This includes supercars with $1M price tags right? Honest question: why aren't all supercars electric if this is possible? I get that there are other parameters important for driving fast, like handling, but won't a million-dollar electric Bugatti always be faster than a gas one?
One answer comes by looking at the 0-100 times instead of just 0-60.
You can dig up lots of videos where they race Teslas against Lamborghinis and Ferraris. Up to 60 the supercar is barely hanging on, but at that point the Tesla is tapped out while the supercar still has plenty of acceleration, and it completely leaves it behind.
Not really. If you see both figures on the same page without any units named, you can generally assume from the context that 0-60 and 0-100 bare both in miles.
0-100 mph is still a pretty common performance indicator in its own right, it's just less commonly used compared to 0-60.
It's not faster, it's quicker, and there's an important distinction between the two—particularly for $M car owners.
Going from 0-60 is a nice perk (quick), but until these cars can hold that speed longer (fast) many car enthusiasts aren't likely to bite.
The most important part of your comment was the other parameters, not of speed but of the car itself. A friend of mine is a Ferrari owner who admires what Tesla can do but will die before he gives up the hard roar of a powerful engine.
Yes, but that's only true for driving on the public road in what is "the wrong gear" for any serious racing driver. On a track it is all about power, because torque is just a figure that you change with the gearbox.
High revving high power output engines (for example Formula 1 until 2004, which still holds half the lap records) have a low torque number, but more rev-range to apply to the gearbox allowing higher actual output to the wheels in the end. Essentially the torque number is just power divided by revs (Newton per meter in SI units).
So an older Formula 1 car that revs to 18.000 rpm has a far lower torque number than your mom's diesel road car. Yet that F1 car does insane acceleration from 0 to 200 km/h and has 700+ bhp while the road car would have around 100 maybe 150 bhp.
Right now a Tesla will overheat if you run it at top speed consistently. Electric is unmatched for instant torque, but the current battery technology makes electric unsuitable for sustained high speed.
As far as practical power, electric is far more useful than gasoline for aggressive city and interstate driving (unless you have a long stretch of open pavement). The lack of transmission gives a distinct advantage in surprise-passing a gasoline sports car. The thrill of instant power cannot be overstated!
Le Mans would probably be the worst place to get an all electric car performing adequately. Energy density and refill times just aren't anywhere near up to the task compared to gasoline.
What if an all electric car was equipped with a complete battery swap out mechanism. Stock up a bunch of batteries. Pop out the dead one, pop in a fresh one, begin charging the dead one to reuse in a few hours (you may need quite a few spares)
This could actually REDUCE refill times (if the swap out is efficient enough). If temperatures could be controlled to allow it to run in an all out mode, this could be a competitive edge?
Or would this be somehow disallowed? I imagine this would be akin to swapping out the complete fuel tank in a car instead of refueling the tank, and I have no idea about racing rules.
> This could actually REDUCE refill times (if the swap out is efficient enough)
Have you ever watched Formula 1 or NASCAR? They can fill 20 gallons of fuel in ~10 seconds. Do you really think a battery swap system could even come close to competing with that?
Just did some googling, and _including_ exit and entry through pit lanes, fastest refuel is 51.3s. I think a battery swap would be reeeeeally tough to accomplish.
And most cars refuel every 14 laps, and races are about 384 laps. Totals over 5000km in 24hrs. That's a lot of batteries...
Just for comparison, your numbers come out to one refill every 52 minutes. If we assume that charging a battery takes about an hour and a half (pretty reasonable based on current charge times for an 85 kWh battery), you really only need 3 batteries total. The battery swap that Tesla originally demoed was done in 90 seconds, and that was obviously for a low-speed, consumer-friendly environment. I don't see why you couldn't do a battery swap in 60 seconds if that was an engineering priority.
I still think this is a pipe dream with current battery tech for other reasons (weight, power density, overheating, etc.), but from a logistics standpoint it might actually be possible.
