Internet sleuths take down the SSC Tuatara's 316-MPH speed record
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
Because it's actually simple to listen how fast an engine rotates, I found that they went slower than what is advertised and that the engine didn't rotate as fast as they claim. I computed 7530rpm and they claim 8600rpm.
I posted it on HN and I hope it's ok to post it again as a comment : https://fungiboletus.github.io/ssc-rpm/
Your method and math checks out even without the tachometer observations - in a split-plane v8 (such as that in the scc tuatara) you have two cylinder fires per rotation of the engine. You have measured 251 cylinder fires per second (251hz) thus 125.5 rotations per second OR 7530/minute (RPM).
Hard to refute that.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/technology/47327/Maps-site-reveals-US-...
Firstly,
>Bugatti's claimed 300-mph-breaking Chiron run was never going to count
As much as they would like to believe otherwise, Guiness World Records can not create truth. If the Chiron goes faster than the SSC, it's the fastest production car. That's it. Two way runs & proper filming are an important factor if you're trying to decide who gets the piece of paper but there's nothing 'official' about it. If someone goes faster but never tells anyone, they still went faster.
That is apart from one point: the Chiron isn't a production car. But neither is the SSC. Nor the Veyron nor the Agera RS. If you don't believe me, try to buy one. No matter how much money you have, or at what time you try to do it, you can't. All of these cars have extremely limited units sold only to people with an existing relationship with the company. All of them set records with special editions. That's just a modified car. If there are only 25 Agera RSes & every one is modified for the owner, how do you establish the one that did the record isn't just the equivalent of a binned, liquid oxygen-cooled CPU that dies after the record setting run? You can't even drive the Veyron away from a record setting attempt: you need to replace its $40000 tyres.
Bugatti's record was once in doubt because they deactivated the speed limiter for the run. This was later retracted because it's not actually about trying to set consistent rules, it's about creating marketing material for Volkswagen's halo car. Which is why they won't let anybody else run their faster cars on their track.
Other, assorted viewpoints:
- If your car is just a modified Lotus, it doesn't count.
- For bidirectional attempts, how can you say that a car has a top speed of C mph when C = A+B/2 mph and A>B? That's an invented figure.
I agree that (A+B)/2 is an invented figure, but I think the logic of "This is the maximum a car can do without external factors" is a reasonable thing to agree on as a top-speed, and wind is an external factor. Otherwise a lot of cars can set their top speed by being dropped from a sky scraper, and the testing would get unreasonably expensive. (A+B)/2 is probably a good first approximation to a wind-neutral value (and a gravity neutral value too).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiAbcw5s9_8
But based on the Beetle's terminal velocity here, this strategy for setting a car's top speed will only work for cars that can't drive particularly fast.
Dropping a $25,000 Camry from an airplane might actually be cheaper than a single speed run of these hypercars, where they burn through a $40,000 set of tires....
Or maybe being a rear-engined car put the Beetle at a unique disadvantage, and the Camry would orient itself just fine.
Junkyards are easy, who's got a helicopter-pilot friend and some land?
Hmmm, one could imagine using the front wheel drive as a flywheel for some attitude control...
Me thinks a drop test is in order.
I work with a group of people who have built a car sharing club. I procured a Jesko production slot for the club and I have no existing relationship with Koenigsegg, nor any similar relationships with any major super or hypercar manufacturers.
How does that work? :)
That's true, and I certainly am not the authority here nor am I knowledgeable enough to pretend to be one....But this reminds me of an argument I had once with someone about Short Takeoff & Landing airplane competitions.
They were bringing up how a group in Alaska was totally incorrect in claiming the competitors at their event were setting world records because (paraphrased) "well I know a guy whose uncle in Idaho took off in a foot less than that on his mountain airstrip, so that video isn't of the world record.".
Did he? Maybe. I can't prove either way. But the difference is, these guys are the, or at least an, authority on STOL world records. If you are serious about setting a record like that, you're going to participate in one of these events. Uncle Jimmy might be a pretty dang good pilot but it really doesn't matter if nobody was there to see it. And the pilots in these all agree that this group is the authority, so why would they recognize a "record" from someone outside it?
The FIA, which sanctions all land speed record attempts, disagrees: Two runs, in opposite directions, with no more than 1 hour between the runs.
If Elon decided to go run a special build Tesla with a new "Infinite Insanity" mode and did 350mph - without Guinness or FIA observers or sanctions, that'd be a thing, and sure it wouldn't qualify for any "official Guinness/FIA piece of paper", but I have no doubt Tesla Marketing would mount a magnificent press campaign with totally convincing proof of their claimed numbers.
(I totally agree that if you _want_ to make claims like that, you should abide by commonly held agreements and recognised authorities. But Elon does dumb shit all the time, and may well be the sort of guy who chooses _not_ to follow FIA rules to intentionally generate social media "engagement" and "vitality"...)
As a wider point, the original Veyron had all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a mercedes S-class (for example), as opposed to being a stripped down racer.
The word "official" refers to authority, not to reality. I'm using the official definition.
Bugatti’s “oh yeah we went superfast but we won’t bother to validate the record” is not very different from “my dad did 100mph once.”
