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Comment by WordyMcWordface | Hacker News Reader

It also depends on how you define "Worlds fastest car" While there is no doubt this is a fast car and that time is a stonking 0-60 time. I am lead to believe it can't complete a full flat out lap of the Nurburgring as constant high speed/full throttle use heats up the battery to the point where performance has to be limited.

So while it will be great to "hoon about" in and should be a win at the traffic light gran prix there are probably much better track day cars.

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> It also depends on how you define "Worlds fastest car"

... and here they defined it so the P100D is the fastest. Welcome to the tautology club.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia has three cars above the P100D on its quickest 0-60 list: the Porsche 918, the LaFerrari, and the Bugatti Veyron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_production_car...

Note also that Tesla has also been called a bit "optimistic" with their 0-60 times as compared to other manufacturers (e.g. by Top Gear when testing P90D against Audi RS6 this year).

The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club

Wikipedia still shows the old 0-60 time for the P100D. At 2.4 seconds, it will be ahead of the Veyron, even with the LaFerrari, and behind the 918.

And Tesla only compares with cars currently in production. The LaFerrari and 918 are not.

Definitely some definitional tweaking to get the "right answer," but not quite a tautology.

"the old 0-60 time"

The _current_ 0-60 time, you mean. Especially with this:

"And Tesla only compares with cars currently in production."

considering this is only a teaser tweet, there's a slight hint of irony there. "Currently in production" is also very different from "fastest production cars". Very selective.

This happened last time Tesla announced something like this - people fell over themselves to install it in the Wikipedia page for fastest production cars. Even though it was: 1) not yet available, 2) not verified, and 3) described even by Tesla themselves as an "expected result". i.e. a press release.

When that didn't work, they took to the page to add a new column to the list of accepted results, to add, effectively "manufacturer projected results", with the end result looking entirely silly and forced - a top 20 chart with Tesla being the only one to have a result in a "not real, not yet" column.

One of the meanings of "old" is "former or previous."

And I see no irony. The teaser tweet is stated using the future tense. It will be the fastest car in production once it comes, unless some other car maker has a big surprise between now and then.

As for the Wikipedia stuff, I offer no defense of it, but I'm not surprised. Wikipedia suffers from plenty of fanboyism.

"We don't compare against cars not currently in production. Our car, not currently in production, is faster."

But it's not the biggest thing in the world. :)

Replace "is" with "will be" and the strangeness goes away.

There's also the weird aspect that the car itself has been sold for months, they'll just become faster once the update hits.

Car and Driver just compared another 20 or so cars at their resident Lightning Lap track a few months ago, including a Tesla. The Tesla was not fast, approx. 30 sec slower on a track that fast cars were finishing in the 2:45 range.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/tesla-model-s-p85d-at-l...

http://www.caranddriver.com/flipbook/lightning-lap-2016-ever...

Acceleration is also relatively poor above about 100 MPH. It's an amazing beast, but yes certainly a traffic light car no sports car.

The fact is anything below 5 seconds 0-60 is a damned speedy car that you really won't get to push in day to day driving... As it is, I've been in a few Model S's and they are fun. I'll keep my Scat Pack Challenger though, far less expensive, only a second lower, and a higher top speed. Not to mention looking quite a bit cooler imho.

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