Just moving the mass in and out seems doable with proper design and gear (some kind of hydraulic lift?), but can you find a competitive car design where the battery is mounted properly (low and central) and still allows good enough access? Operator safety is of course an issue as well, you really would not want some power switch to fail.
Before they installed some additional armor to the bottom of the Model S to increase crash safety in the event the car goes over something dangerous sticking up in the road, the Model S actually possessed the ability to do a quick battery swap by dropping the battery. There's a video out there with Elon Musk demonstrating the functionality.
It never took off, I guess because the infrastructure never existed, and because of the aforementioned armor issues. It's too bad. I always thought battery swaps would be an ideal way to deal with the aging of these batteries. Depreciate the value of the battery based on some formula and allow people to get a newer one once their battery passes some usage threshold, seamlessly, and bill them for the upgrade.
Good question. I'd say it is probably possible to replace a battery pack on the gasoline-refill time scale with a well-engineered drive-over clip-in type mechanism or a side-trolley replacement mechanism.
They replace whole nose assemblies in <30sec in F1. Audi some years ago replaced the entire rear transaxle & suspension assembly at LeMans in < 5 minutes in the middle of the night, because they'd anticipated the potential need for it and done the prior engineering necessary (iirc, that car finished 2nd and their other one won).
Reliability and safety would take some real work, just like the high-speed fuel rigs previously used in F1.
Tesla did this, it was operational in california, and all cars were designed with this capability. you can find the video where they demo'd this. There was little or no customer demand, because supercharging works so well on teslas that its a fine solution for most people's long trips.
The batteries heat up terribly as well. I am not sure whether the power electronics can dissipate the heat, but they are generally easier to cool than batteries because the electronics are centralized and smaller. The problem with batteries is that their heating is proportional to the square of their current output, so when you are extracting a lot of energy from them, the batteries get very hot, and there are a lot of them.
Actually, how does the tesla cools down? I have seen in pictures of the battery that they have pipes connected, does those pipes goes to a heat radiator? I'm curious now.
Yes, the car has a radiator to help cool the batteries. I am a former owner who had a coolant leak due to underbody damage. Unfortunately, even Tesla service wasn't aware that their car had a radiator.
Yeah, the front grill that's low down provides airflow for the battery cooling system. There's also an extremely loud fan for it which comes on occasionally, at high temperatures while driving or at more modest temperatures while supercharging.
There's also the issue of cooling the electric motor.
In addition to the batteries, the 3-phase IGBT inverter is watercooled with the aid of a triangular waterblock (each phase corresponds to one side of the block). [1]
That photo of the inverter is beautiful, as I child I was passionated about electronics, I made some projects like audio amplifier and FM transmitter, never thought we were going to have electronics in cars at this level. Now I wonder how reliable are Teslas, what are the parts that are prone to fail. Going to do a research on youtube right now :)
In theory, properly sized and protected from motor transienst, the power electronics should last the lifetime of the car (and then some). Electric locomotives and EMUs have been using IGBTs for decades in similar arrangements with active cooling.
> Electric is unmatched for instant torque, but the current battery technology makes electric unsuitable for sustained high speed.
Well, not really (see Formula-E). If you want a battery that can sustain high power output (high specific power, e.g. LiFePO4), you have to go to a different chemistry than what Tesla uses (high specific energy, LiNiCoAlO2). Tesla could make a Model S that went fast around a racetrack, but it would mean sacrificing range. Since the 0-60 is mainly a gimmick, it's not worth sacrifising usability for.
> The lack of transmission gives a distinct advantage in surprise-passing a gasoline sports car.
Not sure if the advantage is that great: in the case of a modern >250 hp gasoline sports car with the de rigueur dual-clutch semiautomatic gearbox, the person in the sports car would plant their foot and be in the engine's optimal torque band within ~0.3 seconds. So I doubt there is a disadvantage of the equivalently-powered gasoline sportscar in this situation that is not dwarfed by the noise of human reaction times.
