August 22, 2019 • 41 mins
There’s a difference between cars that are quick and cars that are fast. This is a few of the new ones that’ll get you from 0 to 60 mph quicker than the rest.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to the Fast Track. I'm your host,
Scott Benjamin, and you know, it's a fairly new show.
We're we're still kind of getting our our sea legs here,
trying to uh figure out exactly what we're doing with
this program, but we do have a focus, and the
focus is we're going to be concentrated on things that
are about quick cars, about fast cars, about people to
go fast, about um, anything really that goes fast. And
(00:31):
you know what's funny is I sometimes like to take
it the other direction. Maybe we'll talk about some things
that go slow and and maybe we'll do that at
some point today because it's kind of a nice reversal
to you know, kind of see like what the opposite
end of the spectrum is. Like we're gonna talk about
new cars and some of the quickest new cars that
you can buy, and the price range that we're gonna
be talking about is less than thirty thousand dollars. Now,
(00:51):
the Kelly Blue Book average price for a new car
in nine is around thirty seven thousand, two eighty five
dollars this year, So me nineteen, I think I believe
that they go with a sedan price, you know, just
kind of the middle of the road price there. The
average new price for a car is thirty seven thousand,
two eighty five dollars. That's here in the United States.
(01:13):
That seemed to creep up every year by about three
or four percent something like that. Sometimes this is a
little as two, but usually it's around three percent. So
you can count on adding three percent to that for
twenty and I'm sure that will continue to climb as
we get later and later here. But I want to
talk about cars that are less than thirty thousand dollars
to begin with. And I think before we even start
(01:34):
that one thing that I wanted to mention here, and
this is just kind of like an off topic thing
that I that I thought was interesting. Um. I made
a road trip last weekend. I went to Indiana and
I went to northern Indiana for a family reunion. And
there were a good number of people there. They're probably
eighty people that showed up in this park there and
this is in Wabash, Indiana. And got a lot of
(01:54):
family there, obviously, and you know, some distant relatives that
I hadn't seen for a long time, and one of
them was my cousin. And I have seen him recently,
and I know he was a car stuff listener when
I had the other show. But he's a younger cousin
of mine first cousin, and I do know that he
rides motorcycles. So when I saw him there at the reunion,
I decided I had talked to him a little bit
about that, and he said that he had recently made
(02:16):
what was, for him, I think, the longest trip that
he ever made on his motorcycle, and it was up
into the southern part of Michigan and he went to
I think it was like an RC track and outdoor
RC track for radio controlled vehicles. That was, you know,
pretty intense. I think it was a pretty cool thing.
He said that, you know, some people are spending thousands
(02:36):
of dollars, you know, four or five, six thousand dollars
on these on these rigs for um off road RC
vehicles and racing them in some kind of I don't
know if as a championship or whatever. It's just a
you know, weekend hobby or and something like that. Anyway,
he made the trip up there, and uh, I was
asking him about helmet laws because I had when I
as soon as I crossed into Indiana, I realized that
(02:56):
they did not have the same helmet laws as we
have here in Georgia or even you know, in Kentucky
or Tennessee. It's it's a little different. In Indiana. Anybody
that is under the age of eighteen is required to
wear a helmet. Anybody over the age of eighteen, it's optional.
You don't have to. And I saw this many many
times on the road as I was driving there, because
it's it's northern Indiana really, so a lot of time
(03:17):
spent in Indiana, and I was noticing that. You know.
So there's some people on the highway going ninety miles
an hour, you know, a husband, wife on a on
a great big Harley Davidson motorcycle, both of them not
wearing helmets. And it's just it's a little bit startling
when you see it. I mean, it's up to them,
it's their own you know, right to you know, wear them,
are not wear them. It doesn't matter to me. I mean,
(03:37):
it's up to them. But it is startling to see it,
you know, especially when they're going that type of speed
on the highway. It's just it seems wrong. I don't know,
I don't know how better to put that again, it's
it's everybody's personal decision. I agree with that. That's fine.
But I asked him if he rides a you know,
wears a helmet when he rides, and he says that
he always does. And one thing that he mentioned almost immediately,
and this is this is where this whole story is going.
(03:59):
I guess, is that something that you don't normally think of,
and this is one very good reason to wear a helmet. Um.
He was talking about how it was raining on the
way there, and you know, the rain kind of hurts
your skins. As you're right. I don't know if you've
ever been on a roller coaster maybe or maybe you
are a motorcycle rider, uh, going you know, sixty seventy
miles an hour, rain really hurts when it hits you
(04:22):
going sixty or seventy miles an hour. The same thing
with a roller coaster. It's that same feeling. He said
he encountered some rain on that trip, but he said that,
you know, he has always wore a helmet when he rides.
And one really good lesson that he got early on
was when he was fortunately wearing a helmet. And this
is one of those things that is just one of
those completely unexpected things that you would never ever consider happening.
(04:44):
But he was out for an evening ride and he
was somewhere in the Indiana countryside there going I don't know,
a fifty plus miles an hour, whatever it was, whatever
the speed was. A bat hit him in the head.
A bat. So he's flying, he's driving around a corner. Um,
you know, bat comes out of nowhere. I mean, you
don't even have time to really to react, you don't
have time to duck or anything. Bat strikes him in
(05:06):
the in the face shield and of course the bats destroyed.
But there's just this gross stuff all over his his
helmet and you know, on his shoulder. And he said
it was really kind of sickening, you know, the result
of it. But he was imagining what would happen if
he wasn't wearing that helmet when when he struck this thing.
I mean, it would have could cast some damage, It
could have cost some you know, damage to his eye,
It could have you know, broken his jar or whatever. Um.
(05:29):
I've been in another vehicle. I was in a Cadillac
one time that hit a bat, you know, in the
same place in Indiana when we were out for an
evening drive. My grandfather was driving, and it struck the
windshield when I was in the front seat, and it
was it was pretty scary. It's very abrupt and and
it happens quickly. But um, I don't think i'd ever
heard of a motorcycle rider ever talking about, you know,
hitting a bat in the evening. I thought it was
(05:50):
really interesting and uh, kind of unusual. It's one of
those things again that you just don't think about it,
and it's probably a good reason to wear that helmet
with a face shield. I do want to say, gosh, man,
it seems like we're never gonna get into this topic.
But there's a there's a few things that I want
to say. We're not talking about the fastest cars. We're
talking about the quickest cars that you know, the zero
to sixties speeds and so so quick doesn't necessarily translate
(06:11):
to fast, and that's not I just don't think they're
the same thing. Uh. Fast is where you're typically talking
about something that's you know, overall, you know, high speed
at top speed, that's uh, that's greater than a typical
road car. We're not talking about cars like that. We're
talking about cars that can quickly get from zero to
sixty miles per hour, and there's about fifteen or sixteen
on this list, and I'm gonna go through these relatively quickly,
(06:33):
and uh, and then we're gonna take this conversation in
a different direction because I have found um a lot
of information about the zero to sixty tests that I
think you would be or you would find interesting rather
and even another test that is possibly even more meaningless.
And believe it or not that maybe we'll give just
a little bit away here, but uh, let's begin here now.