1. CERN is made of scientists; Their job is to measure stuff. SSC relied on a third party.
2. Their published studies are indeed open to replication/verification. "Hey we just achieved speed faster than light, believe us" doesn't just happen.
There's always the third possibility - shenanigans. In which case they'll either pull more shenanigans or they'll just try and slink away.
In the meantime it sounds like the record can be safely ignored.
SSC has actually already agreed to run again. [1]
[1] https://jalopnik.com/ssc-tuatara-will-re-run-top-speed-attem...
It seems unlikely that people capable of building a car like this would have released a claimed speed that their car was incapable of reaching due to gearing. Then again, I've seen a lot of stupid things in my time racing.
1. some engines will heat soak and lose more power than others under extended load, which doing 300mph will take, and the tuatara is a smaller engine running a lot of boost, more likely to lose power over time compared to some of the other hypercars with larger engines or partial electric power boosts.
2. gearing
3. aerodynamics. not just drag but will the car become airborne/impossible to control, etc
I noticed that there was a statement from the driver about crosswinds blowing him onto the shoulder during his fastest run. However, I didn't see anything like that in the video. I assumed this meant they didn't want to show that run because the potential danger of being blown off the road wouldn't look good. Perhaps they mixed the speed data with a safer run from earlier in the day. This would explain the discrepancies.
If this is true, perhaps they are simply using the calibration talk as a red herring to distract from the misleading video. This scenario would allow them to not take responsibility and comeback with a genuine record.
But expect to see a lot of hemming and hawing about how they’re having a tough time getting this next attempt scheduled and ask the permits in place. Because it isn’t going to happen. If it could, then they would have released the real footage and data to begin with.
This wasn’t an “editing” error where the framerate of the video accidentally was slowed down, it wasn’t a GPS calibration error, it was a company being caught in a lie. It happens from time to time, especially in motorsport.
Edit: to clarify, it’s not on me to prove that the car isn’t the fastest in the world. It’s on SSC, which is making the claim, to prove it. That their first attempt has been debunked means they will be given more scrutiny the next time around, and I’m not confident that they will do it. Because if this was just an editing error, why don’t they just go back to their footage and show us the real stuff? Did it conveniently get deleted?
Why even use GPS for this, as opposed to a known distance and a clock, or an on-site laser (or whatever electromagnetic wave) based system? Seems like using satellites is unnecessarily complex and error prone(esp. civilian GPS).
GPS (really, multi-constellation GNSS these days) is not only easier to physically set up, it also gives you more data, and likely more accuracy. You don't save the PVT output of the receiver on the vehicle. (I mean, you could save that too, I guess.) You save the raw observables, and post-process along with data gathered at the same time by stationary reference stations. (Either run your own base, or use data from networks like unavco.)
This gives you a remarkably precise picture of the vehicle's position, motion, and acceleration, in 3 dimensions, throughout the entire run. If they want to be transparent about it, they'll publish a multiconstellation RINEX file of the whole shebang, so anyone can analyze it themselves. There might be fewer internet sleuths who know how to sling rtklib or gpstk than youtube-dl and audacity, but the ones who can, will produce a wealth of data.
For bonus points, put two receivers on the car, a few feet apart. This allows moving-baseline so you also get an orientation solution.
Maximum theoretical speed on a dyno, sure.
It's not like the tires can expand in diameter 200% though. I'm sure that Michelin has parameterized tables for the tire's mechanical behavior that they are confident about by now. They aren't exactly new to tire engineering...
Your high school physic teacher is on line 1. Wants to talk to you about what "weight" means...
Weight is the force the earth needs to provide to support the car. Mass remains constant except for burned fuel loss.
Agree re: GPS, on-site laser traps timing an accurately measured distance is obviously preferable. I presume laziness prevails.
The point was really if the mechanical system can only "turn" to a maximum theoretical speed of e.g. 300mph, then they clearly and obviously didn't exceed it, no matter what, unless the car transforms into an airplane at some point.
I don't personally know how much those tires deform at such speeds. My personal experience with sportbikes approaching 200mph has been it's not even enough to make up for the ~5% speedometer error that still indicated higher than actual around 190. But that's a much narrower and lighter tire, and 300mph is a different world.
I heard from a family member that this was _about_ to happen.
Specifically, these records occur on a stretch of "Blue Diamond Highway" between Pahrump, NV and Las Vegas, NV. This is the spot right before it splits into a divided highway. https://goo.gl/maps/nom16aarrpDVymFj6
They'd just finished up years of construction in the area and allowed it's use (since it shuts down all traffic going over the mountain for folks commuting into Las Vegas).