> Right now a Tesla will overheat if you run it at top speed consistently. Electric is unmatched for instant torque, but the current battery technology makes electric unsuitable for sustained high speed.
It'd be interesting and fun to see how far you could push the current model with just some software changes and some improved cooling. People have modified air-cooled Porsches to do hill climbs, and so on, so there's certainly some existing expertise in this area. Everything that comes to mind, given the Model S's design, is pretty elaborate however.
It includes "production" cars, which are vehicles offered for sale to the public, legally able to drive on public roads, and typically mass-produced identical items rather than one-offs for each customer (though this may be only a few dozen vehicles).
It does not include dragsters or other custom vehicles, which may be equipped with nitrous injectors, non-street-legal equipment, or other major concessions to daily driving.
This was apparent in Friday's episode of <strike>Top Gear</strike> Grand Tour where Hammond raced a Porsche 918 hybrid supercar against the Bugatti Veyron, and then against "some old Nissan van." Which (as you may have guessed, sorry for the spoilers ahead) happened to be souped up with a 1900 HP engine, and easily beat the supercar.
Apart from crazy souped-up dragracers, there's also several "non-production" cars that are actually available for purchase and which can be driven on normal roads and are faster. E.g. the Ariel Atom 500, or some of the Lingenfelter- or Hennesey-modified Corvettes.
Tesla defines "production cars" to exclude cars built in very small volumes, for obvious reasons (otherwise Tesla wouldn't be "fastest"). In related news, the Tautology Association of America has offered Elon a complementary lifetime membership.
It would be a tautology if they defined it as the fastest car and excluded only the cars which were faster than it.
No car produced in greater volumes is quicker, and many which are produced in smaller volumes and/or for a lot more money are slower. That's a significant fact that's not diminished by shed-built customs.
>The Tesla does not hold the advantage forever, though, because higher speeds give the advantage to horsepower over instant torque. The Ferrari LaFerrari hits 70 mph a tenth of a second quicker; the Porsche 918 and McLaren P1 pull ahead at 80 mph, and these hypercars all continue to pull away at higher speeds.
0-60 (MPH) is a benchmark that Tesla has optimized. Many cars do 0-100 and 0-120 much quicker than the Tesla does. Additionally, the highest-end supercars (P1, 918, LaFerrari, Regera) have electric assist as "torque fill" - even the relatively humble NSX and i8 use electric motors to assist the traditional combustion engine to aid in acceleration.
Warning! Personal anecdote ahead! As a (poor) car enthusiast, I look for an aggregate of numbers, but ultimately it comes down to that ineffable quality of "feel". For me, personally, 0-60 times aren't as important as handling quality. Yes, I've driven a P85D (Ludicrous mode) "in anger". In sports car terms it's a one-trick pony. It's a hell of a trick, but it's not for me.
In the last episode of "The Grand Tour" they did a race between a Veyron and the new Porsche 918 Spyder which utilizes electric power alongside a petrol engine. The Porsche won only by a very small difference. Porsche is using a complicated system where the electric engine fills the gaps when the combustion engine is in low torque. Seems like the best of both worlds for now.
In the same episode they also did a drag race between a Golf GTI and an BMW i3. While the latter was faster off the line, due to the instant torque thing, once they got past 80 the Golf got away by a lot. That's the beauty of the combustion engine, once it revs up it goes ballistic.
The Koenigsegg Regera combines a powerful twin-turbo
V8 combustion engine with three electric motors and
cutting edge battery power via new powertrain
technology called Koenigsegg Direct Drive. This
revolutionary technology removes the traditional
gearbox, making the car lighter and more efficient.
The dirty little secret here is that the Tesla can only do this speed at full or very high state of charge. Once the battery level drops so do ALL performance numbers.
Super cars also handle exceedingly well.