(06:55):
I want to say that these cars start at six
point three seconds, which is not add for zero to
sixty speed. The six point three seconds is quick. And
if you if you think back, if you're old enough
to remember, back into the nineteen eighties, let's say, mid
nineteen eighties, anything that was going in uh, you know,
sixty miles per hour in about eight seconds was considered
(07:15):
a quick car. That was a quick acceleration. And now
we're getting into you know, six seconds below six seconds,
and there of course there's a lot of cars that
will go faster than that, and we'll we'll talk about
those as well. You know, the fastest cars, but again
under thirty thousand dollars is the is the price point
that we're talking about here. And this all begins with
the Accura I l X, which will go zero to
(07:37):
sixty and six point three seconds. Now, that is a
two one horse power four cylinder engine. The price here
is about twenty six thousand eight, So, um, we're talking
about a relatively quick car for you know, about twenty
seven thousand dollars. Um it has an eight speed, dual
clutch automatic transmission, and um, I guess just a bargain
(08:00):
small sports it in if you want to look at
it that way. Now, I'm not selling in any of
these cars, so I understand that I'm not trying to
talk anyone up over the other one. But the speeds
are gonna go faster and faster as we talk here.
And a couple of these are tied, you know, from
maybe the to the top spot here, you know, like
the first three I think are in the six point
three second range, which includes the Fiat one Spider, which
(08:22):
also comes in at six point three seconds. That one
is priced exactly the same twenty thousand six. Oh, it's
two hundars less. It's six five dollars, so five and
essentially this is like um, I mean, if you want
to look at it simply, this is essentially like the
Masda m X five Miata. I mean, it's very very
(08:43):
closely related to that car. UM. It has a six
speed manual transmission that's the standard for the Fiat. And
again six point three seconds, pretty quick. Um. Another one
that's quick is the Honest Civic s I coupe, which
is at six point three seconds. Again two and five horsepower,
four cylinder engine. The base prices a little bit lower here,
it's twenty two and twenty dollars. Now, you know, one
(09:06):
one quick thing here as we as we go through,
you're gonna find that a lot of these cars have
automatic transmissions. And a lot of people will say, well,
you know, why why even talk about those cars? Why
don't just talk about the manual transmissions are typically faster.
That's not necessarily the case anymore. We're finding that some
of these automatic transmissions are performing so well, they shift
so well that they are able to shift better than
(09:27):
somebody could shift a manual transmission. And that wasn't always
a case in the past. But you'll find that a
lot of these cars on this list do have a
an automatic transmission that that performs exceedingly well or even
better than um a human could shift, and I I
ten years ago, I wouldn't have said anything like that. Usually,
you know, we're talking or typically we were talking about
the manual transmissions and how that was the option to
(09:49):
get because you could shift just a little bit faster.
But that's not the case anymore. Moving on to number
four or sixteen, we're talking about the Dodge Challenger, which
is a V six powered car, and this it's zero
sixteen about three point I'm sorry three seconds now six
point two seconds, six point two seconds, and that's the
base price of around twenty nine and three forty. This
(10:10):
one does jump up about a hundred horse power from
the previous entry, so it's about three hundred and five
horse power versus the two and five we just talked
about with the Honda Civic. Again, this one is paired
to an eight speed automatic transmission, so again that's another
another automatic transmission as uh well, the next one is
not as a matter of fact, it's the Toyota eighty
six or the suber U b r Z, which also
(10:32):
comes in at six point two seconds and This goes
back down to two h five horse power. This has
a flat four engine with two hundred five horse power
and a standard six speed manual transmission. That's what we're
talking about. For the six point two seconds. The base
price is a little bit lower than the previous entry
at eighty or six eighty for the Subaru. And then
(10:55):
we go on to another V six powered car. We're
talking about the number six of sixteen, which is the
heavy Impala, and that comes in at six point one seconds.
Again another three five horsepower V six engine. Um, you know,
let's let's just quickly buzz through these because I do
want to get to some more interesting things I think
anyways in this podcast. Um, and that is kind of
the reasoning behind some of the zero to sixty tests
(11:18):
that we see. And uh, and what they mean really
are they? Are they meaningful to us in in a
in a real way. Um, there's the Mini Cooper S
hard top at six point one seconds. There's the Honda
KNA turbo at six seconds, so and even six seconds
for the for a Honda. Another Hondai which comes in
at six seconds is the Veloctri turbo. Then the Volkswagen
(11:38):
g t I at five point eight seconds, So we're
getting into the five second range here, and it's only
going to drop from this point. Uh, there's the Mazda
m X five Miata, which is five point seven seconds
zero to sixty. Get this is this is a strange one.
Buick Regal sport Back comes in at five point six seconds.
Now I wouldn't have expected a Buick to be on
this list, but it is. Um This one has a
(12:00):
two fifty horsepower turbo charge two lead four cylinder with
a nine speed automatic transmission. Now I just I never
would have guessed abutle could be on the on the list,
especially this high. At five point six seconds, that's a
that's pretty quick, and it comes in at tho so
less than twenty six thousand dollars. The next one I
would expect to be on this list, and that is
(12:21):
the Subaru w r X, and that comes in at
five point five seconds. But that's still not the fastest
one because we are talking about, uh, the Chevy Camaro
U the two leader turbo, which comes in at five
point one seconds. And then there's the Ford Mustang Eco
Boost which also comes in at five point one seconds.
So you can still get a car that will go
(12:44):
zero to sixty in five seconds for under thirty thousand dollars.
And I think that's a that's a pretty good option
for a lot of people if they're not willing to
go as high as you know, what's the average price?
Not thirty seven two five is what I said. Um,
so that is I don't know. I sets a positive
note and you know something that uh, um, if you're
out in new car shopping, you might want to check
(13:04):
that out if zero to sixty is something that's important
to you. And it turns out that zero to sixty,
I don't know. Maybe it's something that's in your head.
Maybe it's something you know I thought. I always thought
that zero to sixty was an important measurement as well.
And uh and there's probably a good reason behind that
or why I thought that it was important. And we
will talk about that in just a moment after we
(13:25):
come back from a word from our sponsor. And we're
back and you're listening to the Fast Track, and I'm
your host, Scott Benjamin, and we were just talking about
a kind of a long list, I guess, of the
quickest cars that you can buy for less than thirty
thousand dollars and and I had about sixteen cars fifteen
or sixteen cars there on that list, and I know
(13:47):
that was a little bit overwhelming, and I hopefully we
can get past this and talk about something that maybe
is a little bit more meaningful to each one of us,
or maybe even less meaningful to each one of us.
I don't know. I mean, that's kind of the conversation
that goes along with this, because I had always looked
at zero to sixty is as one of those things
where you know, personally, when I'm when I'm buying a car,
I want something that's kind of quick. I want something
that feels good when I accelerate off the line or
(14:09):
you know, from a standing start, you know, maybe to
get onto the highway or something like that. And I
think that maybe my thinking was a little bit flawed
now in the in the way that um I was
I was reading into how important a zero to sixty
time is for a vehicle, and it seems like there's
a lot of articles out there about how zero to
sixty doesn't necessarily mean as much as you might think
(14:30):
it does in daily driving or or you know, um,
the numbers are something that that manufacturers like to brag about.
And they all like to say that, you know, we
have the quickest car from zero to sixty and U
or um. They might even have a different measurement, as
we'll talk about here in just a minute. There's one
that's maybe even less meaningful, if you can, if you
want to put it that way. I mean, I hate
to say it that way because you know, all this
(14:51):
stuff means something to somebody, but you know, you and
I on on a daily basis, it doesn't necessarily mean
a whole lot. It's it's really cool for the manufacturers
to be able to brag about this stuff, uh, you know,
for for bragging rights. But um, it doesn't necessarily play
out in the real world the way that we think
it will, you know, the way it does on paper.
There's a there's a way to look at this, I guess.
And I've asked my wife. I've asked my daughter. I've
(15:12):
asked some people around the office here. I've asked, you know,
some of my relatives. I've asked some friends that I have.
You know that I correspond with, what do you think
about zero to sixty time? Is it important to you
when you buy a vehicle and overwhelmingly so far. Everybody,
every single one is really said it doesn't really come
into their their thought process when they're buying a car.
