Think about the measure of automotive performance that is most important to you. What is it? Zero to sixty time? Max fuel economy? Whichever it is, I’ll bet there are a lot of other measures of mettle that aren’t just less important, but in your mind are downright a waste of time.
What do you think is the most overrated automotive performance measure?
Image: Planet-9
Hooniverse Asks: What's The Most Overrated Automotive Performance Measure?
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CAFE.
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I only regret that I have but one upvote to give to this.
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Specific power.
If your car generates 300 horsepower out of 2 liters, it’s a fun little brag for the engineers who designed it, but it’s not making any more power than a 5.0 making 300 horsepower, and it’s not enough information to know if it is doing it more efficiently.
Unless you live in a country where they tax you based on displacement, or race in a series with displacement limits, the ratio of horsepower/liter is irrelevant.-
Theoretically, a higher horspower/displacement will be a more efficient engine. Theoretically.
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Your 300 hp 2-liter will run like an old 2-stroke, developing 80 – 100 hp everywhere on the tach except when turbo boosted to max at redline. I recall Clarkson driving and Evo and loving it on the track and hating it everywhere else. Semi-annual engine rebuilds are also not mentioned along side stunning horsepower/liter numbers. Average horsepower and torque are better real world numbers.
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I think 2.0L turbo mills have gotten a bit better since the 4g63.
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As someone who lives in a country where they taxed on displacement until 2008, couldn’t agree more. While it does give some indication of efficiency, power to engine weight seems more relevant. People ignore that high power to internal capacity doesn’t actually always make for a compact engine because you have a complex valve train and then perhaps extra weight in ancillaries for turbocharging and cooling. 2 Litre Subaru turbos for example, much as I love them, are still pretty thirsty and while Kiefmo is right that turbo engines have got better, it still seems to be largely due to how such engines are more responsive to mapping so you can massage official economy figures. Turbo is more efficient (power to fuel used) in theory, but not always more economical (fuel used in a journey) in the real world, after all, a prius still doesn’t use turbocharging, though of course it does use the atkinson cycle, which they’re possibly even adapting for non-hybrid cars. It’s also interesting that the Prius engine got more economical when they made the engine bigger.
To me downsizing is driven by regulation like CAFE, but in an ideal world, where manufacturers would be chasing real world fuel use rather trying to game some test, we’d be “right sizing”
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Top speed. Unless you’re driving at Le Mans, there is no place you can drive your Bugatti Veyron 254.04 miles per hour. Sure, it’s a ‘big dick measurin’ stick’ but nothing more. It isn’t a real world number that I care about.
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This is particularly true when the car mags say, “Top Speed: 155 mph (electronically limited)”. That’s not the true top speed of the vehicle. That’s the top speed the automaker set based on tire selection and/or gentlemen’s agreements with other automakers.
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The irrelevance of a top speed when electronically limited is precisely why I like it. There is no real desire to “see what it can do”. I know it’ll hit 155. I know it won’t go faster than that. I can travel along at 5 over posted, comfortable in that knowledge.
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I would imagine top speed is an important measure to mdharrell. Sometimes he needs to travel by highway. Not safe in a vehicle that tops out at 35 mph.
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I admit I’ve been tempted to take one of my slower vehicles onto I-5 when traffic is stop-and-go anyway, just to say I’ve been there.
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That’s a lazy way to make the local evening news.
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You misspelled “fantastic.”
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Come on in, the water’s nasty.
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I was about to come and agree with “Top Speed” being unimportant to me, but your note about Dr. Harrell needing to occasionally consider it so he has a freeway-capable vehicle in his stable* reminded me that I do actually care about top speed. For that exact same reason.
The TW200 tops out at 60mph on the flats.** I really want a Yamaha SR400, but… They have a top speed of 80mph, and given that the main thing the TW200 doesn’t do is interstate travel and Bay Area interstates generally have 70-80mph traffic, it wasn’t going to be a good time. Which is what got me looking at 700cc class bikes like the FZ-07. Top speed somewhere between 105-125, depending on rider weight and what kind of wind screen you have mounted.
Yes. Those top speed numbers are low. The FZ-07 doesn’t do much better than my Jeep for top speed (it supposedly drag limits out at 106mph, I have no intention of testing this). This is because my high-riding brick with a flappy soft top is the vehicle in my stable with the best coefficient of drag. Actually: Cd is the one I really don’t care about. Looks are much more important. The Jeep’s [anti-]design language is one of my all-time favorites, and I pulled the windscreen and somewhat aerodynamic headlamp off of my FZ-07 and replaced the lamp with an old-school bucket lamp. So, I’ve even made a bad coefficient of drag worse in the name of looks.
* Probably not the Freeway, though, I expect that thing is sketchy at top speed.