Sorry but the this fixation on 0-60/100/etc is just pathetic. Show me five hundred mile range, show me five minute recharge, because those are the issues that will advance the position of EVs
10 years ago, the rhetoric was "electric cars will never work, because they won't ever be able to go 200 miles and there's no infrastructure, and they drive like golf carts, ha ha!".
Now it's "well it doesn't go 500 miles and it doesn't charge in 5 minutes, and okay, it is the quickest to 60mph of any production car in the world, but only on a full charge and that sucks!!!"
EVs keep getting better. Another 10 years from now, what will anti-EV people be saying?
How many cars today can do 500 miles of range? My hatchback gets 40+mpg but only lasts 350 miles on a tank. My SUV gets around the same.
You might get some diesels going that far, but 500 miles is not really common among gasoline engines. I'm not sure why that's your metric for a quality electric car.
0-60 is just one index of a car. The hypercars usually focus more on the laptime on a track. As the article says, the Tesla is only quicker up to 60-70mph. On a track those cars will rarely go below 60mph. Also, weight is the most important factor to go around a corner fast and I'm guessing battery packs with a decent range is still too heavy for track purpose.
But can it complete a lap around the track without going into limp mode? High-power bursts are nice and all but sustained performance is important too.
This is admittedly an old article so hopefully the engineering has improved since then, but to the best of my knowledge it's still an issue. Maybe they made significant improvements to the battery pack in the P100 though.
One thing I wonder is why Top Gear (the old one) / Grand Tour never has the tesla in it's episodes or drag races?
Especially the latest episode of Grand Tour did some kind of road test with a hybrid car and made a laughing stock of it.
And they laughed about the "future of cars" if it would be like that (they used some ridiculous bmw hybrid). Driving very slow to preserve electricity and long charge times every 40 miles or something like that.
Why didn't they test with a Tesla to give a realistic picture of "the future"?
They did a road trip in a BMW i3 which is basically a commute car. And their point does stand - if you like cars and road trips enough to watch GT or Top Gear you probably care a lot about being able to make road trips.
As a former Tesla owner and current i3 owner, I really don't understand why the concept of the road trip is constantly held up as the standard by which electric cars should be judged. I really don't understand why people are optimizing for their once a year use case rather than their daily use case. Unless it's your lifestyle, road trips are the exception, not the rule.
For my family, it means owning my i3 for commuting and my wife's Toyota Sienna for family trips. For others, it could mean renting a car for a week or two when you take a long road trip.
As a fun note: As a BMW i3 owner, BWM offers me up to 2 weeks per year of complimentary gasoline car rental for road trips.
In the case of GT, roadtripping is the lifestyle that they are showing nearly every single episode. I road trip 5-6 times a year myself over 1000 miles, and for that reason I wouldn't personally want to go a full electric car. Nice about the rental car though!
The GT people have standards which don't really apply to most people. Most of their shows involve cars that most people will never afford.
As a huge fan of both Top Gear and Grand Tour, I absolutely understand. My comment was less about their assessment and more about how the concept of the road trip comes up every time electric cars are discussed. Maybe I'm wrong in this assumption as it's based on purely anecdotal observation from my own interactions with people, your 5-6 times a year is an outlier.
True! I don't often think about it but growing up in a very rural area a car has meant freedom to go anywhere. Everyone I know with an electric car loves them!
If you own two cars, isn't it actually you who have arranged your lifestyle in order to accommodate the electric one? And I feel kinda sad for anyone who feels that going more than 60 miles from home happens only once a year.
My comment was only meant to discuss people optimizing for the edge case (road trips) vs the common case (daily driving). There will always be people for whom long-distance driving is not the edge case.
There's a pretty big assumption that travel beyond 60 miles (or 110 in the case of my i3) requires a car. There are a lot of ways to travel that don't involve driving. I travel frequently; it's almost always by air.
I have a Tesla Model S 60 (lowest battery capacity). I just completed a 800 mile road trip over the weekend. Bay Area to San Diego and back. Zero issues.