I think that there's you know, something that's like that.
(15:34):
You know, when you're in the car and you're driving it,
you want it to be quick, you want it to
feel good. I don't think you necessarily look at that
car and say, you know, I'm I'm interested in this
car because it gets uh, it goes zero to sixty
and five point one seconds versus five point eight seconds
in the real world. The truth is, you're not going
to use that. And I didn't really believe that until
I read several articles about this, and it's going back,
(15:55):
you know, a long time. It's not it's not something
brand new that people are looking at and saying exactly why.
It doesn't necessarily matter. And the reality, I guess is
that you know, you don't actually experience driving a vehicle
zero sixty. It's kind of like a mismeasurement of a
car's performance because it's there's very rarely a time when
you're actually going zero to sixty from from a stoplight.
(16:17):
You're typically not doing that because the speeds on that
road if you're if you're unless you're breaking the law
of course, and I think a lot of people do. Uh,
you know, as far as like and trying to out
accelerate the person next to you, You're not necessarily going
to take it up to sixty or above immediately off
the stop light, unless you are again trying to race
against somebody next to you, or just you know, trying
to have a little bit of fun. I guess when
(16:38):
no one's around. Um, if you're going on too, if
you're on an on ramp, um, maybe, but you're already
kind of like at a rolling, rolling start, unless you're
at a metered on ramp, which we have a lot
of here in Atlanta, and that typically means anyway that
you are accelerating into heavy traffic, and that's something different.
So you're not necessarily going to take it all the
way up to sixty again. UM, I do admit that,
(16:59):
you know, I have a lot of fun kind of
blasting onto a highway if there's you know, open road
in front of me. The reality is, though you know
you're already starting at a rolling start, you're starting at
you know, ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty miles an hour
as you come around the corner to get onto the
on ramp and then and then begin your acceleration. So
that's a little bit different. And you know, some of
the best cars that I've had, some of the manual transmissions.
My favorite gear is sometimes you know, second or third
(17:21):
gear in that car. It's not necessarily first gear. And
a lot of these cars that we're going to talk
about here have kind of cheated the system in order
to get to zero sixty by gearing. And I say cheated,
I mean these are manufacturers that are doing this, but um,
they have geared the cars so that you know, sixty
is achieved in first gear for some of the bigger
V eight engine cars. When you do that, you're you
(17:42):
kind of take out the human equation out of the
whole thing. It's just a matter of mashing down the accelerator,
you know, dumping the clutch, going as fast as you can,
and you get up to sixty it and no time practically,
but that takes out, you know, the point where you
have to shift, and that takes out a little bit
of the skill out of the whole thing. And uh again,
I think i've or you know, the viper does that.
I think the one of the Mustangs does that maybe Corvette,
(18:04):
I'm not exactly sure. I can't remember the list of
manufacturers that have done that where you can achieve sixty
in first gear and again just kind of take some
of the some of the work out of it for
for the human unless you have to shift. You know,
there's really not a whole lot of skill involved in
going sixty and it happens really really quick. UM. But honestly,
(18:24):
like the thing is, zero to sixty is kind of
a misleading measurement of performance. And that's because you know,
most of it, like I said, most of the real
world driving that we're talking about, you know, you're either
starting with a rolling start or you know, maybe a
better view of this, a better a better look at
you know, the maybe the more usable speed would be
from like you know, the thirty or even forty to sixty. UM.
(18:46):
A lot of people use that as a measurement of
performance of a vehicle. And and the reason behind that
is because that's when you're passing another car on the highway,
or if you're exited in the the corner on a track,
or you know, even if you're exited in the corner, um,
you know, not city necessarily, maybe out in the country
or something, and you want to kind of get that
that that adrenaline rush as you go around the corner
and then and then accelerate out. Um really from like
(19:08):
you know, forty to sixty thirty to sixty thirty to
seventy what however you want to measure this. I mean,
there's a lot of different measurements there. That's really where
the power matters, and that's where you can feel the
acceleration of the car. You can feel, you know, the
the strength of the car, the speed, the weight, the traction,
all that matters more so, um, you know, as far
as the gearing goes, UM, you know, the gearing tends
(19:30):
to be a little bit better in that range. It's
not necessarily you know, the uh the real quick I'm
in first, but I have to shift into second almost immediately,
unlike some of those other cars we talked about, the
uh you know, the Viper or whatever. But they have
taken some of the sensation out of driving, if you
want to put it that way. And I think that
one of the cars that they mentioned here in UH
in one of the articles that I looked at, it
(19:50):
was it's called digital trends dot com and you can
look at something that they did here. They compared the
Nissan gt R and the Aston Martin v Advantage gt. Now,
both of these cars claimed to be entry level supercars
and they both cost around a hundred thousand dollars. So
I realize that these are expensive vehicles, but you know,
because they are at that same price point and they
are considered kind of these entry level supercars, you can
(20:12):
compare them and uh, and maybe I don't know, judge
them based on the sensation that they give you when
you drive them. And on paper, it seems like there,
as it says here in the article, there should be
no comparison. The Nissan does zero to sixty and something
like three seconds flat and the the Aston Martin zero
to sixty speed is four point six seconds. So it
(20:33):
seems like the g t R would be the car
to drive, right, That would be the fun one to drive,
and the it's definitely faster, and um, it should be
should be the one that you choose, right based on
zero to sixty. So the idea here is that if
the zero to sixty times are are helpful, which they
should be. Here, the difference between the cars isn't just
a couple of tents of a second. It's it's actually
a pretty big gap there. I mean there's there's um
(20:54):
you know, between three seconds and four point six seconds.
That's a that's a lot of distance between a lot
of time. Rather be when the zero to sixty when
it's reached. But but they do say this, And I've
never driven either one of these cars. I've seen both
of them on the road and and they're both very impressive,
but I guess when you're driving them, it's a lot different.
The thing is, the Aston actually feels a lot faster,
(21:14):
and the reason is because the Nissan, I mean the
Nissan GT are that the the function of getting up
to sixty is so easy, it's achieved so quickly and
in first gear, that there's really nothing to it. As
I just mentioned before, it's just simply a matter of
you know, dumping a collection going sixty miles an hour.
Anybody can do it. All the all the sensation, all
the feel, all the engine sounds, all of that is
(21:37):
is relatively tame. And I understand that it's a it's
a brutal car, I get it, but tame compared to
the Aston. Martin so um, they say that, you know,
the aston Martin acceleration is a little bit more exciting
because it's more visceral. You hear the engine noise, you
feel the vibration, you feel the steering wheel. Uh, you know,
there's more feedback to the car, and that gives you
(21:58):
a better sensation of speed. Even though you're getting there
in four point six seconds, which is still lightning quick.
Really you're still feeling that car and and it feels faster.
It's kind of if I had to compare this to anything,
I might even say that, Um, it's like when you're
in a go cart or even an open top car
and you feel like, you know, when you're low to
the ground, you've got the wind blowing in your hair,
you can hear the noise, you can feel it. It's
(22:19):
it's kind of rough. Uh. You could be in a
go cart going thirty miles an hour and you think
you're going a hundred miles an hour. That's just a
sensation that you get. And that's it's kind of the
idea behind some of these cars we're talking about, and
and how they have you know, that that visceral feel,
that sensation that you know they're going faster than they
really are. And um, I know, just as a side note,
I know my my my wife always thinks I'm going
(22:41):
way faster in my car than she's going in her car.
She's got a Jeep Jeep Wrangler, and it's a relatively
you know, tall vehicle, and uh, I don't know, it
just doesn't have the same sound and feel as my
car does, which is it's just a sedan. It's nothing special.
