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I drove a rented SUV a few weeks ago (GMC Acadia Denali) that had quite shocking acceleration -- 310 horsepower or so -- and the handling of a dead fish. It was

by dgacmu 3y ago

I drove a rented SUV a few weeks ago (GMC Acadia Denali) that had quite shocking acceleration -- 310 horsepower or so -- and the handling of a dead fish. It was kind of scary, and overall a really unpleasant experience. I don't understand why the manufacturer would choose that combination other than being able to market the HP. And this was gas, not EV.

rainsford 3y ago
This seems like a fairly common point as well in car reviews. Super fast cars of any type are only fun in a very limited set of circumstances, most of them not on a normal road. In contrast, even your daily commute can be made more fun with a car that's lightweight or has good handling or an engaging manual shifter or whatever. It's basically the entire premise of the Mazda Miata. It's an unfortunate trend with EVs too (thanks in large part to Tesla IMO). You can get a ton of acceleration with big electric motors and batteries, but the car will otherwise drive like ass because it's so heavy and so little attention has been paid to anything besides speed.
- pornel 3y ago
  Instant torque makes lots of people grin. Most BEVs also have low center of gravity and even mass distribution, so they’re not as bad as a heavy ICE car. On public roads, 0-30mph acceleration is probably most fun you can have within realm of legal and sensible driving. Handling is not an issue at speed limits of public roads.
  - caconym_ 3y ago
    Limiting EV torque off the line is probably one of the lowest-hanging emissions reduction fruits out there, given that (by estimates I've seen) tire wear for current EVs is in aggregate 20-50% faster than ICE vehicles.
    - pornel 3y ago
      The tire thing you've heard has been started by one article that misleadingly bundled tire and breakpad particles with all other emissions summed up by weight. This was extremely misleading breakdown, because it discounted all of the ICE gases that are toxic, but weigh almost nothing, and lighter combustion particles that stay in the air, versus tire particles that are typically heavier and stay on the ground. Of course worn tires aren't environmentally neutral, but that framing was used as a regressive "gotcha" in EVs vs ICE, without daring to mention any real solutions like reversing heavy macho-pickup-truck and SUV fashion created by a workaround for emissions regulation, or moving freight from trucks to rail.
      - caconym_ 3y ago
        Is it or is it not true that EVs shed tire rubber particles at a significantly higher rate than like-for-like ICE vehicles? I said it was low-hanging fruit because it's my understanding that it is: since EVs (again, correct me if I'm wrong) generate more tire rubber particles because of their comparatively high torque output, it's literally a software fix (limiting torque) to cut those emissions to ICE levels or, potentially, even lower. The only reason not to do it is that many people view their personal vehicles as large, expensive toys, and they will be less fun toys if their acceleration performance is curtailed. I don't see this as a "gotcha" for EV technology, because it has such a trivial solution, and it was not my intent to suggest that ICE cars are less (or more, for that matter) damaging to the environment. I'm honestly not sure why you would read my comment that way. --- As for the harm done by microplastics like tire rubber particles, it's my understanding that they don't simply stay on the ground, but rather that drainage carries them into the ground, waterways, and ultimately oceans, where they remain intact for some indefinite period and cause largely unquantified disruptions to local organisms and ecologies. It's not obvious to me that they won't ultimately be more of a problem than airborne pollutants, since they may be much more persistent and difficult to remove.
        DennisP 3y ago
        There's the perfect solution in an ideal world, and there's what actually works given people's actual behavior. For the latter, you have to consider that if you make EVs less compelling, more people might just stick with their ICE vehicles, which are worse overall when you take all pollutants into account. After the EV transition is complete, though, that'd be a good time to start limiting torque. Unless most people are just riding self-driving taxis by then, which probably won't be doing fast acceleration anyway.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Handling is nice for freeway merges but it’s definitely not at high speed. Where I used to live in San Diego there were a couple of ramps where I’d see the SUV drivers wallowing around the curves, tires squealing, visibly struggling to stay in the lane, and it was just like “you do this every day, why?”
