201–210 of 302 posts
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Also Bugatti is part of the VW Group - so it's possible that some day the engineering may trickle down to all of the other brands in the group (such as the humble Skodas I've been driving for the last few years).
> "some day the engineering may trickle down" Do we also have trickle-down engineering now? Is economics not enough for that?
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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.
True, but that just makes the whole exercise even more pointless. There's really no point in building a car that can go above 150km/h, but perhaps some of the aerodynamics can translate into more fuel efficient car. I'm also slightly annoyed by the usage of the word "barrier". There's physical or perceived 300mph barrier. People have built cars that will go a super sonic speeds, so there was never any doubt that it w…
Even if you're "only" going to be driving at 160-180 km/h (as is common e.g. on the German autobahn) you want to be in a car that can do 220-240 km/h. You don't want to be 100% maxing the car out at your cruising speed.
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You cannot compare just engine torque numbers, without adjusting for gear ratios, wheel size and sprockets. As another commenter said, you rev a Ninja (just like a sports car) and launch it using the clutch.
I believe I did point out that on Ninja's (I have one) you need to build the revs; you can't just dump the clutch and go like you can on a BMW Boxer or a Harley (which I also have). Hence the Ninja is generally slowest away when the lights change (but is by far the quickest bike overall). In fact bicycles are fastest off the line, since they produce max. torque at 0rpm (just keep weight on a pedal, release the brakes…
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You could get close just with turbocharging which will lower the torque curve such that max torque is somewhere around 1500 to 2000RPM.
Case in point: a homologated (i.e. stock road car) Ford RS200 Evo set a record of 0-60 in 3.07 seconds back in 1986. When tuned for racing (non-road-legal) they would hit 60 in 2.1 sec. That's with a 2.0 litre straight-four engine, in the 1980s. Optimizing for ludicrous acceleration has always been possible. But it is at odds with race track performance, which is what Ferrari, Bugatti, Lamborghini are focused on. At…
I've been wondering about that for some time. What type(s) of competitions do cars like that enter? I'm not exactly knowledgeable in the racing world, so my view is very limited; the few times a see something about racing (excluding F1 and rally which are obviously different beasts), I mainly see BMWs, Porches, Corvettes (I think) and so on. Maybe my limited exposure just covered the wrong competition?
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I ride bikes and from a practical standpoint, along with small size and manoeuvrability, the acceleration (a result of torque) is one of the most useful attributes. Much moreso than top speed, or even speeds significantly in excess of the posted limits. Bikes don't tend to have high torque in general, but their light weight and gearing are designed to maximise what torque they do produce. This means there are quite a…
Bikes like Harleys and BMW twins have plenty of torque, where bikes like Kawasaki Ninja's major on power (peak torque at high revs). Hence Harleys and BMW's are first off the line at the lights (no need to build revs) but the Ninja's will come steaming past seconds later. There are some fun youtube videos demoing bike performance, e.g. Ninja H2's doing 0-250MPH in 26s [0], outdragging a Bugatti [1] and outpacing an F…
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The most important reason why the TGV has not had any accidents is actually a really simple one: it only runs on very high quality rails with large turn radii and excellent maintenance of the railbed.
And even that is not entirely true. The TGV can only run this fast because it runs on tracks where only the TGV is allowed. The rail bed is even not that great, that's why only some ICEs are allowed on TGV routes, because they need a special deflector which is more robust to tolerate the stones which are thrown up in the air when the train drives over it. I think they took this in consideration when they designed the…
If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_France is to be believed, the high speed lines for TGV are primarily but not exclusively used for TGV:
"LGVs are reserved primarily for TGVs. One reason for this is that line capacity is sharply reduced when trains of differing speeds are mixed, ..." "Some stretches of less-used LGV are routinely mixed-traffic, such as the Tours branch ..." "Outside France, LGV-type lines often carry non-TGV intercity traffic, often as a requirement of the initial funding commitments."
I'm also not so sure about the quality of the rail bed:
"Track alignment is more precise than on normal railway lines, and ballast is in a deeper-than-normal profile, resulting in increased load-bearing capacity and track stability. "
It's pretty impressive. In terms of a daily driver, I think the fun comes from the acceleration, and thus the torque a car can produce. My daily driver is a Mazda 3 / Mazda Axela, which comes with 200 Newtonmeter torque at 6400 rpm. It's ok, it's fun, but yeah. So the other day I drove a 2013 Nissan Leaf (BEV), which gives you ~250 Nm torque right at the beginning. This was so much fun to drive. So for me, a car does…
The biggest problem with this is having too much torque. If the car isn't designed for it, you'll just spin the tires at full throttle, and you'll have to settle for mid-2nd and 3rd gear pulls. I knew someone with a boosted awd Toyota Camry that could spin all the tires in 3rd.
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It’s 490.48 km/h (304.77 mph).
So really we should be asking when a car is going to break the mythical 500 km/h barrier and not some also-ran number ;-) Although apparently that barrier was broken in 1937 by Thunderbolt, so I'm not sure what record we're actually talking about here.