in a contained area or a closed course. There’s a difference between pushing a car to its limit on a racetrack and drag-racing on a public road (well…they did that too, or at least they cut it to look like they did).

But despite some of the antics, you can tell these guys respect the car as a miracle of engineering. That’s interesting, and I think America’s received way of thinking about the car has trouble with this.

In one episode, the trio went to Finland for gravel-road rally racing with beater cars—a Finnish specialty, apparently. And in the introduction to Finland, they discussed the country’s love of motorsports—of the car as a marvel of engineering and of what a skilled handler can do with it—alongside the country’s strict and, if you have a high income, exorbitant traffic fines.

Obviously, the Finns don’t think of this as being contradictory. So we should think about what it feels like to not think it’s contradictory. What do you have to think about the car in order to be able to love it, and use it in an everyday context, but also take driving violations very seriously? (And it pays off, because Finland is well towards the low end of traffic deaths as a share of population among European countries.)

I can’t answer that expertly, of course, but here’s an interesting Reddit thread on various reasons for Europe’s generally lower traffic fatalities compared to the United States. Some of it is design-related: lots of roundabouts rather than intersections. Some is down to the stricter nature of licensing rules and tests. Obviously those aren’t the only reasons. As usual, I think about this stuff a little abstractly.

When I talk about respecting the car, I mean something like, think of the car like a gun: a fearsome tool that can very easily be misused, which demands a sober responsibility of its user. I get the sense that Europe retains that general view of the car. That’s how you can get higher speed limits, more difficult licensing rules, more exorbitant traffic fines—and no hint of “ban cars” or “car-hating” sentiment in any of it.

I tend not to be one of those people who says “Let’s be more like Europe!” I like to think that when it comes to urbanism, America has its own historic cities that can serve as examples for good urbanism today. We don’t need to import that from abroad—or rather, we did, before American land use broke with the general style that prevailed in Europe and basically everywhere else.

But when it comes to cars, specifically, it seems we could use some imports.

Social card image credit Flickr/Ninara, CC BY 2.0

Related Reading:

The U-Turn Not Taken

Mis-Carriage Of Justice

What I Mean By “The Car”

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