It's great that Shelby have accepted this, not crying 'tin foil hat', conspiracy theorists etc etc as so often happens with higher stakes anomalies
Only when evidence and press/public attention started increasing did SSC then miraculously also started finding inconsistencies in the videos, etc etc. But at this point, their only options were to either admit to their wrongdoing or go along and side with the people that, by this time, already had pretty damning reports and proofs that the evidence for the "record" was very sketchy. If you haven't seen, you should check out Shmee150's video [3]
So, to me this was either purposely done for attention/press or the SSC people were really incompetent at trying to break this kind of record without proper measurement tools and official/independent reviewers. Something like this should, imho, be done as professionally and with as much redundancy as possible before any wild claim is made and press releases issued. It should never have come to a point where a few car enthusiasts on youtube can, from just a video and basic math/physics and knowing your own car parts, figure out that your record claims are false or at least very inaccurate. It has never happened when Bugatti or Koenigsegg broke the records. But now, if you search for "fastest production car" on Google, you get a whole lot of SSC results so, in a way, I guess they have succeeded.
[0] https://www.sscnorthamerica.com/news/ssc-tuatara-hypercar-ea...
[1] https://www.sscnorthamerica.com/news/dewetron-validates-ssc-...
[2] https://www.autodevot.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Dewetro...
I don't know why not, because that's obviously exactly what they did. The engineers know the car can't go that fast. The helicopter pilot knows the car wasn't going that fast. They outright lied about the endorsement of the GPS company. You can't do that accidentally.
aki009 NOVEMBER 2, 2020 08:00 AM Not to provide an excuse for these guys, but that stretch of road is not too far from where the US military routinely degrades GPS signals for testing and training purposes. It might explain some of the inconsistencies in GPS data.
Instead lets time signals traveling in space and back. Sheesh.
Laser gates certainly have advantages, but they require more setup and ultimately I am skeptical that they would provide more certainty than GPS results. As mentioned elsewhere a survey GPS receiver can produce raw data which can be processed after the fact as a form of audit, something not really possible with laser gates.
Why on earth? They will literally produce two time stamps + known physical distance. What can be uncertain about that? Why is it any less auditable (or possible to tamper) then a GPS log?
https://www.koenigsegg.com/koenigsegg-agera-rs-achieves-mult...
This is really about Shelby getting caught with a doctored video and lying about a fake record but the author is too nice to call them out on it.
It could never explain what was seen. Either someone foolishly read km/h numbers as mph, or the whole thing is faked. Considering the silly animation of the camera view on the video, I suspect the latter...
One of the specific claims is that the GPS equipment doesn't show a speed of zero when the vehicle is not moving - it's hard to understand how this would happen, a poorly set up DGPS scheme would not produce a 20mph rate of change in fixes for a non-moving object unless it was seriously defective.
All in all it feels a lot like the "calibration" here is just a hand-waving excuse for the outcome - the margin here is so large that calibration issues are not going to account for it unless there was outright incompetence.
The vendor involved, DEWE, makes various types of augmented GPS equipment but also inertial measurement products. Calibration would be a much bigger issue with inertial measurement and that could make more sense, but all the reporting on this says GPS was in use.
Unless they were abusing the system by putting the dGPS reference station on a moving vehicle going the opposite direction or simply feeding spoofed correction data into the GPS.
I've got a bit off-topic question, but how accurate are speedometers in run-of-the-mill commercial cars?
I live near a pair of schools which set up those radar devices [1] showing how fast you're driving and it's rarely the same as my speedometer. Usually 2-5 km/hr below my cars number. So I always assume now that my car's number is more of a projection of the acceleration levels combined with the current speed to give a picture of how fast you're going to be traveling very shortly.
I've long been curious which one is more accurate. Apologies I've yet to do the rabbithole of figuring out how speedometers work vs how the radar speed sign works. I just assumed the radar device (on an empty road) is more accurate to real life than my car since it's a fixed external measure.
There's also apparently a rule in the US that requires that the speedometer never read low for commercial vehicles... probably another reason that the same rule gets applied to passenger vehicles, for parts commonality.
The speedometer is just based on the rotation of one of the axles, usually via a magnet and reed switch in modern cars. If you do the arithmetic you'll find that just tire wear can have a surprisingly large impact on the final speedometer indication, a few percent easily. Presumably if your tires are brand new the speedometer is much closer to accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nevada_State_Rout...
And I would not have expected you to write about something that needs to be changed (in that tone) and doing it yourself immediately afterwards. Why then write about it before fixing it, or in fact at all. Didn't make sense to me.
Also, my thank you could be seen as equally directed towards the stranger that got your hint.
So let me get this straight; this is a $1.6M "supercar" with an NRE-supplied souped up Chevy (or is it a Ford?) V8 with the usual couple turbos hanging off it?
Nice profit margin.
Because if it's just another Chevy v8 with some shiny manifolds and turbochargers hanging off it and an E85 compatible fuel system, it's nothing more than a souped up crate motor.
At 30k I'd personally be more interested in the h1v8 with turbos hanging off it, but it's still not something I'd be willing to pay $1M let alone $1.6M to get in a "supercar" package. That's insane IMO. And it's not that I'm against exploiting COTS parts for performance applications. It's just a matter of cost; Chevy-based powertrains are economical, this vehicle is not; hence: nice profit margin.
On one side, we have a couple of people on keyboards, taking down dubious claims based on clear facts, logic and power of deduction.
On the other side, we have people on keyboards influencing millions using blatant lies, clear twisting of facts, easily verifiable incidents.