** Clearly this is the Correct Vehicle to take on the Hell On Wheels LeMons rally. First day? Up and over the Sierra Nevada!-
Of course the Freeway is sketchy at top speed; of course I take it on the freeway anyway. It’s generally okay up to about 60-ish mph, which is close to flat-out on level ground with the 12 hp motor. I understand the 16 hp specimens are zippier.
It helps that I installed the aftermarket Freeway Advanced Racing Team (yes, the designer went with F.A.R.T.) kit that greatly reduces its originally excessive positive scrub radius, although I haven’t yet bothered to install the other aftermarket kit that introduces some Ackermann into the steering as well. Just changing the scrub radius has made a world of difference at speed.
Neither of these is mine, but note the difference between the stock steering geometry (top) vs. that provided by the F.A.R.T. kit (bottom) by comparing where the kingpin axis would intersect the ground relative to the tire contact patch:
http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k115/angibb/freeway68s.jpg
http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k115/angibb/freeway83r.jpg-
Now I feel silly for assuming maybe the Freeway was too marginal to go on the freeway. Given the similarities between the TW200 on the freeway and the Crunchero at a LeMons race, and your analogous vehicles (HMV Freeway & Saab 96 racecar), I should have assumed the other way. Also because people seem to actually drive about 60mph on the interstates around Seattle, it’s not quite as bad to have a vehicle that tops out at 55-60mph. I think I’d be more willing to take my tdub on I-5 up there.
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Wow, the top photo is a precise description of engineering by engineers that don’t care about engineering. But what if unsprung weight really is my friend?
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I’ve always felt that anything over 100mph is just wasted gearing. It’s rare that I push my car beyond 80 on the street. In fact, the most fun I’ve had in a car has been on twisty roads below 60mph. I’d rather have a car that’s dialed-in to giving me the most versatility and gear selection within double-digit speeds than one that can strut its stuff at the Bonneville flats..
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If my ute could pull redline in top gear it would be doing ~180 mph, and it is still on the lower -geared side of things for the highway, ie not ideal for fuel economy. A tall cruising gear is a good thing.
On the other hand in mountains on off-road trails I have been wishing for a gear or two below first! You can’t often have everything.
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Fly swallowing capacity:
http://www.lltek.com/slideshow/audi_a8_d4_hofele_deutscheland/images/img_04_HFL_Audi_A8_D4_w12_grille.jpg
…and I will show myself out-
That gaping maw is not only ugly, it also (unnecessarily) forces more air through the engine compartment instead of up over the car, thus increasing wind resistance and reducing down-force. All this from a brand that in the ’80s was the first to remove rain gutters and fit flush-fitting windows to eak out a slightly lower drag coefficient.
Vorsprung durch Technik is a long time ago…-
The phony tendencies in modern design – stripes and stitches “editions” that replace rell power increases included – are irksome. Yet I can’t deny…humans are not that different from magpies. Something shiny and new, following a trend, will earn most people the credit they’re after, even if they did nothing to make it and just spend money on it.
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Greenhouse gas ratings. These are tailpipe only ratings, so they don’t take into account the total vehicle (GHG emissions as plastics and rubbers offgas), and they don’t take into account the total lifecycle of the vehilce (how much energy/GHG went into producing the vehicle and the fuel (gas, diesel, coal/nuke/wind/CNG) that it’s burning. If the EPA cared about truth in advertising laws, they would call it the “Smug Factor”.
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Can be pretty important if you’re taxed on them, as in the UK. Not that that makes them any more useful.
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That’s rather unfair. There are lots of ways to measure efficiency. Some better than others. Oddly enough, some parties like to pick metrics that seem to put them in a better light. I’ll agree that inclusion of extraction and manufacturing energy and emission streams has significance, as would a lifetime or per-year of operation metric. But many of these are susceptible to outside influences. It might be that the most efficient vehicle is impossible to properly recycle, or vice versa.
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The questions was regarding overrated performance measures. Tailpipe emissions are only a part of the total emissions of a vehicle and are completely meaningless on pure electric and mostly meaningless on plug-in hybrids. Even if you ignore the GHG emissions related to production of the vehicle and its systems (which can be ~10% of the total lifecycle emissions), a more meaningful metric would include material emissions (this is coming in the next few years) and, in the case of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, power generation emissions based on national power source breakdowns (i.e. in the US we are about 25% coal and 25% natural gas with other fuel sources making up the other 50%). This gives a more meaningful and complete measure for comparing vehicles without slicing the control volume at a point that skews in favor of a certain technology unrealistically.
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Recent experience has shown that tailpipe emissions are quite underrated!
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I smell what you did there!