It's a it's a Volkswagon c C. And um, it's
just lower and it just has that since sation of
(23:01):
of a faster speed. So we'll look over and think,
I'm going, you know, ninety miles an hour and I'm
going sixty miles an hour on the highway. It just
has a different feel when you're that much closer to
the pavement and you know, you don't have maybe that
commanding view that you have above. It's a little bit
maybe she feels a little bit less in control, uh
than when you have that that high view advantage point.
I do want to talk about a couple of cars
(23:22):
here that have, you know, some slower times and some
faster times. I guess that you know the best and
the and the worst cars for acceleration and we will
do that quickly and uh and I promise you we're
gonna get to this, uh, this other thing because there's
a new I guess you'd call it a new record
claimed by one of the manufacturers, and we do want
to get to that. But we'll do that after we
take a break for a word from our sponsor. And
(23:48):
we're back and you're listening to the Fast Track, and
I'm your host, Scott Benjamin, And just before the break,
we were talking about some of the best and worst
acceleration rates or speeds for cars in the in the world.
And you know, I want to start out with a
couple of cars here, the current production cars in the US,
and then we're gonna talk about some of the uh
the slowest cars in the world and some of the
slowest cars in the world. Has zero to sixty times UM.
(24:10):
If you're still paying attention to zero sixty times after
you know what we've just said here on this on
this podcast, you want to get the best vehicles that
are on the road right now in the US. You
want to look at a couple of cars that are
fairly expensive. There's the portion on eleven Carrera S, which
is around four point one seconds zero to sixty per hour,
and then the Corvette Stingray comes in next, the three
L T at four point three. There's a Jaguar, the
(24:33):
Camaro S S. There's the portion of seven eighteen Boxer,
which is the base vehicle, comes in at four point
four seconds. There's the Ford Mustang GT Premium, which comes
in at four point nine seconds. Then there's a bunch
of others here on this list. We're not gonna list
all of them. You can find these lists if you
want to at Consumer reports dot org and they're listed
under the best and worst car acceleration. I'm gonna give
(24:55):
you possibly a better site to had to go to
even than that one in just a because um there's
a site that is dedicated to nothing but zero to
sixty times if you want to go buy these numbers.
But on this list of best acceleration vehicles, we we
just kind of wrapped up with the Ford Mustang, and uh,
we'll mention here that there's also a Tesla, the Tesla
(25:17):
model excess on their Mercedes Benz, another Tesla BMW, couple
of them. Uh, there's a Nissan, there's a Maserati, of course,
Dodge Jaguar. There's a whole bunch here on this list.
And then they list the slowest vehicles, and I'm going
to tell you that the slowest cars in the list,
these are the current US production vehicles slowest times, and
so that the slowest one on the list is by
(25:40):
far not the slowest one ever to be recorded zero
to sixty, and I'll get to that in just a moment,
But the current slowest production vehicle zero to sixty in
the U S is the MITSUBC Mirage E S, which
comes in at twelve point one second zero to sixty,
and uh the Chevrolet Spark one LT which comes in
at twelve seconds, then the Fiat five hundred Sport, which
(26:01):
is funny that they call it the Fiat Sport at
eleven point three seconds, and then the Toyota Prius, the
Toyota c HR, then the Honda Kona, the Buke Encore
Leather Edition, Ford Focus s E, which is the one
leader engine, and then the Hyundai Tucson. All of those
are right around eleven seconds, you know, somewhere around eleven
point one, eleven point two three, you know, et cetera.
(26:22):
Up to the Mitsubishi Mirage, which comes in again at
twelve point one seconds. Now, those are the current US
production vehicles. And you know, one one quick thing that
I don't know if I mentioned this, you know, we
we said that zero to sixty might not be something
that you necessarily pay a whole lot of attention to.
But I can tell you one case where it probably
does matter to you, and it's one that a lot
(26:43):
of people find. It's a bad position a lot of
people find themselves in. You pull out into traffic. You know,
you're you're exiting the shopping mall, or you're exiting you know,
the grocery store or whatever, and you kind of misjudge
the traffic that's approaching from the nearest stoplight. You pull
out and you realize, hey, that traffic is moving a
lot faster than I thought was going to try to
accelerate and get you know, ahead of them or stay
ahead of them. Uh so you know, you know, you're
(27:04):
not making a burden of yourself there in the middle
of traffic, and you realize quickly that you know, everybody's overtaken.
You can't get that little car to go as fast
as you wanted it to go, or that big car
to go as fast as you wanted it to go.
And that's one situation I think where it pays to
have a car that accelerates kind of quick those situations
where you you need to for your own safety go
(27:24):
just a little bit faster or get up to speed quickly.
And uh and I found myself in that position many
many times. And uh, and that is kind of scary.
So maybe that's one thing that you do need to
consider when you're when you're thinking about a a quick
accelerating vehicle getting back to slow accelerating vehicles. And this
is I find this to be a funny list and
and this is the site that I want to tell
you about. The site is zero to sixty times dot com.
(27:48):
That's zero to sixty times and sixty is six zero
times dot com. And they do have they have several
lists here. I mean, you can search cars by make
model ranges. You know, cars that are in the two
second range, cars that are in the five second range.
You can search classics, hatchbacks, whatever you want. You can
break this down just about any way. Really, you can
browse by anything, manufacturer whatever you like. Uh. They have
(28:11):
current and vehicles that were are out of production. And
that's where this list comes in because this is the
slowest cars in the world. Zero to sixty specs of
the slowest cars in the world. Some of these are
kind of funny, um and some of them you would
absolutely expect. Now, I know, a lot of cars aren't
built for speed, and that's for the reason that they're
on this list. They're built for practicality. So a couple
(28:33):
of the cars here that are on this list, and
I'm gonna just mention one right now. It's not the slowest,
but the Tata Nano is one of the cars that
we've kind of made fun of in the past a
little bit on car stuff, but the car does have
its place in the world. There's a there's a purpose
for the Tata Nano, and the purpose was that it
was it was a vehicle that was at a very
very low price point. I think brand new vehicle was
(28:54):
something like you know, three thousand U S dollars whatever
that translates to UM in India. I can't remember exactly
the price point there, but it's a vehicle that was
created for people that normally would be driving or riding
on a motorcycle or a moped to work and to
school and around, you know, just around the city, and
it's very dangerous. Have you ever seen any of the
(29:15):
these uh intersections that are just chaotic and crowded, and
you know, you see three, four, sometimes five people on
a motorcycle and any know, I'm laughing a little bit,
but it's it's funny, it's humorous, but it's also exceedingly dangerous,
and a lot of people are injured or killed on
these every year. And this gets them into a vehicle
that you know, I don't know if any of them
(29:35):
have air conditioning or anything like that, I'm not sure,
but it gets them into a vehicle that has some
type of structure around them. There's a there's there's something
there to protect them in the event that, you know,
there's a collision. And if you do look at some
of these, you know, these crowded intersections UM and some
of these UH these developing nations, you'll find that, you know,
the traffic control system, if there is one even at all,
is definitely not what we have here in the United States,
(29:57):
and it's it's it's exceedingly poor and and there's a
lot lot of collissions that happened and it's it's very,
very dangerous situations. So the Tata Nano is a perfect
example of of you know, a vehicle that is on
this list not for speed necessarily, but because you know,
it was it had a purpose in mind. It was
built for a purpose. And some of the other cars
in this list are classics. They're they're older vehicles that
(30:17):
were just simply commuter cars. There were city cars again,
you know, one step above many or micro cars even
or even you know, maybe that's what they were. Many cars.
