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Comment by Veedrac | Hacker News Reader

It's wild that after a hundred years there is still exponential progress in the power output of cars. The most unusual part to me is how EVs are fundamentally a consumer technology, so it all rapidly falls into mass production territory; eg. Xiaomi sells a 1527hp car for $73k. Horsepower is rapidly reaching 'solved' territory; even at its record speed, BYD's car wasn't even power limited.

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Power for power’s sake is not necessarily a good thing.

There is some indication that putting rapidly accelerating cars on streets is leading to a proliferation of accidents.

For sure; the US kills literally hundreds of thousands of people in ways other countries have solved, and bigger faster vehicles seems at odds with the lack of driver and infrastructure responsibility here. I don't want to make light of that.

I just had the numbers run to check this. About 650,000 fewer people would have died over my short life so far, if the US had the vehicle fatality rate of my home country.

A car with a 4 second 0-60 time can reach 40mph, a speed lethal to 80% of pedestrians, in under 80 feet from a standstill. That's the distance from the limit line to the far crosswalk when crossing a 5 lane road.

Putting this level of performance (and better) into boring suburban SUVs bought by ambivalent consumers is negligence.

> It's wild that after a hundred years there is still exponential progress in the power output of cars.

We hit a wall there for a while. Cars were actually becoming less powerful and slower on average for a couple of decades as governments tightened emissions and safety requirements. It took Tesla to blow the walls off EV production and consumer acceptance. It's a good reminder that progress doesn't happen in a straight line.

I was thinking more wrt. the top end, which did stall out for 30 years from WWII but has otherwise been on fairly smooth exponentials since the beginning.

The power isn't much use for driving down the road but maybe we can hook it to fans and have flying cars at last.

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