> if you like cars and road trips enough to watch GT or Top Gear you probably care a lot about being able to make road trips.
I don't know about that. They do it just to shit on EV's. (Disclaimer: I own an EV, but also like and watch Grand Tour). It's an entertainment show. They're not about objective analysis. It's the crank-call-radio-morning-show model applied to cars.
Their complaints about the i3 was low range (needing multiple recharges) and weak power (when range extended).
They could have used something like a Vauxhall Ampera, which is actually designed for the road-trip route they ran (all electric in London, powerful gas range extender for freeway driving at 80+mph).
They could have used a pure-EV car that actually had decent range like a Renault Zoe, which would have only needed a single recharge stop to make their entire trip, even driving at 70mph the whole time.
But they didn't. They didn't use a fair car to test, because then it would have been less funny.
Of course there's more to the story - Top Gear isn't exactly "objective journalism" and the team will create a story out of thin air when it suits the show. See also "M3 vs Prius" segment: http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/06/12/bmw-m3-vs-toyota-prius-its...
The very first episode of The Grand Tour (The Holy Trinity) was about how awesome hybrids are (the McLaren P1, Porsche 918 and Ferrari LaFerrari). Granted, those cars are worth over a million dollars.
What's interesting about those 3 cars is that while they are hybrids, they don't leverage that technology to increase economy; they use it to increase power. There are real, physical limitations involved in gasoline engines and the electric motors are used purely to compensate for those limitations (time it takes for a throttle to open, fuel and air to mix, and ignite--the time it takes for a transmission to change a gear. These things can be made ultra-fast; but, they cannot be eliminated).
BMW did a very similar thing with their 330e model; the electric motor is primarily used to increase the power from the relatively small engine that is normally only on the lower-end 320.
I'm not sure about low speeds; but, I believe all 3 cars technically offer an all-electric mode that will let you drive with substantially reduced performance and with a range of 10-15 miles.
That said, my original statement was mean to describe the objective of these hybrid cars; any additional "fuel economy" is probably best described as a side effect.
From the episodes (I myself not being in the market for million dollar hybrid supercars), there's a significant amount of button pressing to have it go all-electric.
Combustion technology has also been favoring power over efficiency for at least the last 20 years. It turns out that once you get the car up to about 35 MPG, above that nobody really cares, statistically speaking. Specific power meanwhile has skyrocketed. You can now buy a 1000cc normally-aspirated engine that makes 200 horsepower.
If anything the Grand Tour was trying to show if affordable electric cars were here yet. They tested a reasonably affordable BMW alongside a traditional engined VW.
Because if you drive a Tesla hard, battery overheats and it shuts down. Plus once you run out of battery (even if it doesn't overheat) you need several hours to recharge it. Plus Tesla is only "high performance" in a straight line. I believe they had an episode with a Tesla. It ended up on a tow truck.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. The Tesla S handles like a pig and you can't track the car because the battery can't handle it. These are valid criticisms. Though, the towing part of that episode I think was played up for the show.
That said, for 90+% of people, the Tesla S, and almost assuredly the Model 3, will be more than sufficient vehicles for people. The focus on acceleration is an amazing selling point and most people will never track their car. The ranges on these cars are pretty excellent and charging stations are becoming more and more common.
These cars aren't for me though, I'll gladly keep driving my BMW. The Tesla feels soulless while driving it and the skinny tires and the extreme weight shifts prevent you from hammering through corners which is were I believe driving is the most exhilarating.
Anyone who doesn't believe it, watch the video. Car and Driver took a Model S onto a track and in less than a minute it was limping in low-power mode as the batteries were overheating. They also ran into an issue where the brakes stopped working. This was just during one lap of a small race track.
The Model S is a luxury performance sedan, not a race car. It can't handle being pushed to its limits for any period of time. It just wasn't designed for that.
