this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Why is a vehicle with 1000HP and 0-60 in 2 seconds street legal.
That sounds like it would be fun to go to a race track and race in a controlled environment, but when is that ever needed in a city?
Electric motors are incredibly high performance. Those numbers sound extreme for a combustion engine but that kind of performance is pretty standard for electric motors.
Performance limitations are usually added via software to prevent battery wear and for safety reasons.
They could go 0-60 in .5 seconds but there's only so much traction you can get out of rubber tires.
0-60 in a road car would be near impossible because, like you mentioned, you wouldn't have the traction for it.
Top fuel dragsters tend to do their 0-60 in about 0.8-0.9 seconds and that's using extremely specialized tires on a specifically prepped track surface and they are still traction limited.
The fastest EV 0-60 (as far as I could find) was a Formula Student car called Mythen WR at 0.956 seconds. It hit 62mph in 40ft. Also it was driven by a woman.
Edit: I was doing some more reading about top fuel dragsters and the fastest 0-60 time (which was approximately 0.8 sec, they don't actually measure it) came from Brittany Force's (which is a crazy cool name) 1000ft run at the 2019 Las Vegas run. She ran the 1000ft in just 3.695 seconds and crossed the line at 338.17 mph. There's a video in my link too, it's crazy to watch. For you Europeans that's hitting just shy of 550 kmph in just over 300m
Yeah, I've watched Top Fuel races in person. They're pretty awe inspiring.
Electric engines essentially have 100% of torque available at minimal RPM, it doesn't need to ramp up like an ICE.
And it doesn't take anything exotic to hit the traction limit, just more current. As long as the ECSs were rated to handle the current and, if not, you can upgrade them (manufacturer software fuckery aside).
The best way to sell EVs in the US is to focus on their performance and not their climate impact. Partisanship makes the latter a non-starter, but everyone can appreciate a car with the power to move when you want it to.
I understand that. I am saying we should have regulations and governors on all cars. No car driven in a city ever needs to accelerate that fast and should not be street legal if it can.
They are, generally, limited by their software. Higher performance comes at the cost of battery life and reduced range and so it requires the owner click through a bunch of "you may die and also set your car on fire" warning screens before it removes the limits.
Some supercars won't even allow you to put the car into the highest performance mode unless you're at a track (verified by GPS).
I agree that it can be dangerous
Even worse, I assume these cars are mainly bought by people without fast car experience. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
And why the hell would you give this amount of horsepower to a barely functioning self driving car? It just doesn't make sense to me.
That's not really the issue, the slap dash construction and safety issues are the issue.
They also likely aren't paying for or actuallygetting these vanity products because plaids are notoriously behind in production and it's not terribly unlikely that you receive it and it immediately has to go back because of some critical production flaw/error.
As a pedestrian I am very concerned about how fast and heavy these vehicles are. People drive recklessly with them, blasting through intersections with people crossing. There is zero reason for a vehicle designed for a city to ever need to be this powerful.
And I also agree with you on the quality of build and lack of safety testing, especially on the cyber truck. Drivers can’t see anything and those are unsafe for everyone in them and around them.