  - kbos87 3y ago
    This. Who cares about top end speed when I can reliably pull ahead of any other vehicle on the road in my Model Y? I use that capability regularly. I'd literally never go 100+mph - that's a novelty.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    What are you even talking about? Maybe if you're driving around the grid of a city. Most driving enthusiasts know where to find roads that are fun at legal speeds.
- gambiting 3y ago
  I keep saying this to people and they literally don't believe me - my 86bhp volkswagen e-Up is more fun to drive than my 400bhp Mercedes-AMG ever was. Seriously, I haven't been hit in the head. The AMG was fun for a total of 4 seconds, which is exactly how long it took you to get to the legal speed limit, then you just sort of pootled along, unable to push hard and enjoy it. Yes it had grip, yes it had the noise, but I'd say out of the 4 years I owned it, I had "fun" in maybe a total 5% of those 4 years. In the e-Up? I can push it hard all the time. You can get on some countryside roads, keep the pedal flat, and chuck it around, and it takes ages to get to any kinds of illegal speeds. And it's electric so the torque is always there, there's no waiting for the dual clutch gearbox to finally decide what it wants to do, you press the throttle and you go, it's absolutely beautiful how you can thread this car out of a corner. My enjoyment of hard driving this car is probably 10x that of the AMG, partially because you can actually do it for longer, and partially because I'm far less likely to kill myself or land in jail doing so. And it's only 1200kg so it's not like an oil tanker in turns, despite having wheels from a lawnmower.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    Yeah kinda surprisingly I think the enjoyability of accessible cars peaked with the 90s/2000s enthusiast tuning scene ie "ricers." A 2500lb civic si or corolla xrs with a cold air intake was more fun than anything made since and they were like $22k.
caconym_ 3y ago
Reminds me of this article I saw recently: https://www.roadandtrack.com/reviews/a45688551/2023-tesla-model-s-plaid-pevoty-review/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/reviews/a45688551/2023-tesla-mo... > The result is terrifying. Both terrifying to drive, and terrifying to realize that these things are out on the road, in the hands of a public I don't trust enough to handle this sort of power. Up on Angeles Crest, the Plaid is incredibly quick, but it doesn't have the chassis, steering, or brakes to deal with the horsepower. Especially irritating is the damping, which is never settled in the Plaid's multiple drive modes. And that yoke steering wheel is just so incredibly stupid. It is scary. Consumer automobile trends are chasing more and bigger in every dimension and our regulators are either asleep at the wheel or on the payroll. Pedestrian deaths are trending up, we have hard data showing that pickup trucks are 2.5x more likely to kill the occupants of other vehicles in a crash, and there is no sign that anyone gives a single flying fuck about any of these lives that have been needlessly snuffed out—a pile of corpses as a monument to the pigheaded vanity of adult children. It is fucking disgusting.
- rgmerk 3y ago
  It has its defenders - including among HN commenters that own one - but the Plaid seems to me to be an extremely silly vehicle.
- kortilla 3y ago
  > pigheaded vanity of adult children. It is fucking disgusting. Presumably you suggest we also banish unhealthy food, cigarettes, weed, and alcohol, right? They are all responsible for significant deaths (especially when combined with any kind of driving) and are only for fun
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    Did you miss the part about being 2.5x more likely to kill other people, as in, not the people in the truck?
    - kortilla 3y ago
kube-system 3y ago
Try to cram 7 or 8 people and some luggage into one of those and that 310hp won't feel so powerful anymore. But the handling will be even more terrifying! I hate getting one of these as a rental instead of a van.