You only need basic knowledge of physics to see why a high performance car without large radiators would overheat when expending a ton of energy per unit of time. Sadly a lot of people here lack it.
I wonder a little about anyone who reads about a car that will do the quarter mile in 10.5 seconds at 125 mph and thinks "that thing is all hype, it's not fast enough for me."
If your plans for the day somehow involve a crash helmet and the Mulsanne Straight, yeah, you're going to find it a little limiting and it's the wrong tool for the job. But seriously, it's a 4-door sedan...
Probably has a lot to do with tradition and the intangible "feel" of what it takes in an ICE car to get massive performance. Sure, the Tesla can do some amazing things (acceleration) but versus other established metrics ('Ring time) it's going to have 'cherry picking' asterisks next to its claims I think. There's likely more than a little bias against zipping around in a oversized Traxxis LiPo instead of romping around with a thumping motor and exhaust sound.
I can see taking it to the drag strip for a little fun, but a real track day? Does anybody do that with a big sedan like this? Just curious, I haven't seen enough of those to really have an opinion here.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadYou can dig up lots of videos where they race Teslas against Lamborghinis and Ferraris. Up to 60 the supercar is barely hanging on, but at that point the Tesla is tapped out while the supercar still has plenty of acceleration, and it completely leaves it behind.
0-100 mph is still a pretty common performance indicator in its own right, it's just less commonly used compared to 0-60.
And they're doing that. Mainly hybrids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koenigsegg_Agera. Electric for the start, gas for the win.
Going from 0-60 is a nice perk (quick), but until these cars can hold that speed longer (fast) many car enthusiasts aren't likely to bite.
The most important part of your comment was the other parameters, not of speed but of the car itself. A friend of mine is a Ferrari owner who admires what Tesla can do but will die before he gives up the hard roar of a powerful engine.
There's an old expression around the speed shop that fits here:
"People buy power, but they drive torque."
And its electric FTW in a big way if you believe in that koan.
High revving high power output engines (for example Formula 1 until 2004, which still holds half the lap records) have a low torque number, but more rev-range to apply to the gearbox allowing higher actual output to the wheels in the end. Essentially the torque number is just power divided by revs (Newton per meter in SI units).
So an older Formula 1 car that revs to 18.000 rpm has a far lower torque number than your mom's diesel road car. Yet that F1 car does insane acceleration from 0 to 200 km/h and has 700+ bhp while the road car would have around 100 maybe 150 bhp.
As far as practical power, electric is far more useful than gasoline for aggressive city and interstate driving (unless you have a long stretch of open pavement). The lack of transmission gives a distinct advantage in surprise-passing a gasoline sports car. The thrill of instant power cannot be overstated!
EDIT: or diesel
This could actually REDUCE refill times (if the swap out is efficient enough). If temperatures could be controlled to allow it to run in an all out mode, this could be a competitive edge?
Or would this be somehow disallowed? I imagine this would be akin to swapping out the complete fuel tank in a car instead of refueling the tank, and I have no idea about racing rules.
Have you ever watched Formula 1 or NASCAR? They can fill 20 gallons of fuel in ~10 seconds. Do you really think a battery swap system could even come close to competing with that?
And most cars refuel every 14 laps, and races are about 384 laps. Totals over 5000km in 24hrs. That's a lot of batteries...
I still think this is a pipe dream with current battery tech for other reasons (weight, power density, overheating, etc.), but from a logistics standpoint it might actually be possible.
EDIT: thanks for noticing, added metric equivs. The difference was just in the sources I found reporting the units differently.
It never took off, I guess because the infrastructure never existed, and because of the aforementioned armor issues. It's too bad. I always thought battery swaps would be an ideal way to deal with the aging of these batteries. Depreciate the value of the battery based on some formula and allow people to get a newer one once their battery passes some usage threshold, seamlessly, and bill them for the upgrade.