Really they weren't built for performance and or for getting
up to top speed. And sometimes sixty is the top
speed of these cars. That's another issue with some of them.
You know, I think the Tata Nano the top speed
is sixty two miles per hour. That's the very maximum
(30:39):
on them. In fact, the number one vehicle on the list,
that is the maximum speed. So I can understand why
it takes along to get there. I'm not gonna go
through the whole list, but we'll start down at number ten,
which is the night Fiat eight fifty in Romatic, which
goes zero to sixty and twenty five point four seconds. Now,
that's a long long time. If you were to start
(31:00):
a stop watch, you would realize just how long that
is to you know, to get out into traffic, Try
to accelerate, try to get up to speed with what
you know, the type of speed of traffic that we
see typically here in the modern day. Number nine on
the list is the fourteen Tata Nano Twist x T,
which which goes zero to sixty and twenty seven seconds. Um.
Then there's a couple more a couple more Tatas here
(31:22):
on the list, and then the nineteen fifty Triumph Mayflower
is another one that's on the list twenty seven point
nine seconds. So we're creeping up a little bit here,
but only up by one second as we get up
to the midpoint on the list, as the two thousand
nine Tata Nano, which goes zero to sixty and twenty
nine point four seconds. And then we go back to
nineteen fifty four for a Triumph of a model of
(31:42):
the Triumph called the Renown, and the Renown is pretty slow.
It's at at twenty nine point five seconds, but that
is not the slowest vehicle, and they do jump up
incrementally here, just very very small amounts. We're talking about
the nineteen fifty nine Austin Mini Cooper eight fifty m
K which goes zero to sixty and twenty nine point
six seconds. Then another triumpher noun model again twenty nine
(32:05):
point nine seconds. Another Triumph again, So the Triumph is
represented on this list many many times, as is Tata.
This is the Herald model, the Triumph Herald from nineteen sixty.
It's editions so less than a less than a leader
in this car, it's a little coupe model UM twenty
nine point nine seconds. But the number one vehicle on
this list, the slowest zero to sixty time according to
(32:27):
zero to sixty times dot com, is a car called
the Mia Electric Car. Now. It's an all electric vehicle.
It's a French made vehicle does zero to sixty and
exactly thirty seconds. Now, I have the MEA pulled up
here on a website and I'm looking at it right now.
It was produced between June of two thousand eleven and
December of two thousand thirteen, and it was built in France.
(32:49):
It's a three door hatchback and there was also a
van edition of this vehicle. And it's not a car
that was sold here in the United States. It was
a European market vehicle, and of course it's just a
commuter car. The top speed on this one is and
one hundred kilometers per hour, which is equivalent to sixty
two miles per hour. So that is the maximum speed
on this vehicle. It had a small battery is I
(33:10):
believe that, you know, the equivalent horsepower in this thing
was something like I want to I'm gonna ballpark this.
I think it was like around twelve horse power or
something like that. It's a very very low, low horsepower
vehicle to begin with. And of course horsepower is not
all that matters in this We're talking about torque and
all kinds of other things, and electric cars typically have
a lot of torque, which is surprising. But you know,
(33:30):
I guess maybe this one just had such a small
electric motor that it was unable to climb up to
that that maximum speed very quickly, as we see in
in some of the other higher performing electric vehicles that
we do see today, because there are several that are
that are you know, decent performers. Now it wasn't always
the case, but there are some now. But again, the
Mida Electric, I think they gave the two thousand twelve
model the lowest rating. You know, I think I have
(33:53):
just about no more really to say about zero to
sixty times at this point. And uh, you know, if
you find zero to sixties still am a measurement that
you want to go buy for buying your vehicle, you know,
please do. If you find that still interesting, please do.
And I still do look at it as kind of
a standard, and it's just one of those equal playing
fields that everybody can kind of look at and say like, okay,
I can I can see where one car relates to
another one or how it compares on again, an even
(34:15):
playing field. Somewhat, Um, maybe that even playing field isn't
quite as even as as we're thinking when I when
I tell you what I'm gonna tell you next, because
there is a new article that came out just recently
from Car and Driver, and there is um gosh, I
don't know the best way to put this. Maybe there's
a there's a new king in town and it is
the Ford Mustang Shelby GT. Five hundred, and this one
(34:37):
goes by a different measurement, and it's a measurement that
we don't hear an awful lot about, but it is
out there, and it's something that manufacturers used for selling vehicles.
It's a marketing tool, really, and uh it is impressive.
I mean it is and until you maybe parse this
out and figure out exactly what we're talking about here.
So we're talking about a standing start up to one
hundred miles per hour and then back to us standing
(34:58):
stop again. And there's a little bit of trickery that
goes on here. And uh, I want to tell you
that the Mustang Shelby GT five currently holds this record,
and Ford claims the number is ten point six seconds,
So zero one d to zero in ten points six seconds,
which is really really fast. I mean that's a that's
a quick quick speed. We were talking about, you know,
(35:20):
cars that could barely muster up to sixty in that time,
and to climb from sixty to one hundred and then
back to zero again that takes an awful lot more
time in a lot of cases. And if they can
even do it, really, this car goes on sale this
fall and it will begin somewhere around seventy four dollars,
So there's a seventy four m s r P on
this vehicle. And the thing is you have to look
(35:44):
at this number and again break it down into what
it really means. This has been done by several manufacturers before.
And here's how this this all works out. And I
didn't know this until I read this article. I thought
that they were doing a a true you know, standing
start accelerate up to hundred and then back down to zero.
That's not the way that this all plays out. The
way these magazines kind of put these numbers together is
(36:04):
a little bit deceptive, but they're accurate in a way.
And I'll tell you how this all happens. What they
do is they take a car from zero to one
hundred and they measure that speed. So let's say that
a car can go from zero to one hundred in
I'm going to take the Camaro S S one ll
E as an example here. Let's say it goes from
zero to one hundred and nine point one seconds. So
they get that speed, and that's easy to achieve, you know,
(36:25):
you just hammer the accelerator and you get to nine
point one second, sets zero one. Then they take another
separate test where they're already going one hundred miles per hour,
and then they break as hard as they can without
lock up. And for this car this Camaro S s
L E and one L E that I'm talking about
one hundred to zero the breaking speed in in time,
I guess I should say the time is three point
(36:48):
eight seconds. So they add together the nine point one
seconds and the three point eight seconds, and then they
get the estimated zero to one hundred zero speed of
twelve point nine seconds. So I think, I mean, everybody
can understand how this is all working out right, It's
not it's not zero to one D zero, it's it's
more like zero to one hundred. And then we'll start
a new test one D zero and then add the
(37:08):
two numbers together and that's what we get. And that's
how they measure all these and uh, that is something
that I just I had no idea that that's the
way they were doing. And I think there have been
cars in the past that have done this. Now, Carol
Shelby did it back in nive in the Shelby Cover
and you might be surprised to learn that the Cover
seven had a speed This is still quick at fourteen
(37:30):
point five seconds. But when you consider that the Ford
Mustang Shelby GT. Five hundred, the current vehicle that's gonna
be on sale this fall does it in ten points
six seconds. Uh, four teen point five sounds relatively slow.
I mean when you're talking about, you know, vehicles in
in this type of performance range. Other cars that do
it quickly are the Ford Mustang G T which has
(37:51):
the Performance Pack Level two. I don't know exactly what
that means, h third teen point two seconds. And then
of course there's the the Mustang Shelby GT three fifty
which does it and around twelve point six seconds. Other
cars that you know have done this. There there are
other vehicles, of course, you know, the corvettes always in
there somewhere. Of course, manufacturers do kind of play around
with these a little bit, as you can see, and
(38:11):
you know, they give you the best numbers. Obviously, of
course they want to turn in the best numbers, as
do you know some of the magazines that put out
these numbers that the testing is just a it's a
it's a little bit deceptive if you look at it
that way. And again I had no idea. So what
they're doing is they're extrapolating now how quickly the the Mustang,
the current Mustang we're talking about, the the Mustang Shelby GT. Five.
