> So, if you wanted the equivalent of being dropped off a 50-story building, you'd have to be speeding at 500 mph, rather than just 50.
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> -zK

Actually, the speed at which you hit the ground is proportional to the square root of the height of the fall, not to the height.

I did some calculations, and assuming that one story is about 4 meters (so a 50-story building is 200 meters tall) you'd land at 140 miles per hour from a 50-story fall.

(For a 50-miles-per-hour landing, you'd have to fall from a height of 25 meters, which is about six stories. Close enough.)

Of course, those calculations assume no air resistance. You said "if you dropped your car" so I'll assume that's what's falling. I assume a typical car is 3000 pounds. If the car is horizontal when dropped, I assume the cross-sectional area is 8 square meters and the drag coefficient is 1. If the car is vertical when dropped, I assume the product of the drag coefficient and the cross-sectional area is 8.5 square feet.

For a car dropped pointing horizontally, air resistance slows it down to about 100 to 110 miles per hour if dropped from 50 stories. To get it to be going 50 miles per hour upon landing, you only need to move it up to the seventh story.

For a car dropped pointing downward, air resistance actually doesn't slow it down that much; if dropped from 50 stories, it's still going more than 130 miles per hour.

Lucky "Which, of course, means that, if two cars going 50 or 55 miles per hour collide with each other head-on, it's the equivalent of dropping a horizontal car off a 50-story building" Wizard