They replace whole nose assemblies in <30sec in F1. Audi some years ago replaced the entire rear transaxle & suspension assembly at LeMans in < 5 minutes in the middle of the night, because they'd anticipated the potential need for it and done the prior engineering necessary (iirc, that car finished 2nd and their other one won).
Reliability and safety would take some real work, just like the high-speed fuel rigs previously used in F1.
There's also the issue of cooling the electric motor.
[1] http://www.pointthepower.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Scre...
Well, not really (see Formula-E). If you want a battery that can sustain high power output (high specific power, e.g. LiFePO4), you have to go to a different chemistry than what Tesla uses (high specific energy, LiNiCoAlO2). Tesla could make a Model S that went fast around a racetrack, but it would mean sacrificing range. Since the 0-60 is mainly a gimmick, it's not worth sacrifising usability for.
> The lack of transmission gives a distinct advantage in surprise-passing a gasoline sports car.
Not sure if the advantage is that great: in the case of a modern >250 hp gasoline sports car with the de rigueur dual-clutch semiautomatic gearbox, the person in the sports car would plant their foot and be in the engine's optimal torque band within ~0.3 seconds. So I doubt there is a disadvantage of the equivalently-powered gasoline sportscar in this situation that is not dwarfed by the noise of human reaction times.
It'd be interesting and fun to see how far you could push the current model with just some software changes and some improved cooling. People have modified air-cooled Porsches to do hill climbs, and so on, so there's certainly some existing expertise in this area. Everything that comes to mind, given the Model S's design, is pretty elaborate however.
It does not include dragsters or other custom vehicles, which may be equipped with nitrous injectors, non-street-legal equipment, or other major concessions to daily driving.
This was apparent in Friday's episode of <strike>Top Gear</strike> Grand Tour where Hammond raced a Porsche 918 hybrid supercar against the Bugatti Veyron, and then against "some old Nissan van." Which (as you may have guessed, sorry for the spoilers ahead) happened to be souped up with a 1900 HP engine, and easily beat the supercar.
It's also apparent when looking at this electric project car: https://phys.org/news/2016-06-electric-car-world.html which, at 1.5 seconds, seems likely to approach the limit of wheeled vehicles.
A lot of the mods used to increase power considerably also decrease the MTBF of many components within vehicles.
Tesla defines "production cars" to exclude cars built in very small volumes, for obvious reasons (otherwise Tesla wouldn't be "fastest"). In related news, the Tautology Association of America has offered Elon a complementary lifetime membership.
No car produced in greater volumes is quicker, and many which are produced in smaller volumes and/or for a lot more money are slower. That's a significant fact that's not diminished by shed-built customs.
>The Tesla does not hold the advantage forever, though, because higher speeds give the advantage to horsepower over instant torque. The Ferrari LaFerrari hits 70 mph a tenth of a second quicker; the Porsche 918 and McLaren P1 pull ahead at 80 mph, and these hypercars all continue to pull away at higher speeds.
Warning! Personal anecdote ahead! As a (poor) car enthusiast, I look for an aggregate of numbers, but ultimately it comes down to that ineffable quality of "feel". For me, personally, 0-60 times aren't as important as handling quality. Yes, I've driven a P85D (Ludicrous mode) "in anger". In sports car terms it's a one-trick pony. It's a hell of a trick, but it's not for me.
In the same episode they also did a drag race between a Golf GTI and an BMW i3. While the latter was faster off the line, due to the instant torque thing, once they got past 80 the Golf got away by a lot. That's the beauty of the combustion engine, once it revs up it goes ballistic.
Super cars also handle exceedingly well.
Sorry but the this fixation on 0-60/100/etc is just pathetic. Show me five hundred mile range, show me five minute recharge, because those are the issues that will advance the position of EVs
Now it's "well it doesn't go 500 miles and it doesn't charge in 5 minutes, and okay, it is the quickest to 60mph of any production car in the world, but only on a full charge and that sucks!!!"
