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Comment by jdnenej | Hacker News Reader

That's 482km/h for those using modern units.

Information is fine but please keep the flamebait away.

why? that was useful to me. everyone aside from the US uses metric.

The issue is not the information (482 km/h) but the swipe ('modern units'). The breaks the site guidelines by being flamebait. In fact it's a classic flamewar topic, one of the pettiest and most repetitive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How is it flamebait. Was something I said untrue?

I answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861098.

It’s 490.48 km/h (304.77 mph).

Why is the "300mph barrier" even a thing when we're talking about a French-turned-Italian-turned-German automaker doing test runs in Germany? They only barrier they need to care about is the metric one at 500km/h.

Because it sounds impressive and it gives them a record title they can use to market the car. Last thing they did was their 0-400-0 records time, something nobody before them even thought about, hyped up in their marketing video [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfu1CGpW6lU

I'm sure it would have read "500km/h barrier" if they managed to break it.

Exactly.

However, 300mph is a valid goal as that was the milestone Sir Malcolm Campbell also barely passed in his final world-record run in the Bluebird.

The only thing they need to be concerned with is being faster than everything else. Units are arbitrary, even kilometers (1000x the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second). Once they go past 500 km/h people will start wondering about some other round number until we get to relativistic speeds.

Going faster than the speed of sound would be interesting and a somewhat "non-arbitrary" target.

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

At these speeds there's more to be said about how good the tyres are. You can add more power and better aero up until the point where the rubber shreds. It would be interesting to see what the car could do with solid wheels on a salt flat.

And we get there, we will strive to achieve Warp 10

British publication.

So relatively muscular imperial miles are correctly used. Readers' eyes might pass over in disinterest should weird & weedy "kilometres" be used instead.

On a more serious note, I'm sure the various manufacturer marketing departments take every opportunity, imperial, metric, Klingon, whatever, to mark a passing of a numeric "barrier" - i.e. a number ending in zeros.

I'm still waiting for someone to break the mythical 2500 furlong per hour barrier.

If you're going to use furlongs, you gotta use the whole FFF system consistently. 1000 furlongs per millifortnight for the win!

It makes for good marketing in countries still using miles obviously. They'd be stupid not to publicize it.

So really we should be asking when a car is going to break the mythical 500 km/h barrier and not some also-ran number ;-)

Although apparently that barrier was broken in 1937 by Thunderbolt, so I'm not sure what record we're actually talking about here.

Production vehicle land speed record.

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