(38:31):
They're extrapolating that that one will be able to accelerate
in six points seven seconds. And that's based on what
they assume the breaking is going to be, and they
assume that it's going to be somewhere around three point
eight seconds because in this group, you know, in this
this this type of vehicle that we're talking about, you know,
the heavy end of this group, they're estimating that one
hundred zero times about I guess about three point nine seconds.
(38:53):
Then they subtract, you know, from the the ten points
six seconds, and you know, they get the number that
they think it's going to be. So and six point
seven seconds zero to one hundred is what they're estimating
to be the zero to one hundred times for this vehicle.
So again you look into this whole thing because there's
a lot of interesting ways that manufacturers play around with
the numbers and and make it kind of work for them.
And this is nothing new. Manufacturers has done this for
(39:14):
a long long time. Uh kind of played around with
the stuff and and kind of uh slant the test
to kind of go the way they want to, or
you know, gear the car so that it exceeds um
you know, certain parameters that they wanted to so they
can then have these bragging rights, you know, zero to
one hundred or zero to sixty or whatever it happens
to be. But definitely dig into that stuff if if
that type of thing is important to you, and you
(39:35):
can go to Car and Driver dot com or you know,
zero to sixty times dot com or any of those
sites that I've talked about. Digital Trends had some articles
on this. You can find zero sixty times zero one
hundred times for just about every vehicle out there. Really,
it's pretty easy to do. And you know, honestly, um,
I don't think I have a whole lot more to
say about this. Again, I hope you find it just
kind of a good starting point for your research and
(39:56):
you're you're delving into exactly, you know, what's important to
you when you're buying a new vehicle as far as
acceleration goes. And if you want to find us on Twitter,
we are the fast Track Pod, and on Facebook and
on Instagram we are the fast Track Show. And we
also have a brand new website that you can check
out and that it's called the fast Track Show dot com. Again,
(40:16):
the fast Track Show dot com. That's our new website,
and that's where we're gonna house all of our podcasts
from this point forward. So I know we're just beginning here,
and uh, we'll soon have kind of an archive of
material there for you to search back and you know,
check out some of the earlier episodes. Right now, we're
still early on and in this whole thing. Of course,
you can you know, leave reviews if you want to,
I mean, which I think is always nice to do. Um,
(40:37):
you know, good our badge. We will take it all.
We'd like to hear what you think. You can do
that on Apple Podcasts or on the I Heart Radio
Apple or wherever you happen to listen to your podcasts
and if you like what you're hearing, as particularly if
you like what you're hearing, and tell your friends all
about it, because you know, we'd like to gain some
new listeners. And thanks for listening. We really appreciate it,
and we'll see you next time.
Hello, and welcome to the Fast Track. I'm your host,
Scott Benjamin, and you know, it's a fairly new show.
We're we're still kind of getting our our sea legs here,
trying to uh figure out exactly what we're doing with
this program, but we do have a focus, and the
focus is we're going to be concentrated on things that
are about quick cars, about fast cars, about people to
go fast, about um, anything really that goes fast. And
(00:31):
you know what's funny is I sometimes like to take
it the other direction. Maybe we'll talk about some things
that go slow and and maybe we'll do that at
some point today because it's kind of a nice reversal
to you know, kind of see like what the opposite
end of the spectrum is. Like we're gonna talk about
new cars and some of the quickest new cars that
you can buy, and the price range that we're gonna
be talking about is less than thirty thousand dollars. Now,
(00:51):
the Kelly Blue Book average price for a new car
in nine is around thirty seven thousand, two eighty five
dollars this year, So me nineteen, I think I believe
that they go with a sedan price, you know, just
kind of the middle of the road price there. The
average new price for a car is thirty seven thousand,
two eighty five dollars. That's here in the United States.
(01:13):
That seemed to creep up every year by about three
or four percent something like that. Sometimes this is a
little as two, but usually it's around three percent. So
you can count on adding three percent to that for
twenty and I'm sure that will continue to climb as
we get later and later here. But I want to
talk about cars that are less than thirty thousand dollars
to begin with. And I think before we even start
(01:34):
that one thing that I wanted to mention here, and
this is just kind of like an off topic thing
that I that I thought was interesting. Um. I made
a road trip last weekend. I went to Indiana and
I went to northern Indiana for a family reunion. And
there were a good number of people there. They're probably
eighty people that showed up in this park there and
this is in Wabash, Indiana. And got a lot of
(01:54):
family there, obviously, and you know, some distant relatives that
I hadn't seen for a long time, and one of
them was my cousin. And I have seen him recently,
and I know he was a car stuff listener when
I had the other show. But he's a younger cousin
of mine first cousin, and I do know that he
rides motorcycles. So when I saw him there at the reunion,
I decided I had talked to him a little bit
about that, and he said that he had recently made
(02:16):
what was, for him, I think, the longest trip that
he ever made on his motorcycle, and it was up
into the southern part of Michigan and he went to
I think it was like an RC track and outdoor
RC track for radio controlled vehicles. That was, you know,
pretty intense. I think it was a pretty cool thing.
He said that, you know, some people are spending thousands
(02:36):
of dollars, you know, four or five, six thousand dollars
on these on these rigs for um off road RC
vehicles and racing them in some kind of I don't
know if as a championship or whatever. It's just a
you know, weekend hobby or and something like that. Anyway,
he made the trip up there, and uh, I was
asking him about helmet laws because I had when I
as soon as I crossed into Indiana, I realized that
(02:56):
they did not have the same helmet laws as we
have here in Georgia or even you know, in Kentucky
or Tennessee. It's it's a little different. In Indiana. Anybody
that is under the age of eighteen is required to
wear a helmet. Anybody over the age of eighteen, it's optional.
You don't have to. And I saw this many many
times on the road as I was driving there, because
it's it's northern Indiana really, so a lot of time
(03:17):
spent in Indiana, and I was noticing that. You know.
So there's some people on the highway going ninety miles
an hour, you know, a husband, wife on a on
a great big Harley Davidson motorcycle, both of them not
wearing helmets. And it's just it's a little bit startling
when you see it. I mean, it's up to them,
it's their own you know, right to you know, wear them,
are not wear them. It doesn't matter to me. I mean,
(03:37):
it's up to them. But it is startling to see it,
you know, especially when they're going that type of speed
on the highway. It's just it seems wrong. I don't know,
I don't know how better to put that again, it's
it's everybody's personal decision. I agree with that. That's fine.
But I asked him if he rides a you know,
wears a helmet when he rides, and he says that
he always does. And one thing that he mentioned almost immediately,
and this is this is where this whole story is going.
(03:59):
I guess, is that something that you don't normally think of,
and this is one very good reason to wear a helmet. Um.
He was talking about how it was raining on the
way there, and you know, the rain kind of hurts
your skins. As you're right. I don't know if you've
ever been on a roller coaster maybe or maybe you
are a motorcycle rider, uh, going you know, sixty seventy
miles an hour, rain really hurts when it hits you
(04:22):
going sixty or seventy miles an hour. The same thing
with a roller coaster. It's that same feeling. He said
he encountered some rain on that trip, but he said that,
you know, he has always wore a helmet when he rides.
And one really good lesson that he got early on
was when he was fortunately wearing a helmet. And this
is one of those things that is just one of
those completely unexpected things that you would never ever consider happening.