EVs keep getting better. Another 10 years from now, what will anti-EV people be saying?
Pointing out facts is now "anti-EV"?
Many a car can be optimized for acceleration:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12004422/fastest-accelerat...
You might get some diesels going that far, but 500 miles is not really common among gasoline engines. I'm not sure why that's your metric for a quality electric car.
http://insideevs.com/expected-tesla-model-s-fails-lap-nurbur...
edit: a quick Google of forums and articles suggests the car has a problem overheating when you drive it above ~100 MPH
http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-s-formula-1-racing-circ...
https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/p90d-overheating
Especially the latest episode of Grand Tour did some kind of road test with a hybrid car and made a laughing stock of it. And they laughed about the "future of cars" if it would be like that (they used some ridiculous bmw hybrid). Driving very slow to preserve electricity and long charge times every 40 miles or something like that. Why didn't they test with a Tesla to give a realistic picture of "the future"?
For my family, it means owning my i3 for commuting and my wife's Toyota Sienna for family trips. For others, it could mean renting a car for a week or two when you take a long road trip.
As a fun note: As a BMW i3 owner, BWM offers me up to 2 weeks per year of complimentary gasoline car rental for road trips.
The GT people have standards which don't really apply to most people. Most of their shows involve cars that most people will never afford.
There's a pretty big assumption that travel beyond 60 miles (or 110 in the case of my i3) requires a car. There are a lot of ways to travel that don't involve driving. I travel frequently; it's almost always by air.
I don't know about that. They do it just to shit on EV's. (Disclaimer: I own an EV, but also like and watch Grand Tour). It's an entertainment show. They're not about objective analysis. It's the crank-call-radio-morning-show model applied to cars.
Their complaints about the i3 was low range (needing multiple recharges) and weak power (when range extended).
They could have used something like a Vauxhall Ampera, which is actually designed for the road-trip route they ran (all electric in London, powerful gas range extender for freeway driving at 80+mph).
They could have used a pure-EV car that actually had decent range like a Renault Zoe, which would have only needed a single recharge stop to make their entire trip, even driving at 70mph the whole time.
But they didn't. They didn't use a fair car to test, because then it would have been less funny.
Of course there's more to the story - Top Gear isn't exactly "objective journalism" and the team will create a story out of thin air when it suits the show. See also "M3 vs Prius" segment: http://www.bmwblog.com/2009/06/12/bmw-m3-vs-toyota-prius-its...
BMW did a very similar thing with their 330e model; the electric motor is primarily used to increase the power from the relatively small engine that is normally only on the lower-end 320.
That said, my original statement was mean to describe the objective of these hybrid cars; any additional "fuel economy" is probably best described as a side effect.
And I think only 2/3 even had that option.
That said, for 90+% of people, the Tesla S, and almost assuredly the Model 3, will be more than sufficient vehicles for people. The focus on acceleration is an amazing selling point and most people will never track their car. The ranges on these cars are pretty excellent and charging stations are becoming more and more common.
These cars aren't for me though, I'll gladly keep driving my BMW. The Tesla feels soulless while driving it and the skinny tires and the extreme weight shifts prevent you from hammering through corners which is were I believe driving is the most exhilarating.
Anyone who doesn't believe it, watch the video. Car and Driver took a Model S onto a track and in less than a minute it was limping in low-power mode as the batteries were overheating. They also ran into an issue where the brakes stopped working. This was just during one lap of a small race track.
The Model S is a luxury performance sedan, not a race car. It can't handle being pushed to its limits for any period of time. It just wasn't designed for that.
... I feel like there's a valid counterpoint here that asks "Then what did you engineer?"
It's a fair question if you're bragging about performance but unable to endure even moderate track conditions.
If your plans for the day somehow involve a crash helmet and the Mulsanne Straight, yeah, you're going to find it a little limiting and it's the wrong tool for the job. But seriously, it's a 4-door sedan...