4 ms·

850 ft-lbs might be a bit too much for the streets. Please, by all means, have as much acceleration as you want on your property or on the track. I personally

850 ft-lbs might be a bit too much for the streets. Please, by all means, have as much acceleration as you want on your property or on the track. I personally don't want rich, drunk teens flying their 2-ton death machines into gas stations, through fast food joints, or into me.

sliken 5y ago
I don't see the relationship. Idiots can kill people regardless of car power. I've not seen any relationship between car power and percentage of cars in serious accidents. If you look at the top 10 cars involved in accidents (per 1000 cars), it's not a particularly powerful bunch. In the USA last year the stop accident prone car was a Scion FR-S with under 200 HP (150 lb-feet). The Toyota Prius (even Toyota marketing makes fun of it's performance) is at #8. Personally I feel safer in a capable car, even if it has crazy 0-60 times and impressive HP/Torque numbers.
- willis936 5y ago
  That's because you're normalizing by the wrong value. You should be normalizing "number of accidents per 1000 cars of the same model". https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-model https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...
  - DennisP 5y ago
    From a quick glance at that, a Chevy Malibu with a 0-60 of 7.8 seconds has a worse death rate than a Corvette, which has a time of around three seconds.
    - willis936 5y ago
      The Malibu has a multi-vehicle crash death rate (MV) of 36 and single-vehicle crash death rate (SV) of 24. The Corvette is 4 and 53. Individual model comparisons aren't of much consequence (especially with such incomplete data), but trends are. If you scan the MV and SV columns in the midsize and large sections and compare it to the sports car and 2-door sections you'll see the trend I'm highlighting. The pdf linked on that page is helpful for this. https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-report/pdf/55/2 https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-report/pdf...
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Care to explain the comically large spread between the 2wd and the 4wd Juke? Or perhaps the various Charger models? The data seams to be screaming "driver demographics" at you.
- anonfornoreason 5y ago
  Sure but what if that scion FR-S now has an electric motor at the same price point? Or the Prius gets an electric motor at that same price point? That's the thing with electric cars, you can make most of them insanely powerful off the line without making them into a full on sports car. I definitely drove like an idiot with our full size passenger van when I was a teenager. Hazard is when all cars have instant torque.
  - sliken 5y ago
    I'd say it's safer, and unlikely to have a significantly different overall performance. Sure 0-30 mph is likely faster, full torque instantly does that. But instant torque leads to less surprises. In my WRX I did have a moment where my prediction of how things would play out was wrong, so I hustled and a second or 2 later (thanks ICE lag + turbo lag) I was in an unintentional 4 wheel slide. Ended fine (WRX is very predictable when sliding), but instant torque just makes things easier. Generally the lower the performance of a car, the longer in the future you have to predict your power needs, which makes things like on ramps, highway passing (especially on uphills), and of course getting across intersections quickly. I think one correction for the OP is that while instant torque is a huge change for the driver, it's not so for anyone outside the car. Much of the lag in the throttle, engine (waiting for RPMs to increase), torque converter, automatic to shift, driveline slack, etc is invisible to people outside. What pedestrian notices is the launch after all that happens, and said launch is much like an EV launch. Sure $50-$75k Teslas are quick, but I don't expect cheaper EVs to be particularly faster than the cheaper gas cars.
    - anonfornoreason 5y ago
      It will be interesting to see how the numbers shake out. I've just known too many drivers that can't even keep a constant throttle, so making throttle response instantaneous is problematic. Analogy: my kid has an electric dirt bike, and it has a knob to control throttle response, and a knob to control speed. He can rock top speed, but he still can't handle more than 1/3rd up the dial on throttle response. He doesn't have good enough throttle control to handle the torque, and this is a tiny little thing. I base much of my thoughts off the experience of working with him to learn throttle control (he accidentally power slides in turns all the time, which is iffy on a dirtbike for a kid), and my experience with other drivers.
giantg2 5y ago
