America’s Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient

Yep

Some non-negligible percentage of horse-riding was also done by the nobility, where the horses were used either for hunting, or for military campaigning—both places where a horse "avoiding danger" can actually be fatal.

Re: hunting, horses would often rear back from predatory-looking animals, dropping their riders and possibly dropping onto their riders, crushing and laming/killing them. "Hunting accident" was the old world's "boating accident."

Re: military cavalry usage, horses could be spooked into stampeding—this was an incredibly large problem when in a closely-packed cavalry formation. Cavalry warfare was phased out upon the introduction of guns not because horses were more likely to die by a bullet than by an arrowhead; but rather because the sound of rifle or cannonfire was usually enough to spook horses un-used to the sound, turning many of the first rifle-era battles into instant routs.

There is so much more to actual high performance driving than acceleration numbers. You may say "oh yea, cornering!" and while that's certainly delving deeper into it, there's a _lot_ more than just that (and many, many things go into "cornering").

So the M3/M4 w/ the competition package makes 444 hp and does 0-60 in 3.9s, which is "slow" compared to a P100D in Ludicrous Mode. It's actually really fast with just 2 driven wheels, but there's much faster out there. But, now:

- The Transmission. Transmissions are a technical solution to a technical limitation of ICE, namely the fact that the delta of engine speed is much smaller than the delta of wheel speed (even at "just" legal speeds), therefore gearing was introduced. Transmissions are not necessary, and should not be seen as something that's great about a car, if a car is capable of being driven at the full range of wheel speeds its market segment targets w/o a transmission. While the DCT is perhaps one of the best transmissions in the world (on par with exotics found in much more expensive vehicles), it will be a good riddance when it's no longer necessary. No matter how good a transmission is, there will be an imbalance in power when shifting, which _will_ upset the vehicle in a high performance cornering scenario, which the closer you are to the limit (with something like DCT, you will need to be a highly skilled driver to even begin to approach having this matter), the more it will count.

- Suspension and, directly related, vehicle weight. Your Tesla can do 3.x 0-60, but you need high performance suspension and low weight to make use of it in corners. Something like the M3/4, and even more so the suspensions GM has been putting in its high performance products like the Stingray (which trickles down to Camaros and ATS/CTSes), are a world away from just "standard" high performance suspension.

- Differentials, electronics. Limited Slip Differential will make a marked difference in high performance cornering when you're not exactly perfect. All the electronics for stability control, traction control, abs/braking, they all work in tandem. On the M3/4 they work really, really well. I was able to feel like Superman by pulling some feats that simply would not be possible without these advanced systems and my skill level. You would think that this is not so much of a good thing, but it actually works both ways and _can_ be good -- for example, as I got more confident on the AutoCross part of the day, I started to hit some of the nannies, particularly stability control which would not give me full throttle until I had unwound the steering wheel. Now, the instructors had been shouting this in my ear all day long, but actually _feeling_ this really connected it for me and I started to get it and was able to learn _faster_ because of the feedback I was getting from the car due to the nannies keeping me from wiping out. It was quite amazing, and I'm sure that very few of my fellow students realized just how much the electronics had helped them that day.

- Brakes! You need to stop. The simple fact that the M3/4 can be spec'd w/ Carbon Ceramic discs (which also moves from 4-piston to 6-piston calipers) puts it in a different class. We abused these cars all day long, maximum acceleration and maximum braking most of the time. The brakes never faded, it was simply incredible. 35-40 ppl abusing 12 cars (6 M3s & 6 M4s) for about 6 hours, zero fade (and zero mechanical issues out of a dozen cars). This makes it a street-legal track machine (tool), compared to just a car that gets to 60 MPH fast. We were told early on to literally "try to break the brake pedal off," and, because some students had reservations, they insisted "please, you cannot hurt these cars, do absolutely everything possible to break the brake pedal because we want you to experience maximum braking" (this was during a maximum braking exercise early on, which the later exercises built upon), finally adding "n fact, we challenge you, if you can break the brake pedal we'll give you the car for free." God knows I tried. Contrary to what you would think, the brakes had one of the most profound, lasting impressions on me, and I would absolutely, without batting an eye, spec the $8,500 option for the Carbon Ceramic brakes on these cars if I had the slightest inclination of tracking them.

- "Abuse" capacity. I'm not talking about long term reliability, as far as the engine is concerned, an electric engine _should_ be night & day compared to a complex, "cave age" ICE. But there's more to it, there's the drivetrain -- yea, even with a single speed, there are shafts, some sort of differential, in AWD applications even more complicated stuff going on. 35 monkeys trying to break these 12 cars resulted in.. nothing, not a single one of them exhibited any issues. The school ran for the whole week and we were the Wednesday class, so these cars had already been abused in similar fashion the 2 previous days. Now, these cars are engineered to do this, so it's not really abuse since they're made for it. That's why you're paying $80k+ for "just" an M3/M4 (again, with all the right options, the brakes being almost $10k of that), on paper it looks like "wtf, a Mustang GT makes about the same power" -- you're buying a real-deal track machine that's street-legal and, in 4 door guise, can take your kids to school too.

I _cannot wait_ for the time when there will be a comparable machine that does away with all the now-unnecessary complexity of ICE. Not having gearing and the issues it introduces will change some of the dynamics of high-performance driving, it will be superior even in the hands of pros. Until then, ICE is still here with us, and the 0-60 numbers on most/all cars are like MegaPixels on digital cameras.