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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

On a related note in the sports car community its been interesting to watch Acceleration stop being a mark of a performance car. There is even a lot of chatter around this being the end of the supercar segment since there are family wagons that can now do 2 second 0-60 runs. On top of that the speed is now too much for anyone to reasonably use off a drag strip or circuit.

Now there is a huge emphasis on engagement, dynamics, and a bunch of vague "feelsomeness" as sports cars slowly become like horses.

The march of time is interesting...

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We see this same sentiment in comments on this very website. Comments like "Straight line acceleration doesn't matter", for example.

Except, as a driver, I never accelerate in a tight curve. Once I got an EV, aggressive drivers were no longer able to block me from merging into traffic; if anything, I was able to easily get away from them if necessary.

I believe what we are seeing is car enthusiasm being pushed further into the long tail. Aesthetics, self-sufficiency through repair, exotics, etc, will always have a place, but speed off-track is over. ("Drive feel" is the new "gold cable connectors".)

The majority of the long-tail is just becoming "its really expensive" and "its an investment asset" unfortunately.

This is really quite wrong.

Performance car /= sports car. Sports cars are light and nimble by definition. They are usually fast, but this is not a rule. There have always been sedans that are faster in a straight line than most sports cars. There have always been sports cars that are not very fast at all. None of this is new, and claiming otherwise is ahistorical. Even back in the '60s, a sports car enthusiast would have chosen an MGB over a much faster Camaro, because the MGB is a sports car and the Camaro is not.

Engagement, dynamics, and "feelsomeness" are not vague at all. Handling is the product of engineering. It is largely objective. Some cars really are easier to control than others. Some really do hold on better in the corners. Cars really do have more or less body roll and more or less oversteer. What "character" is best is a matter of opinion, but the car really does have that "character". The fact that something is hard to measure does not mean it doesn't exist.

Sports car fans mean exactly what they say: they value handling over acceleration. If they didn't mean it, they wouldn't buy sports cars.

And the Tesla plaid is the fastest nurburgring sedan ever made.

Go ahead, say that's not a sports car.

If Nurburgring times are all we’re looking at, there are SUVs (ok, CUVs) that will destroy the times of “real sports cars”.

Its not a sports car. Besides, BMW M4 CSL, Jaguar XE project 8, BMW M3, Mercedes AMG 63 GT have faster lap times.

Fine. At the time when it ran that time it was the fastest, and faster than practically every sports car ever made.

The nurburgring is about the most sports car track ever made. I don't really know how to measure anything about a car's sportiness other than its speed around the track generally agreed to be the most "Gran Turismo" style.

If you want your own personal gatekeeping standards for "true sports car", whatever. When batteries double in density in the next ten years, your gatekeeping will look even more ridiculous.

The ICE drivetrain is a zombie at this point that is surviving on inertia and the incompetence of legacy automakers.

> Fine. At the time when it ran that time it was the fastest,

See here:

https://www.hotcars.com/fastest-sedans-around-the-nurburgrin...

And join with the list here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_N%C3%BCrburgring_Nords...

All five sedans that beat the Model S around the Nürburgring drove their laps earlier. The Plaid has only ever been the sixth fastest sedan around the 'ring. Which is excellent, but not what you said.

>and faster than practically every sports car ever made.

It isn't. It loses even to the 2012 Nissan GT-R or 2007 911 GT2. It loses to any of the faster 911s by nearly a minute. It is faster than some sports cars, but not recent sports cars at a similar price.

How is it that the Plaid, despite being one of the fastest cars on the road in a straight line, loses quite badly to cars with half the power? Because there is much more to performance than just acceleration. The cars you disparage are dramatically better in the corners than the Plaid.

>The nurburgring is about the most sports car track ever made.

I don't quite know what this means, but I don't think it's true. The use of the 'ring as a benchmark is often criticized because it rewards power over handling. A track that specifically tests handling would be slower and twistier. This is not sour grapes; people have been saying this for decades.

Hm I think you're right. I must have been thinking of Laguna Seca.

Of course, I'm assuming THAT isn't a "real sports car course" either.

People race motorcycles at Laguna Seca. Several of them are faster than the Plaid. Are they sports cars too?

