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Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

topgear.com

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Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#261

Post by perl4ever »

mrweasel wrote: post #40
tudorw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met a guy who owned a Lambo, before he drove anywhere he'd walk the route to check there was nothing to snag on!

My old boss had his Ferrari fitted with winter tires to drive it year round in Denmark. His logic: Why should I only be able to drive the car I love driving 5 month a year. (That answer is related to the heater, or lack there of, in a Ferrari. It is apparently really cold driving it in January) I like that approach a lot more. What the point of having an awesome car, if you're afraid to drive it.

Somebody told you Ferraris don't have heaters?

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#262

Post by zone411 »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #86
zone411 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you don't know about track days or drag strips. That's the way to enjoy a car that goes faster than 150km/h fully. A 300mph Bugatti is still way above any speed you'd reach, though.

Even in that case a much lighter (and cheaper!) car like an Atom or Caterham will be a lot more fun than one of these hulking great monstrosities. Often faster as well, depending on the track.

Yeah, I wrote the same thing in another response. But a few track days per year is a good way to have real fun in a supercar.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#263

Post by hazeii »

dpark wrote: post #244
hazeii wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the car has to accelerate around 20 times the mass. Bugatti Veyron is listed as having the highest torque [0] at 1,106lb/ft but then it weighs over 4,000 lbs. Plus there'd a delay for the engine to rev up to peak torque before the launch (i.e. it wont produce 1,100ft-lbs at idle). Be interesting to test, but I'm not too practiced at racing Veyron's off the line on my bicycle. Having said that, I am very used…

Race cars don’t launch at idle. If you’re racing cars that are idling when the light turns green, then you aren’t racing their engines. You’re racing the driver’s disinterested reaction time. The Veyron might weight 20x as much as you and your bike, but has over 300x the power output of the best sprinters in the world. Given equal reaction time and equal interest in racing, I am doubtful your cycling advantage would…

I quite agree, as I've pointed out elsewhere although the bicycle is fastest away it's a short-lived advantage (I'm not discussion racing starts, so it's assumed all vehicles are starting from idle and reacting to e.g. lights changing).

In a racing start, a well-driven torquey car (like the Veyron) will also launch faster than a motorbike - at least to start with. Once the speed increases, the acceleration drops and the motorbike can then use its superior power-to-weight ratio (which it can't fully use off the line). Eventually - once speeds are well into triple digits - a fast-enough car starts to catch up with the motorbike again (due to better aerodynamics).

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#264

Post by fragmede »

sniglom wrote: post #165
killjoywashere wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top Gear actually did a road test of a Tesla S vs an Aston Martin starting at 30 MPH and the Tesla dusted the Aston Martin. Considering electric motors start with max torque, and the stats that are easily googlable, the Tesla would have no problem with the Bugatti. Never mind the Tesla is smaller, has a lower center of gravity, and costs 15x less and has more range. And it's probably worth noting that the Tesla is al…

The tesla is really fast to 70mph or so, after that it constantly lose power as it revs. >And it's probably worth noting that the Tesla is almost certainly software limited. Most things are software limited in modern cars. The question is, if you improved the battery pack so it could deliver more power, would the motors handle it?

The limitations are there to protect the battery pack and motors - Teslas are production cars with multi-year warranty, so the conservative limits are accordingly.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#266

Post by usrusr »

jacques_chester wrote: post #224
usrusr wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good point with the degraded working. In a train serving hundreds of passengers (or many dozens of truckloads), running on something that is literally as expensive to maintain as a whole rail network, the cost saved by cutting the driver is just not worth the extra hassle and delay in edge cases. Perhaps it is much more meaningful to think of that person as the engineer on duty than as a driver.

Autonomous rail has probably racked up billions of passenger-kilometres by now. The edge cases are pretty thin and it's unlikely that a human driver will have equivalent levels of accumulated experience. The most reliable line in the MTA, for example, is the L train. It is also the closest to fully autonomous (due to union rules, there is a driver who turns it on and then "supervises" the train).

I use a driverless subway almost daily. And it's rare, but not not terribly rare to see the fallback driver panel in use. It works because a fallback driver can be deployed in minutes, which is very much not true with the distances spanned by heavy rail.

Regarding the L train, how much would service suffer if the "supervisor" wasn't there to clean up whatever is left by reliability nines? We may never know. And it is hardly surprising that a recently modernized line is beating the living history museum that is the rest of the MTA. It's quite a leap to go from modernization causing reliability to automation causing reliability.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#267

Post by dpark »

corkscrew wrote: post #246
dpark wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact bicycles are fastest off the line, since they produce max. torque at 0rpm (just keep weight on a pedal, release the brakes to go). I doubt a bicycle would actually cross the starting line before a high end bike or car would surpass it. A 180lb rider would produce about 90lb of torque at most (assuming 6” crank) and that’s only for the instant that the crank is parallel with the ground. A high end car would…

Track cycling sprinters (myself included) can produce over 300 Nm of peak torque (more than many mid range cars)

I don’t think that’s accurate. But apparently the number is higher than I would have guessed, at around 230 for an elite cyclist.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7528120_Torque_and_...

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#268

Post by mrweasel »

perl4ever wrote: post #261
mrweasel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My old boss had his Ferrari fitted with winter tires to drive it year round in Denmark. His logic: Why should I only be able to drive the car I love driving 5 month a year. (That answer is related to the heater, or lack there of, in a Ferrari. It is apparently really cold driving it in January) I like that approach a lot more. What the point of having an awesome car, if you're afraid to drive it.

Somebody told you Ferraris don't have heaters?

I think the actual words was something like “they might as well not have heaters”.

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#269

Post by dang »

trax wrote: post #58
dang wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information is fine but please keep the flamebait away.

why? that was useful to me. everyone aside from the US uses metric.

The issue is not the information (482 km/h) but the swipe ('modern units'). The breaks the site guidelines by being flamebait. In fact it's a classic flamewar topic, one of the pettiest and most repetitive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Bugatti has broken the 300mph barrier

#270

Post by hinkley »

I remember when Top Gear took out their first Bugatti, they pointed out that the tires were... I can't remember if they £10k apiece or per set, and at top speed their range diminished drastically. At top speed the life of the tires was measured in hours, and not many of them, not unlike a race car. So wear and tear to 'open her up' was astoundingly high.

What's the range on this one, I wonder?

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