(04:44):
But he was out for an evening ride and he
was somewhere in the Indiana countryside there going I don't know,
a fifty plus miles an hour, whatever it was, whatever
the speed was. A bat hit him in the head.
A bat. So he's flying, he's driving around a corner. Um,
you know, bat comes out of nowhere. I mean, you
don't even have time to really to react, you don't
have time to duck or anything. Bat strikes him in
(05:06):
the in the face shield and of course the bats destroyed.
But there's just this gross stuff all over his his
helmet and you know, on his shoulder. And he said
it was really kind of sickening, you know, the result
of it. But he was imagining what would happen if
he wasn't wearing that helmet when when he struck this thing.
I mean, it would have could cast some damage, It
could have cost some you know, damage to his eye,
It could have you know, broken his jar or whatever. Um.
(05:29):
I've been in another vehicle. I was in a Cadillac
one time that hit a bat, you know, in the
same place in Indiana when we were out for an
evening drive. My grandfather was driving, and it struck the
windshield when I was in the front seat, and it
was it was pretty scary. It's very abrupt and and
it happens quickly. But um, I don't think i'd ever
heard of a motorcycle rider ever talking about, you know,
hitting a bat in the evening. I thought it was
(05:50):
really interesting and uh, kind of unusual. It's one of
those things again that you just don't think about it,
and it's probably a good reason to wear that helmet
with a face shield. I do want to say, gosh, man,
it seems like we're never gonna get into this topic.
But there's a there's a few things that I want
to say. We're not talking about the fastest cars. We're
talking about the quickest cars that you know, the zero
to sixties speeds and so so quick doesn't necessarily translate
(06:11):
to fast, and that's not I just don't think they're
the same thing. Uh. Fast is where you're typically talking
about something that's you know, overall, you know, high speed
at top speed, that's uh, that's greater than a typical
road car. We're not talking about cars like that. We're
talking about cars that can quickly get from zero to
sixty miles per hour, and there's about fifteen or sixteen
on this list, and I'm gonna go through these relatively quickly,
(06:33):
and uh, and then we're gonna take this conversation in
a different direction because I have found um a lot
of information about the zero to sixty tests that I
think you would be or you would find interesting rather
and even another test that is possibly even more meaningless.
And believe it or not that maybe we'll give just
a little bit away here, but uh, let's begin here now.
(06:55):
I want to say that these cars start at six
point three seconds, which is not add for zero to
sixty speed. The six point three seconds is quick. And
if you if you think back, if you're old enough
to remember, back into the nineteen eighties, let's say, mid
nineteen eighties, anything that was going in uh, you know,
sixty miles per hour in about eight seconds was considered
(07:15):
a quick car. That was a quick acceleration. And now
we're getting into you know, six seconds below six seconds,
and there of course there's a lot of cars that
will go faster than that, and we'll we'll talk about
those as well. You know, the fastest cars, but again
under thirty thousand dollars is the is the price point
that we're talking about here. And this all begins with
the Accura I l X, which will go zero to
(07:37):
sixty and six point three seconds. Now, that is a
two one horse power four cylinder engine. The price here
is about twenty six thousand eight, So, um, we're talking
about a relatively quick car for you know, about twenty
seven thousand dollars. Um it has an eight speed, dual
clutch automatic transmission, and um, I guess just a bargain
(08:00):
small sports it in if you want to look at
it that way. Now, I'm not selling in any of
these cars, so I understand that I'm not trying to
talk anyone up over the other one. But the speeds
are gonna go faster and faster as we talk here.
And a couple of these are tied, you know, from
maybe the to the top spot here, you know, like
the first three I think are in the six point
three second range, which includes the Fiat one Spider, which
(08:22):
also comes in at six point three seconds. That one
is priced exactly the same twenty thousand six. Oh, it's
two hundars less. It's six five dollars, so five and
essentially this is like um, I mean, if you want
to look at it simply, this is essentially like the
Masda m X five Miata. I mean, it's very very
(08:43):
closely related to that car. UM. It has a six
speed manual transmission that's the standard for the Fiat. And
again six point three seconds, pretty quick. Um. Another one
that's quick is the Honest Civic s I coupe, which
is at six point three seconds. Again two and five horsepower,
four cylinder engine. The base prices a little bit lower here,
it's twenty two and twenty dollars. Now, you know, one
(09:06):
one quick thing here as we as we go through,
you're gonna find that a lot of these cars have
automatic transmissions. And a lot of people will say, well,
you know, why why even talk about those cars? Why
don't just talk about the manual transmissions are typically faster.
That's not necessarily the case anymore. We're finding that some
of these automatic transmissions are performing so well, they shift
so well that they are able to shift better than
(09:27):
somebody could shift a manual transmission. And that wasn't always
a case in the past. But you'll find that a
lot of these cars on this list do have a
an automatic transmission that that performs exceedingly well or even
better than um a human could shift, and I I
ten years ago, I wouldn't have said anything like that. Usually,
you know, we're talking or typically we were talking about
the manual transmissions and how that was the option to
(09:49):
get because you could shift just a little bit faster.
But that's not the case anymore. Moving on to number
four or sixteen, we're talking about the Dodge Challenger, which
is a V six powered car, and this it's zero
sixteen about three point I'm sorry three seconds now six
point two seconds, six point two seconds, and that's the
base price of around twenty nine and three forty. This
(10:10):
one does jump up about a hundred horse power from
the previous entry, so it's about three hundred and five
horse power versus the two and five we just talked
about with the Honda Civic. Again, this one is paired
to an eight speed automatic transmission, so again that's another
another automatic transmission as uh well, the next one is
not as a matter of fact, it's the Toyota eighty
six or the suber U b r Z, which also
(10:32):
comes in at six point two seconds and This goes
back down to two h five horse power. This has
a flat four engine with two hundred five horse power
and a standard six speed manual transmission. That's what we're
talking about. For the six point two seconds. The base
price is a little bit lower than the previous entry
at eighty or six eighty for the Subaru. And then
(10:55):
we go on to another V six powered car. We're
talking about the number six of sixteen, which is the
heavy Impala, and that comes in at six point one seconds.
Again another three five horsepower V six engine. Um, you know,
let's let's just quickly buzz through these because I do
want to get to some more interesting things I think
anyways in this podcast. Um, and that is kind of
the reasoning behind some of the zero to sixty tests
(11:18):
that we see. And uh, and what they mean really
are they? Are they meaningful to us in in a
in a real way. Um, there's the Mini Cooper S
hard top at six point one seconds. There's the Honda
KNA turbo at six seconds, so and even six seconds
for the for a Honda. Another Hondai which comes in
at six seconds is the Veloctri turbo. Then the Volkswagen
(11:38):
g t I at five point eight seconds, So we're
getting into the five second range here, and it's only
going to drop from this point. Uh, there's the Mazda
m X five Miata, which is five point seven seconds
zero to sixty. Get this is this is a strange one.
Buick Regal sport Back comes in at five point six seconds.
Now I wouldn't have expected a Buick to be on
this list, but it is. Um This one has a
(12:00):
two fifty horsepower turbo charge two lead four cylinder with
a nine speed automatic transmission. Now I just I never
would have guessed abutle could be on the on the list,
especially this high. At five point six seconds, that's a
that's pretty quick, and it comes in at tho so
less than twenty six thousand dollars. The next one I
would expect to be on this list, and that is
(12:21):
the Subaru w r X, and that comes in at
five point five seconds. But that's still not the fastest
one because we are talking about, uh, the Chevy Camaro
U the two leader turbo, which comes in at five
point one seconds. And then there's the Ford Mustang Eco
Boost which also comes in at five point one seconds.