You just said it's not a sports car. It's a sedan.

No one would dispute that it's a performance car. No one would dispute that it's very fast. But none of that matters here, because it weighs 5,000 lbs and has four doors. A Spitfire is not a muscle car, a Camaro is not a superbike, a 917 is not a performance sedan, and a Plaid is not a sports car.

You can, of course, use the word however you want. Words change meaning over time. But if you want to claim that sports car enthusiasts have moved the goal posts, you need to know where they were set in the first place. I am using the word in roughly the same way enthusiasts have always used it, and you are not.

Also, the Tesla Plaid is not the fastest sedan on the Nurburgring. It is the sixth fastest. Note that the top five times were set before Tesla's run.

https://www.hotcars.com/fastest-sedans-around-the-nurburgrin...

> Now there is a huge emphasis on engagement, dynamics, and a bunch of vague "feelsomeness" as sports cars slowly become like horses.

I think this is mostly just the experience of people who only started caring about performance cars when EVs started being competitive. Porsche people (and many others) have been ranting about the engagement and driving dynamics for 50 years now. There are decades of arguments on forums about handling, 50/50 weight ratios, understeer and oversteer, shifter feel, track times, etc. in addition to arguing about straight line acceleration.

EV people feel like those things are just excuses because previously they only digested mainstream auto news which puts a massive emphasis on straight line acceleration.

This has been an age old debate -- if you read the comment closely it was saying that supercars were defined by acceleration and handling, but now acceleration is no longer their forte. You could always get a sports car like a P-car if you wanted handling.

Don't think everything is just defined by this one issue, it goes way back, but Electric has now killed the first half of a supercar

> if you read the comment closely it was saying that supercars were defined by acceleration and handling

> sports car community

> as sports cars slowly become like horses

can you see how I might have been confused that the comment was about sports cars?

> supercars were defined by acceleration and handling, but now acceleration is no longer their forte.

I would argue that their forte is (usually) being fast around a track, and that acceleration and handling are just aspects of a complete system, subject to engineering tradeoffs like anything else. When we evaluate through that lens, ICE/hybrid supercars are doing just fine.

Acceleration was never really the top metric for super cars. It was more performance at high speeds, with high end cars like the Bugatti Chiron Supersport 300+ going up to 489 kmph (that is a lot in case you wonder). Part of the super car segment will go electric, that is for sure, but I do not see the end of the super car. Look at luxury watches. They are booming despite a Casio GShock with Multiband beating the shit out of them in terms of accuracy.

Super car segment is well below Bugatti. Thats a 2.5 million dollar car. Super cars are between 150k usedish and a million. Plus a lot of other vague definitions. Most people say call the 911 the dividing line of a supercar and top of the sports car range.

In general this segment is dying off, chasis are being reused for 10+ years in the market, tons and tons of special edition and reissues. most of the new work is being done in the Hypercar segment which is almost just a nonsensical money-fight space. And they were, for the most part, defined by speed in the public eye. If you wanted feelsome-ness you just go a Cayman or a Lotus.

I stand corrected, the Bugatti is a hypercar. It's a bit embarrassing considering that I was in the workshop where they make the Bugatti engines just a few weeks ago. Awesome experience btw, seems to be part of the standard factory tour at Volkswagen Salzgitter currently.

Strangely, acceleration seem to stop mattering when EVs took it over.

Suddenly, ICE heads started extolling the sensory virtues of the combustion engine.

Indeed. It's a case of "my favorite kind of car isn't the best performing anymore, but I refuse to accept that, so I'm going to change the definition of performance instead."

Pretty much what is destroying the notion of 'sports car' and 'supercar' Enthusaists don't want to admit a family SUV can now blow them away on the road or the track -- so you have to fallback on things like 'feelsome'. its a huge sore spot in the community

Honestly I'd bet that anything at or below a 9s 1/4 mile is physically painful. It's gotta feel like getting thrown into a padded wall.

The maths doesn't check out. A 9 second quarter mile is an average of well under 1g.

It is like lying on a bed except with less gravity than usual.

Of course it's not linear, but it's very unlikely to be more than 2g at any time. People can comfortably handle well over that in that direction of acceleration

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