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typically about 20% of cradle-to-grave emissions come from manufacture and disposal. tailpipe emissions comprise by far the majority of a car’s lifetime energy usage.
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0-60.
On track, we don’t do 0-60.
We almost never drop below 50.
And even on the street, for cars of sufficient performance, it’s such a small part of their acceleration curve it’s nearly irrelevant.
Especially when everyone takes 15 seconds on an on-ramp anyway.-
50-80 is much more useful.
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One of the magazines I used to read had a passing speed test. They would do it in the cars top gear as well. It really showed you a lot of things about how a vehicle was set up.
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A lot of car magazines I used to read dropped this info in the mid-90s, together with a lot of other measurements. Shiny photos and general praise for every car, unless it was an actual comparison in which the domestics needed to be lifted heavily onto the podium, were part of that package. Needless to say, I quit magazine buying.
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Yeah, 50-70 times were typical. Car and Driver also printed 5-60 “street start” numbers.
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I think 0-60 should always be quoted with 1/4 mile time.
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I am more of a 2/971 of a leuga fan.
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I live my life 2/971 of a leuga at a time.
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Well, that’s perfect for me, as my car does 15s to 60 at WOT on a good day, running downhill.
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0-60 makes me nostalgic. For a young driver in Ireland up to the early 00s trying to pick which affordably insurable sub 1.4 litre hatchback was king, so you were never going to be able to brag about big bhp or top speed, and ‘ring times weren’t a thing yet, and most cars took over 10 seconds so the car which could get from zero to the general speed limit (we didn’t really have motorways then so 70mph was only theoretically legal) was the measure of street cred and sexual potency. 😀 …nowadays when even economy cars can do it in under 10, most 2 litre turbo diesels 7 point someting, and supercars in less time than it takes to soil your underpants, it seems irrelevant and diminishing. You take it for granted any car can get out of its own way, but there was a time when my Punto Sporting with a mighty 80bhp and 1.2 litres of sheer muscle, getting to 60 in a neck..eh..noticing. 10.9 seconds while stirring the 6 speed box like an angry chef stirring cake batter made me a contender.
http://www.auto-data.net/images/f3/big3203.jpg
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Nice lateral G’s, but my Challenger R/T has stopped harder and accelerates just about as well…
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That’s a significant difference between left and right turns. And how many tenths of G’s will it do before it slips?
/Not trying to legitimise the feature, but that’s…neat.-
I think the car can turn just as hard either way, but without going to a track it’s easier to get higher right-turn G’s (somewhat confusingly shown on the left side of the car icon) in street driving. It’s probably making noticeable tire squeal by 0.6g or so, but it’s hard to spare attention for the instantaneous readout while doing that. I can say that the 2015 car feels noticeably happier in hard cornering than my 2010 did; FCA re-tuned the suspension & steering away from the heavier feel of the old DaimlerChrysler-era tune, and on top of that my car has the “super track pack” which sits a little lower on stiffer springs.
There are a few other similarly fun (but similarly dangerous for street use) gadgets in that screen mode – 0-60 MPH time, 1/4-mile time, stopping distance, etc.
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eMPG because it really doesn’t mean anything. It’s a fictional rating.
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Absolutely. Something like kWh/100km could actually be useful.
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Don’t they use a mathematically-derived number of”e” gallons per kWh, to get what kogashiwa described? The numbers are probably right given the difference in efficiency of an electric vs combustion engine.
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Similarly, ‘miles per tank’ is absolutely useless. Yes, your gas-guzzling SUV has a 50 gallon tank. That just means it’ll bankrupt you on those (fewer) occasions that you fill it up. And you’d better add fuel stabilizer.
Also, getting 600 miles per tank sounds nice, but are you getting 600 miles per bladder-emptying and/or stomach-filling session? If not, it’s kinda useless.
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Top gear or 40-60 acceleration when you compare manuals and automatics but don’t allow the manual to downshift.
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It would be useful for mags to test what each manual car could do 40-60 and 50-70 in each gear, without upshifting, from the lowest possible proceeding to top gear. It would help put some hard numbers on an engine’s flexibility.
From driving manuals most of my life, I wish I had more control over what my van’s transmission does. Sometimes, I want to give it WOT for highway passing, but only want it to drop a single gear to 4th and let the midrange torque pull it out. Instead, it drops to 3rd and boils while not providing appreciably more acceleration than would have been available in 4th. Other times, like passing on an 80mph highway in the middle-of-nowhere Montana, where triple digits might need to be briefly explored — I really appreciate the eagerness.-
They used to do so, as with the earlier discussion.
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Lateral G-force on a skid pad is a pretty meaningless measure of handling since it is easily gamed by putting wide sticky tires on almost anything. Actual handling doesn’t have all that much to do with total grip. Just look at the tire sizes on a Lotus Elan.
