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Certification documents show a single rear-mounted electric motor producing 268 horsepower and hooked up to a 93-kWh battery. Wow, that seems like a lot of hor
by tocs3 9mo ago
Certification documents show a single rear-mounted electric motor producing 268 horsepower and hooked up to a 93-kWh battery.
Wow, that seems like a lot of horsepower.
- anishgupta 9mo agoBox on turbo
- stetrain 9mo agoHorsepower is pretty cheap in an EV once you have a big battery. The 2026 Nissan Leaf, an economy car and one of the cheapest new EVs in the US at $29k, has 214hp.
- nospice 9mo agoThey were using Jaguar I-Pace for a good while, right? That was nearly 400 hp.
- jerlam 9mo agoHowever, they accelerate rather slowly. Waymo isn't in any need to get you to your destination faster, nor get into additional collisions.
- Analemma_ 9mo agoTo me the torque is more important than the horsepower: one nice thing about Waymo is that they're quite good at gentle, constant acceleration up San Francisco's steep hills. Human Uber drivers have a 50/50 chance of making me carsick when they try this, out of some combination of inexperience and driving a car without enough low-end torque.
- standardUser 9mo agoThis is the thing people seem to sleep on when it comes to EVs - they simply drive better than other cars. More responsive, better pickup, smoother drivetrains, etc.
- idiotsecant 9mo agoThis is also a feature of hybrids people overlook. They might have tiny ICE engines, but the additional torque from the electric motor more than makes up for it
- redfern314 9mo agoI mean, kind of. Series hybrids (where the drivetrain is all electric and fed by a generator) yes, but all the parallel hybrids I've driven are still pretty anemic because you have both a tiny ICE engine and a tiny electric motor. They also don't always engage simultaneously in a way that makes it feel like you're getting the torque on demand.
- sib 9mo agoEhhhh.... The most prevalent hybrid (at least in the US) is the Toyota Prius. At least until to latest models, they were very slow, with a 0-60 time of ~10 seconds.
- yardie 9mo agoTesla Model 3 Standard is 280HP/210kW. And it's only really limited by the C of the battery pack. Under optimal conditions I've measured 310HP, according to the Canbus app. EVs are incredibly powerful. Even the humble Nissan Leaf would blow the doors off an 00s performance car.
- jedberg 9mo agoI have a Leaf. It makes me laugh when people with "muscle cars" try to race me. One time I humored one of them, and completely smoked them off the line. And my car was still in Eco mode.
- gambiting 9mo agoWe have a VW e-Up, with a very meagre 80hp electric motor - I can guarantee that off the lights that car is faster than pretty much any muscle or sports car, because it just instantly accelerates from standstil. I used to own an AMG few years ago, and to match what the e-Up can do I'd have to put it into Sports+ mode then enable launch control, then sit there with revs at 4000rpm just waiting for the light to change so the car would actually launch quickly. But off the standing start from idle? No chance.
- foobarian 9mo agoThe peak torque at 0rpm is a nice feature for city traffic low-key drag racing. I think if you really wanted to have a chance to troll an EV owner you'd have to incite them to race you on a highway with conditions that cause frequent speed changes in the 50-100mph range. But tbh even they you'd have a hard time. Maybe if you kept that up until they ran down the battery?
- elictronic 9mo agoNever or arrested on a public road basically vs my daily driver is fun even when driving in the real world. It’s not loud is the last real complaint I see.
- 9mo ago