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Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

topgear.com

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Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#21

Post by ollie87 »

tialaramex wrote: post #13

It's futile to actually have road-legal cars that go this fast because you can't do very much useful with the speed. This is much too fast for the human operator (driver) to safely react to things outside the cockpit, which is why for example Britain owns trains capable of 140mph in service but deliberately limits them to 125mph. Tests suggested drivers couldn't be relied on to reliably observe and react to a linesid…

Mmmmhmmm, don't really see it as an issue here given that not many folks are going to be buying a £2.5m hypercar to drive at three times the speedlimit to work on a Monday morning.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#22

Post by vinay427 »

fgonzag wrote: post #18
vinay427 wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what record they have here. There have already been multiple road-legal 300 mph cars as well as a stock road-legal 300 mph car for sale (Koenigsegg Jesko). The article says that this is the first from a series manufacturer. Why does Koenigsegg not count, or was this the first?

Do you have a source or link to any verified speed runs by those cars? AFAIK those are theoretical numbers, and Koenigsegg has never had a verified run at 300mph+)

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/usa/ford-gt-just-did-300mph

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#23

Post by vinay427 »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #16
vinay427 wrote: post #4

I'm not sure what record they have here. There have already been multiple road-legal 300 mph cars as well as a stock road-legal 300 mph car for sale (Koenigsegg Jesko). The article says that this is the first from a series manufacturer. Why does Koenigsegg not count, or was this the first?

They don't have a record yet, but the record they are aiming for is for the fastest "production" car. The car they used was modified from stock so it doesn't count for the record yet. But this will almost certainly lead to a small batch of cars with the same configuration from the factory, which they will use to (re)claim the fastest production car crown.

Alright, that makes sense, and I suppose the title doesn't claim they're the first to build a road-legal 300 mph car (as they're not).

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#24

Post by Ballas »

kijin wrote: post #8
steve_taylor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s 490.48 km/h (304.77 mph).

Why is the "300mph barrier" even a thing when we're talking about a French-turned-Italian-turned-German automaker doing test runs in Germany? They only barrier they need to care about is the metric one at 500km/h.

I'm sure it would have read "500km/h barrier" if they managed to break it.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#25

Post by Svip »

tialaramex wrote: post #13

It's futile to actually have road-legal cars that go this fast because you can't do very much useful with the speed. This is much too fast for the human operator (driver) to safely react to things outside the cockpit, which is why for example Britain owns trains capable of 140mph in service but deliberately limits them to 125mph. Tests suggested drivers couldn't be relied on to reliably observe and react to a linesid…

This is why the TGV has no signals. Instead it uses a radio communication system. If no radio signal is received within a time frame, the train will warn the driver, and eventually stop. If a train has to perform an emergency stop, all other trains behind it are informed via the same system. If the driver does not react, the train will stop itself.

There is a reason why the TGV has seen no accidents since its launch in 1981.

As for a car, yeah, it's mostly a gimmick. Still incredible engineering, though.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#26

Post by jlg23 »

tialaramex wrote: post #13

It's futile to actually have road-legal cars that go this fast because you can't do very much useful with the speed. This is much too fast for the human operator (driver) to safely react to things outside the cockpit, which is why for example Britain owns trains capable of 140mph in service but deliberately limits them to 125mph. Tests suggested drivers couldn't be relied on to reliably observe and react to a linesid…

> It's futile ....

But it is fun.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#27

Post by parsimo2010 »

kijin wrote: post #8
steve_taylor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s 490.48 km/h (304.77 mph).

Why is the "300mph barrier" even a thing when we're talking about a French-turned-Italian-turned-German automaker doing test runs in Germany? They only barrier they need to care about is the metric one at 500km/h.

The only thing they need to be concerned with is being faster than everything else. Units are arbitrary, even kilometers (1000x the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second). Once they go past 500 km/h people will start wondering about some other round number until we get to relativistic speeds.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#29

Post by mellosouls »

kijin wrote: post #8
steve_taylor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s 490.48 km/h (304.77 mph).

Why is the "300mph barrier" even a thing when we're talking about a French-turned-Italian-turned-German automaker doing test runs in Germany? They only barrier they need to care about is the metric one at 500km/h.

British publication.

So relatively muscular imperial miles are correctly used. Readers' eyes might pass over in disinterest should weird & weedy "kilometres" be used instead.

On a more serious note, I'm sure the various manufacturer marketing departments take every opportunity, imperial, metric, Klingon, whatever, to mark a passing of a numeric "barrier" - i.e. a number ending in zeros.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#30

Post by adrianN »

tialaramex wrote: post #13

It's futile to actually have road-legal cars that go this fast because you can't do very much useful with the speed. This is much too fast for the human operator (driver) to safely react to things outside the cockpit, which is why for example Britain owns trains capable of 140mph in service but deliberately limits them to 125mph. Tests suggested drivers couldn't be relied on to reliably observe and react to a linesid…

A train going faster than 25mph or so is already too fast for the operator to react (braking distances are huge!), so I doubt that the top speed is limited for that reason.
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