by dgacmu 3y ago

rainsford 3y ago

This seems like a fairly common point as well in car reviews. Super fast cars of any type are only fun in a very limited set of circumstances, most of them not on a normal road. In contrast, even your daily commute can be made more fun with a car that's lightweight or has good handling or an engaging manual shifter or whatever. It's basically the entire premise of the Mazda Miata. It's an unfortunate trend with EVs too (thanks in large part to Tesla IMO). You can get a ton of acceleration with big electric motors and batteries, but the car will otherwise drive like ass because it's so heavy and so little attention has been paid to anything besides speed.

pornel 3y ago
Instant torque makes lots of people grin. Most BEVs also have low center of gravity and even mass distribution, so they’re not as bad as a heavy ICE car. On public roads, 0-30mph acceleration is probably most fun you can have within realm of legal and sensible driving. Handling is not an issue at speed limits of public roads.
- caconym_ 3y ago
  Limiting EV torque off the line is probably one of the lowest-hanging emissions reduction fruits out there, given that (by estimates I've seen) tire wear for current EVs is in aggregate 20-50% faster than ICE vehicles.
  - pornel 3y ago
    The tire thing you've heard has been started by one article that misleadingly bundled tire and breakpad particles with all other emissions summed up by weight. This was extremely misleading breakdown, because it discounted all of the ICE gases that are toxic, but weigh almost nothing, and lighter combustion particles that stay in the air, versus tire particles that are typically heavier and stay on the ground. Of course worn tires aren't environmentally neutral, but that framing was used as a regressive "gotcha" in EVs vs ICE, without daring to mention any real solutions like reversing heavy macho-pickup-truck and SUV fashion created by a workaround for emissions regulation, or moving freight from trucks to rail.
    - caconym_ 3y ago
      Is it or is it not true that EVs shed tire rubber particles at a significantly higher rate than like-for-like ICE vehicles? I said it was low-hanging fruit because it's my understanding that it is: since EVs (again, correct me if I'm wrong) generate more tire rubber particles because of their comparatively high torque output, it's literally a software fix (limiting torque) to cut those emissions to ICE levels or, potentially, even lower. The only reason not to do it is that many people view their personal vehicles as large, expensive toys, and they will be less fun toys if their acceleration performance is curtailed. I don't see this as a "gotcha" for EV technology, because it has such a trivial solution, and it was not my intent to suggest that ICE cars are less (or more, for that matter) damaging to the environment. I'm honestly not sure why you would read my comment that way. --- As for the harm done by microplastics like tire rubber particles, it's my understanding that they don't simply stay on the ground, but rather that drainage carries them into the ground, waterways, and ultimately oceans, where they remain intact for some indefinite period and cause largely unquantified disruptions to local organisms and ecologies. It's not obvious to me that they won't ultimately be more of a problem than airborne pollutants, since they may be much more persistent and difficult to remove.
      - DennisP 3y ago
        There's the perfect solution in an ideal world, and there's what actually works given people's actual behavior. For the latter, you have to consider that if you make EVs less compelling, more people might just stick with their ICE vehicles, which are worse overall when you take all pollutants into account. After the EV transition is complete, though, that'd be a good time to start limiting torque. Unless most people are just riding self-driving taxis by then, which probably won't be doing fast acceleration anyway.
- acdha 3y ago
  Handling is nice for freeway merges but it’s definitely not at high speed. Where I used to live in San Diego there were a couple of ramps where I’d see the SUV drivers wallowing around the curves, tires squealing, visibly struggling to stay in the lane, and it was just like “you do this every day, why?”
- kbos87 3y ago
  This. Who cares about top end speed when I can reliably pull ahead of any other vehicle on the road in my Model Y? I use that capability regularly. I'd literally never go 100+mph - that's a novelty.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  What are you even talking about? Maybe if you're driving around the grid of a city. Most driving enthusiasts know where to find roads that are fun at legal speeds.
gambiting 3y ago
I keep saying this to people and they literally don't believe me - my 86bhp volkswagen e-Up is more fun to drive than my 400bhp Mercedes-AMG ever was. Seriously, I haven't been hit in the head. The AMG was fun for a total of 4 seconds, which is exactly how long it took you to get to the legal speed limit, then you just sort of pootled along, unable to push hard and enjoy it. Yes it had grip, yes it had the noise, but I'd say out of the 4 years I owned it, I had "fun" in maybe a total 5% of those 4 years. In the e-Up? I can push it hard all the time. You can get on some countryside roads, keep the pedal flat, and chuck it around, and it takes ages to get to any kinds of illegal speeds. And it's electric so the torque is always there, there's no waiting for the dual clutch gearbox to finally decide what it wants to do, you press the throttle and you go, it's absolutely beautiful how you can thread this car out of a corner. My enjoyment of hard driving this car is probably 10x that of the AMG, partially because you can actually do it for longer, and partially because I'm far less likely to kill myself or land in jail doing so. And it's only 1200kg so it's not like an oil tanker in turns, despite having wheels from a lawnmower.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Yeah kinda surprisingly I think the enjoyability of accessible cars peaked with the 90s/2000s enthusiast tuning scene ie "ricers." A 2500lb civic si or corolla xrs with a cold air intake was more fun than anything made since and they were like $22k.

caconym_ 3y ago

Reminds me of this article I saw recently: https://www.roadandtrack.com/reviews/a45688551/2023-tesla-model-s-plaid-pevoty-review/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/reviews/a45688551/2023-tesla-mo... > The result is terrifying. Both terrifying to drive, and terrifying to realize that these things are out on the road, in the hands of a public I don't trust enough to handle this sort of power. Up on Angeles Crest, the Plaid is incredibly quick, but it doesn't have the chassis, steering, or brakes to deal with the horsepower. Especially irritating is the damping, which is never settled in the Plaid's multiple drive modes. And that yoke steering wheel is just so incredibly stupid. It is scary. Consumer automobile trends are chasing more and bigger in every dimension and our regulators are either asleep at the wheel or on the payroll. Pedestrian deaths are trending up, we have hard data showing that pickup trucks are 2.5x more likely to kill the occupants of other vehicles in a crash, and there is no sign that anyone gives a single flying fuck about any of these lives that have been needlessly snuffed out—a pile of corpses as a monument to the pigheaded vanity of adult children. It is fucking disgusting.

rgmerk 3y ago
It has its defenders - including among HN commenters that own one - but the Plaid seems to me to be an extremely silly vehicle.
kortilla 3y ago
> pigheaded vanity of adult children. It is fucking disgusting. Presumably you suggest we also banish unhealthy food, cigarettes, weed, and alcohol, right? They are all responsible for significant deaths (especially when combined with any kind of driving) and are only for fun
- resolutebat 3y ago
  Did you miss the part about being 2.5x more likely to kill other people, as in, not the people in the truck?
  - kortilla 3y ago

kube-system 3y ago

Try to cram 7 or 8 people and some luggage into one of those and that 310hp won't feel so powerful anymore. But the handling will be even more terrifying! I hate getting one of these as a rental instead of a van.