Those high torque numbers tend to come with advance traction and stability manager limits, making them much less likely to lose control than pedestrian cars with less power and less advanced systems.
- sliken 5y ago
  True. However seems like nearly all cars with enough power to lose traction in normal conditions have advanced traction control systems. After all nearly all passenger cars have ABS these days and it's just a matter of software to retard the timing/throttle as needed to reduce traction. Even fairly midrange cars like the Subaru crosstrek ($22.6k), Toyota RAV4 ($26.5k), and Honda CR-v ($26.4k) have pretty advanced traction control systems and the average cost of a new car in the USA is $47,077. In fact the traction control system is the number one complaint for those driving in the snow, except for the Subaru. Not of those 3 cars are particularly fast and reviews often mention the lack of power.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    " it's just a matter of software to retard the timing/throttle as needed to reduce traction." The implementation of that is so much more complicated in something like a Tesla S vs the others. Things like independent torque vectoring is not common in most gas vehicles. I thought Car and Driver or Road and Track did a great write-up on it, but I can't find it. This one is meh, but has some details in it. The second one talks about stuff like slip-start mode. https://plugincarworld.com/does-a-tesla-have-traction-control/ https://plugincarworld.com/does-a-tesla-have-traction-contro... https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-CC0F27E7-FD78-448D-B739-209EBBEDF2C3.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-CC0F27E...
    - sliken 5y ago
      Heh, I should have said "just a matter of software to retard the timing/throttle and per wheel braking". Sure being software the quality of the implementations vary (looking at you Honda, BMW (depending on year), and Toyota). Sure the Tesla has an advantage over ICE cars in that it can produce positive or negative torque near instantly on either axle. But braking is a good substitute. I didn't really fully understand differentials till I built one for an RC car and played with it enough. If you turn the car upside down you can immediately tell that dragging your finger on one wheel, speeds up the other wheel, thus the dangers of an open differential (my WRX had two limited slip differentials and one open slip). Open differentials + braking give you the best of both worlds. You get a cheap, less drag, lighter differential, but you can still transfer torque from the slipping wheel to the non-slipping as needed. Most don't realize that most cars (when it's slippery) are one wheel drive (fwd or rwd with an open differential), some are rear or front wheel drive and have limited slip so they are 2wd. AWD can be 1, 2, 3 or 4wd when slippery, depending on the configuration of open and closed differentials. My WRX was 3wd (1 open and 2 LSD). Hardcore offroad vehicles have locking hubs or full sync mode for very slipper conditions, but it's hell on tires if used on a normal road since every turn will scrub tires for the difference between inside and outside curve distances. However if you google snow testing and the 3 cars I mention above you'll find a report basically saying the Subaru was awesome in the snow, predictable, could climb, turn, and brake as well as traction allowed. The toyota and honda however were pretty terrible in comparison despite all being a similar price, similar power, similar tires, and AWD. I was amused to find that Subaru's were really better in the snow. I spent a year of commuting through six 7,200 foot peaks every weekend and went through many snow storms, blizzards, freezing fog, etc. My WRX did awesome, except when the snow was so high it would life the car off the tires. It didn't use anything active for traction control, but was awesomely predictable in the snow. I thought rally drivers had inhuman skills in their ability to drift sideways through corners and stay in their lane.... till the WRX and found it easy to do the same. Great fun. Sure my old WRX couldn't do torque vectoring, or even active traction control, but was so predictable that it didn't particularly matter if there was some slipping. It also communicated exceedingly well, one treacherous night descending from 7,200 feet or so into Carson City I was at 10 mph or so, any slower and I'd slide to the inside of corners. I could tell not only that the ABS was going off, but which wheel. I tuned my speed as a result so I'd slow so one wheel would occasionally trigger, but not so slow that I'd slide to the inside of corners. Pretty eerie with the slow rumble of the boxer engine near idle, silence from the heavy falling snow, and the noise of the ABS floating between the 4 wheels. As you might imagine it had my full attention. As you can probably tell despite my m3p being faster and more advanced in many ways, I still miss my WRX.

