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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

The M5 may beat the Tesla at 0-60 on paper (3.7 seconds vs 3.9), but in practice the Tesla will beat the M5.

A 0-60 is measured from the time the car starts to move. If you measure from when the accelerator is depressed, the Tesla gains a huge advantage and will beat the M5.

EDIT:

Here's a 0-100 video:

http://ca.autoblog.com/2012/10/09/sport-sedan-shootout-tesla...

Now unless there's some tricks in the video, it's quite obvious that the M5 does much better at the latter half of the drag than the first half. So if a Tesla can beat an M5 at 0-100, it will destroy it at 0-60.

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This is very strange and foreign reasoning to me. I competitively raced cars in an amateur series.

You are claiming that the Tesla's superior throttle response makes it faster 0-60. The car needs to move the weight, so measuring it from when it starts moving to when it hits the desired speed seems like a perfectly reasonable metric.

Throttle response needs to be measured separately.

The M5 comparison is more than enough to get an idea for the car's capabilities. I've never driven a Model S. I've driven several cars in the area of the M5. If the Model S is in that class, it's a beast!

It's not throttle response, it's torque at 0RPM.

When you're racing, you rev your engine before the light turns green and pop the clutch when it turns green.

You don't do that when you're not racing, because it's hard on clutches, and the vast majority of daily drivers are automatics.

When you're racing an electric car, you mash the accelerator when the light turns green, the same way you start the car moving when you're normally driving. So you get race-track start feeling every time you drive your car.

Only electric vehicles start at 0 RPM. Normal combustion engines idle under 1,000 RPM and the M5 has a fairly flat torque curve for a naturally aspirated car with somewhere around 260lbs at idle. That's very good and about 50% of its peak torque.

The M5s also have SMG which is a computer controlled manual transmission. No manually operated clutch. Even has a launch mode if you want the computer to control wheel spin for you so you get the best possible launch.

Throttle response is still the wrong metric to use here. And is a bit of a red herring in the discussion.

My 2006 M3 had SMG and I didn't like it much. (Fine for highway driving, sucks for city street driving). Maybe the new one is better?

I'm not a fan of the SMG myself (or equivalents from other manufacturers) nor is anyone else I know. But it's not really because of any real performance metric. SMG is far better at changing gears than any of us mortals could accomplish. But it's just not fun.

If you didn't like yours for the same reason I don't know if you'd like the new iterations. You're still not doing the shifting yourself.

ps. Your project looks interesting and I signed up for the mailing list. The success page said an email had been sent but I haven't received anything. Not sure if there's a long delay or it's a bug.

There's something very odd about that video. It looks like the M5 is driven off the line from tickover which is not how you would launch it in practice. C.f. http://youtu.be/E-xVVPO8L8s

That's an interesting observation. Intuitively, I believe it, but do you have a source?

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