James May provides yet another insightful article at The Times Online, discussing why we’re so obsessed with performance figures. To a degree, I’d say he’s right, especially with so many cars with similar levels of performance these days. Perhaps we’re almost reaching a plateau, where the next development in supercars won’t be to hit 0-60 even quicker, but to manage an MPG figure of more than 30? Who knows, but there’s certainly no stopping progress.
Chris @ Driving Spirit says
February 22, 2011 at 7:58 amI do enjoy James’s articles, they’re always an entertaining read.
I think he’s absolutely right, although I think the power battle actually started a few years ago with Mercedes/AMG versus BMW’s M cars. I suspect we may be reaching a peak and common sense will hopefully prevail.
It’s gotten so silly that even a hot hatch has to have at least 250bhp to be considered ‘fast enough’, and 300bhp seems to be the target. Figures that would have embarrased a supercar a few years ago.
Instead of ‘more power!’ manufacturers should be concentrating on making their cars lighter. That would increase performance, handling and economy, a win-win-win scenario.
Jason says
February 23, 2011 at 11:35 amI love performance cars, but surely the limit has been reached?
How can they make a vehicle get from 0-60mph in 2 seconds? That just seems not real? You need to be able to breathe whilst driving surely!?
Don’t get me wrong, if a car reaches that speed I will definitely want to test it out 🙂
Mr Butterscotch says
February 24, 2011 at 12:17 amHi Jason,
It’s a good point. Then again, absolute performance doesn’t necessarily dictate the sensation delivered. For example, the Ariel Atom V8 should accelerate at about the same rate from 0-62 as a Bugatti Veyron. However, I’d imagine that the Atom provides a rather quicker sensation of speed than most anything else (apart from say a Formula 1 car). I maintain that for most people, 200bhp is probably enough to feel that they’re going quite fast in most cars.