sliken 5y ago

I don't see the relationship. Idiots can kill people regardless of car power. I've not seen any relationship between car power and percentage of cars in serious accidents. If you look at the top 10 cars involved in accidents (per 1000 cars), it's not a particularly powerful bunch. In the USA last year the stop accident prone car was a Scion FR-S with under 200 HP (150 lb-feet). The Toyota Prius (even Toyota marketing makes fun of it's performance) is at #8. Personally I feel safer in a capable car, even if it has crazy 0-60 times and impressive HP/Torque numbers.

willis936 5y ago
That's because you're normalizing by the wrong value. You should be normalizing "number of accidents per 1000 cars of the same model". https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-model https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...
- DennisP 5y ago
  From a quick glance at that, a Chevy Malibu with a 0-60 of 7.8 seconds has a worse death rate than a Corvette, which has a time of around three seconds.
  - willis936 5y ago
    The Malibu has a multi-vehicle crash death rate (MV) of 36 and single-vehicle crash death rate (SV) of 24. The Corvette is 4 and 53. Individual model comparisons aren't of much consequence (especially with such incomplete data), but trends are. If you scan the MV and SV columns in the midsize and large sections and compare it to the sports car and 2-door sections you'll see the trend I'm highlighting. The pdf linked on that page is helpful for this. https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-report/pdf/55/2 https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-report/pdf...
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Care to explain the comically large spread between the 2wd and the 4wd Juke? Or perhaps the various Charger models? The data seams to be screaming "driver demographics" at you.
anonfornoreason 5y ago
Sure but what if that scion FR-S now has an electric motor at the same price point? Or the Prius gets an electric motor at that same price point? That's the thing with electric cars, you can make most of them insanely powerful off the line without making them into a full on sports car. I definitely drove like an idiot with our full size passenger van when I was a teenager. Hazard is when all cars have instant torque.
- sliken 5y ago
  I'd say it's safer, and unlikely to have a significantly different overall performance. Sure 0-30 mph is likely faster, full torque instantly does that. But instant torque leads to less surprises. In my WRX I did have a moment where my prediction of how things would play out was wrong, so I hustled and a second or 2 later (thanks ICE lag + turbo lag) I was in an unintentional 4 wheel slide. Ended fine (WRX is very predictable when sliding), but instant torque just makes things easier. Generally the lower the performance of a car, the longer in the future you have to predict your power needs, which makes things like on ramps, highway passing (especially on uphills), and of course getting across intersections quickly. I think one correction for the OP is that while instant torque is a huge change for the driver, it's not so for anyone outside the car. Much of the lag in the throttle, engine (waiting for RPMs to increase), torque converter, automatic to shift, driveline slack, etc is invisible to people outside. What pedestrian notices is the launch after all that happens, and said launch is much like an EV launch. Sure $50-$75k Teslas are quick, but I don't expect cheaper EVs to be particularly faster than the cheaper gas cars.
  - anonfornoreason 5y ago
    It will be interesting to see how the numbers shake out. I've just known too many drivers that can't even keep a constant throttle, so making throttle response instantaneous is problematic. Analogy: my kid has an electric dirt bike, and it has a knob to control throttle response, and a knob to control speed. He can rock top speed, but he still can't handle more than 1/3rd up the dial on throttle response. He doesn't have good enough throttle control to handle the torque, and this is a tiny little thing. I base much of my thoughts off the experience of working with him to learn throttle control (he accidentally power slides in turns all the time, which is iffy on a dirtbike for a kid), and my experience with other drivers.

giantg2 5y ago

Those high torque numbers tend to come with advance traction and stability manager limits, making them much less likely to lose control than pedestrian cars with less power and less advanced systems.