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Plus cars like C4 Corvettes can have huge mechanical grip but such shitty suspension tuning that they’re useless off a billiard table-smooth skidpad.
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Grip =/= handling
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Well, grip does give you a pretty good head start on handling.
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Years ago at the Wheels magazine”Active Safety Test” they ran the best vehicles from each category and one of the highest G-force readings came from the Toyota Land Cruiser, because when the tyres started to slide (at a low limit as you would expect) they would do an initial unweght and then bite again before going fully, and this would generate a momentary spike in G reading that was at least as high as the sporty cars could manage for a sustained period. Needless to say that was ignored in the results.
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Landcruiser Driftwagon? I like the way you think. I might have to reconsider that whole drifting thing.
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I have seen that, didn’t end well… Guy tried to drift a right turn through an intersection (try a left turn for those of you with LHD), but lost it and spun out. Not as bad as it might have ended but other drivers had to take avoiding action. Time and place!
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I still have no idea what the “rolling start” 5-60 mph criteria is supposed to tell me.
I wish I could get more reliable information about weight and weight distribution, for some reason that’s always hard to find.
I’m still working on a spreadsheet of cars I like that I’m hoping will tell me all sorts of weird stuff, from simple power/weight, to weight/seat, exterior volume/seat, volume/weight, power/GVWR, etc. I’m going to objectively figure out the best overall car and then turn it down in exchange for something with quirky flaws!
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For automatics, I always understood this to be the acceleration measure that mimics what most of us do in real life — let off the brake and then press the accelerator. In between, the car accelerates at idle on the TC to approximately 5mph.
Alternately, it mimics the behavior we all exhibit when we’re not sure whether the guy in the next lane is actually gonna participate in the stoplight drags with us. You start off easy, listening to the other car’s engine and potential tire squeal, ready to shove the right pedal through the firewall if necessary.
Either way, it stands opposed to the automatic brake-torquing launch, or barring nannies that prevent that, a two-foot quick launch, that most magazines attempt to get the best possible acceleration. -
The 5-60mph time has always been more important to me than 0-60. Likewise, I value the passing times (40-60mph). Drag racing these days is for the track– you can’t realistically get away with it on the street. I could care less how well a car hooks up and goes when you dump the clutch. I want to know how well it accelerates when I mash the pedal.
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How about 0-60 *with roll-out*! There isn’t any roll-out from zero you clowns!
There I feel better now.
I’m trying to think of a performance metric that is important to me. Price and reliability?
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You’re in the same boat as me with coefficient of drag. I guarantee you Steve has a significantly better Cd than your Laverda.
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I was surprised to see Steve had an air dam, but I guess they were doing everything they could for fuel efficiency in 1991. Actually, I’m surprised to see Steve still has the air dam, the way I drive.
As for the Laverda, well, I gave up the Sprint fairing in favor of the bikini the first year I had it and never looked back. (Not my bike)
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8PhCMwP8KjQ/VWiz7QF-nXI/AAAAAAAAHXg/PRuUI0MAT58/w800-h800/1984-Laverda-RGA-Jota.jpg-
Air flow under a truck is a huge drag problem, so the air dam is actually going to do some good (and probably one of the bigger wins). When you go look at drag coefficients for fully faired motorcycles, they’re only about as good as my Jeep. Which is bloody terrible. This also means 200mph capable sport bikes do that all through brute force rather than careful wind tunnel design. Also also, good call on the bikini fairing.
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Air flow beneath a four wheeled vehicle can be something like twenty percent of the total drag. Restricting entry air is probably the largest variable. So that vertical chin spoiler may be doing some outsized work.
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Peak HP in the absence of also showing a curve.
Metrics I wish we saw more of:
Dyno-at-the-wheels HP and torque curves
As-tested weight, at each corner
^^ Those are easily measured, but in a world with more sophisticated powertrains I’d like to know more about specific fuel economy. A 2.0 turbo, DI, variable-everything motor can get 35mpg and make 300hp, but not at the same time. How quickly does the economy drop off with more aggressive driving?
(EcoBoost, I’m looking at you)
If only to win internet pissing matches, I’d like to know the power/lb of the motor itself. E.g., I’m told a 3.5L EcoBoost V6 weighs as much as a 5.0 Coyote. HP/liter is dumb, HP/lb or HP/liter of space taken up are more relevant from my perspective.
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My na RX-7 makes 200whp, but below 6,000RPM it’s worse than a mail truck.
Cue the first reaction of everyone (not used to rotaries) who drives it and short shifts at 4K: “But you said this thing is fast?!”
Quarter-mile times. Completely useless outside of a drag strip, which for the vast majority of drivers has yet to be somewhere which they may find themselves behind the wheel.
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