It doesn't matter what car he was driving the lorry would always catch him - it was all in his head a nervous breakdown.

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What kind of 3.2L car can only do 80 or 90 mph LOL. I don't know how American car makers get so few horse power out of such big engines. A friend had a 3.0L car made in UK about the same time (early 70's)and it was easily capable of about 125 mph! As you said Truck driver comes up behind car being a prat, car driver puts his foot down, film over, running time about 10 mins.

"Why does the guy in the car not just put his foot down and drive away from the truck"?
It's because the truck driver has some.some.some souped-upped diesel.Daves car's just not that powerful.he can't go around driving at 80 or 90 miles an hour.as soon as he stops concentrating he'd go back to 60 or 70 like he always does, he can't help it, it's a habit I guess.take it easy.take it easy!

He's going in to your room, it's
you
he wantsoffer him yourself!!

It would not even need to be a fast car to outrun a truck. I remember seeing this for the first time as a kid 40 years ago and thinking "Why does the guy in the car not just put his foot down and drive away from the truck"? I found out later that somehow in America the managed to produce 5 or 6 litre V8 cars that could only do 70mph.

Actually, a race bicyclist could make for a pretty interesting match-up, depending on what roads were used. The truck might have a speed advantage on an open road with lots of room for acceleration and momentum, but a bike with a fast rider could make quick maneuvers and turnarounds that the truck couldn't even
begin
to follow, and I bet the rider could out-accelerate that tanker from a standing stop even if its tank trailer were empty (which I suspect it was). "OK, pal, it's your brute force versus my agility and stamina go ahead and try me!"

a bicycle would be really coolimagine trying to avoid that truck!

Much better with an ordinary Plymouth (R.I.P.) sedan. It made Mann seem like most of us, an 'Everyman' (as they used to say back then). Relatively few Americans in 1971 had sports cars or muscle cars, and even fewer people were driving anything like an SUV. (A
Jeepster?!
Jeepers!) When I saw this movie on its first airing, as an ABC Movie Of The Week, I was ten years old and my family's car was a fairly bare-bones 1970 Plymouth Duster with the 198-cubic-inch six under the hood. The instrument panel on Mann's Valiant was the same as what we had, so during the hill-climbing scenes, when its idiot lights were all flashing and his engine was overheating, I had all the more reason to be rooting for him.

You don't need a flux capacitor to, hypothetically, create a situation like this on the American road today. With so many poorly trained and unprofessional drivers, especially among truckers, this movie feels chillingly real.

BMW M3 - 1985, Audi TT - 1998, Porche 911 GT3 - 1999, the film 1971. Spot the problem
I guess if they had a flux capacitor and managed to get to 88 mph it might be possible.

It is not interesting to me.