sliken 5y ago
True. However seems like nearly all cars with enough power to lose traction in normal conditions have advanced traction control systems. After all nearly all passenger cars have ABS these days and it's just a matter of software to retard the timing/throttle as needed to reduce traction. Even fairly midrange cars like the Subaru crosstrek ($22.6k), Toyota RAV4 ($26.5k), and Honda CR-v ($26.4k) have pretty advanced traction control systems and the average cost of a new car in the USA is $47,077. In fact the traction control system is the number one complaint for those driving in the snow, except for the Subaru. Not of those 3 cars are particularly fast and reviews often mention the lack of power.
- giantg2 5y ago
  " it's just a matter of software to retard the timing/throttle as needed to reduce traction." The implementation of that is so much more complicated in something like a Tesla S vs the others. Things like independent torque vectoring is not common in most gas vehicles. I thought Car and Driver or Road and Track did a great write-up on it, but I can't find it. This one is meh, but has some details in it. The second one talks about stuff like slip-start mode. https://plugincarworld.com/does-a-tesla-have-traction-control/ https://plugincarworld.com/does-a-tesla-have-traction-contro... https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-CC0F27E7-FD78-448D-B739-209EBBEDF2C3.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-CC0F27E...
  - sliken 5y ago
    Heh, I should have said "just a matter of software to retard the timing/throttle and per wheel braking". Sure being software the quality of the implementations vary (looking at you Honda, BMW (depending on year), and Toyota). Sure the Tesla has an advantage over ICE cars in that it can produce positive or negative torque near instantly on either axle. But braking is a good substitute. I didn't really fully understand differentials till I built one for an RC car and played with it enough. If you turn the car upside down you can immediately tell that dragging your finger on one wheel, speeds up the other wheel, thus the dangers of an open differential (my WRX had two limited slip differentials and one open slip). Open differentials + braking give you the best of both worlds. You get a cheap, less drag, lighter differential, but you can still transfer torque from the slipping wheel to the non-slipping as needed. Most don't realize that most cars (when it's slippery) are one wheel drive (fwd or rwd with an open differential), some are rear or front wheel drive and have limited slip so they are 2wd. AWD can be 1, 2, 3 or 4wd when slippery, depending on the configuration of open and closed differentials. My WRX was 3wd (1 open and 2 LSD). Hardcore offroad vehicles have locking hubs or full sync mode for very slipper conditions, but it's hell on tires if used on a normal road since every turn will scrub tires for the difference between inside and outside curve distances. However if you google snow testing and the 3 cars I mention above you'll find a report basically saying the Subaru was awesome in the snow, predictable, could climb, turn, and brake as well as traction allowed. The toyota and honda however were pretty terrible in comparison despite all being a similar price, similar power, similar tires, and AWD. I was amused to find that Subaru's were really better in the snow. I spent a year of commuting through six 7,200 foot peaks every weekend and went through many snow storms, blizzards, freezing fog, etc. My WRX did awesome, except when the snow was so high it would life the car off the tires. It didn't use anything active for traction control, but was awesomely predictable in the snow. I thought rally drivers had inhuman skills in their ability to drift sideways through corners and stay in their lane.... till the WRX and found it easy to do the same. Great fun. Sure my old WRX couldn't do torque vectoring, or even active traction control, but was so predictable that it didn't particularly matter if there was some slipping. It also communicated exceedingly well, one treacherous night descending from 7,200 feet or so into Carson City I was at 10 mph or so, any slower and I'd slide to the inside of corners. I could tell not only that the ABS was going off, but which wheel. I tuned my speed as a result so I'd slow so one wheel would occasionally trigger, but not so slow that I'd slide to the inside of corners. Pretty eerie with the slow rumble of the boxer engine near idle, silence from the heavy falling snow, and the noise of the ABS floating between the 4 wheels. As you might imagine it had my full attention. As you can probably tell despite my m3p being faster and more advanced in many ways, I still miss my WRX.