So you can still get a car that will go
(12:44):
zero to sixty in five seconds for under thirty thousand dollars.
And I think that's a that's a pretty good option
for a lot of people if they're not willing to
go as high as you know, what's the average price?
Not thirty seven two five is what I said. Um,
so that is I don't know. I sets a positive
note and you know something that uh, um, if you're
out in new car shopping, you might want to check
(13:04):
that out if zero to sixty is something that's important
to you. And it turns out that zero to sixty,
I don't know. Maybe it's something that's in your head.
Maybe it's something you know I thought. I always thought
that zero to sixty was an important measurement as well.
And uh and there's probably a good reason behind that
or why I thought that it was important. And we
will talk about that in just a moment after we
(13:25):
come back from a word from our sponsor. And we're
back and you're listening to the Fast Track, and I'm
your host, Scott Benjamin, and we were just talking about
a kind of a long list, I guess, of the
quickest cars that you can buy for less than thirty
thousand dollars and and I had about sixteen cars fifteen
or sixteen cars there on that list, and I know
(13:47):
that was a little bit overwhelming, and I hopefully we
can get past this and talk about something that maybe
is a little bit more meaningful to each one of us,
or maybe even less meaningful to each one of us.
I don't know. I mean, that's kind of the conversation
that goes along with this, because I had always looked
at zero to sixty is as one of those things
where you know, personally, when I'm when I'm buying a car,
I want something that's kind of quick. I want something
that feels good when I accelerate off the line or
(14:09):
you know, from a standing start, you know, maybe to
get onto the highway or something like that. And I
think that maybe my thinking was a little bit flawed
now in the in the way that um I was
I was reading into how important a zero to sixty
time is for a vehicle, and it seems like there's
a lot of articles out there about how zero to
sixty doesn't necessarily mean as much as you might think
(14:30):
it does in daily driving or or you know, um,
the numbers are something that that manufacturers like to brag about.
And they all like to say that, you know, we
have the quickest car from zero to sixty and U
or um. They might even have a different measurement, as
we'll talk about here in just a minute. There's one
that's maybe even less meaningful, if you can, if you
want to put it that way. I mean, I hate
to say it that way because you know, all this
(14:51):
stuff means something to somebody, but you know, you and
I on on a daily basis, it doesn't necessarily mean
a whole lot. It's it's really cool for the manufacturers
to be able to brag about this stuff, uh, you know,
for for bragging rights. But um, it doesn't necessarily play
out in the real world the way that we think
it will, you know, the way it does on paper.
There's a there's a way to look at this, I guess.
And I've asked my wife. I've asked my daughter. I've
(15:12):
asked some people around the office here. I've asked, you know,
some of my relatives. I've asked some friends that I have.
You know that I correspond with, what do you think
about zero to sixty time? Is it important to you
when you buy a vehicle and overwhelmingly so far. Everybody,
every single one is really said it doesn't really come
into their their thought process when they're buying a car.
I think that there's you know, something that's like that.
(15:34):
You know, when you're in the car and you're driving it,
you want it to be quick, you want it to
feel good. I don't think you necessarily look at that
car and say, you know, I'm I'm interested in this
car because it gets uh, it goes zero to sixty
and five point one seconds versus five point eight seconds
in the real world. The truth is, you're not going
to use that. And I didn't really believe that until
I read several articles about this, and it's going back,
(15:55):
you know, a long time. It's not it's not something
brand new that people are looking at and saying exactly why.
It doesn't necessarily matter. And the reality, I guess is
that you know, you don't actually experience driving a vehicle
zero sixty. It's kind of like a mismeasurement of a
car's performance because it's there's very rarely a time when
you're actually going zero to sixty from from a stoplight.
(16:17):
You're typically not doing that because the speeds on that
road if you're if you're unless you're breaking the law
of course, and I think a lot of people do. Uh,
you know, as far as like and trying to out
accelerate the person next to you, You're not necessarily going
to take it up to sixty or above immediately off
the stop light, unless you are again trying to race
against somebody next to you, or just you know, trying
to have a little bit of fun. I guess when
(16:38):
no one's around. Um, if you're going on too, if
you're on an on ramp, um, maybe, but you're already
kind of like at a rolling, rolling start, unless you're
at a metered on ramp, which we have a lot
of here in Atlanta, and that typically means anyway that
you are accelerating into heavy traffic, and that's something different.
So you're not necessarily going to take it all the
way up to sixty again. UM, I do admit that,
(16:59):
you know, I have a lot of fun kind of
blasting onto a highway if there's you know, open road
in front of me. The reality is, though you know
you're already starting at a rolling start, you're starting at
you know, ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty miles an hour
as you come around the corner to get onto the
on ramp and then and then begin your acceleration. So
that's a little bit different. And you know, some of
the best cars that I've had, some of the manual transmissions.
My favorite gear is sometimes you know, second or third
(17:21):
gear in that car. It's not necessarily first gear. And
a lot of these cars that we're going to talk
about here have kind of cheated the system in order
to get to zero sixty by gearing. And I say cheated,
I mean these are manufacturers that are doing this, but um,
they have geared the cars so that you know, sixty
is achieved in first gear for some of the bigger
V eight engine cars. When you do that, you're you
(17:42):
kind of take out the human equation out of the
whole thing. It's just a matter of mashing down the accelerator,
you know, dumping the clutch, going as fast as you can,
and you get up to sixty it and no time practically,
but that takes out, you know, the point where you
have to shift, and that takes out a little bit
of the skill out of the whole thing. And uh again,
I think i've or you know, the viper does that.
I think the one of the Mustangs does that maybe Corvette,
(18:04):
I'm not exactly sure. I can't remember the list of
manufacturers that have done that where you can achieve sixty
in first gear and again just kind of take some
of the some of the work out of it for
for the human unless you have to shift. You know,
there's really not a whole lot of skill involved in
going sixty and it happens really really quick. UM. But honestly,
(18:24):
like the thing is, zero to sixty is kind of
a misleading measurement of performance. And that's because you know,
most of it, like I said, most of the real
world driving that we're talking about, you know, you're either
starting with a rolling start or you know, maybe a
better view of this, a better a better look at
you know, the maybe the more usable speed would be
from like you know, the thirty or even forty to sixty. UM.
(18:46):
A lot of people use that as a measurement of
performance of a vehicle. And and the reason behind that
is because that's when you're passing another car on the highway,
or if you're exited in the the corner on a track,
or you know, even if you're exited in the corner, um,
you know, not city necessarily, maybe out in the country
or something, and you want to kind of get that
that that adrenaline rush as you go around the corner
and then and then accelerate out. Um really from like
(19:08):
you know, forty to sixty thirty to sixty thirty to
seventy what however you want to measure this. I mean,
there's a lot of different measurements there. That's really where
the power matters, and that's where you can feel the
acceleration of the car. You can feel, you know, the
the strength of the car, the speed, the weight, the traction,
all that matters more so, um, you know, as far
as the gearing goes, UM, you know, the gearing tends
(19:30):
to be a little bit better in that range. It's
not necessarily you know, the uh the real quick I'm
in first, but I have to shift into second almost immediately,
unlike some of those other cars we talked about, the
uh you know, the Viper or whatever. But they have
taken some of the sensation out of driving, if you
want to put it that way. And I think that
one of the cars that they mentioned here in UH
in one of the articles that I looked at, it
(19:50):
was it's called digital trends dot com and you can
look at something that they did here. They compared the
Nissan gt R and the Aston Martin v Advantage gt. Now,
both of these cars claimed to be entry level supercars
and they both cost around a hundred thousand dollars. So
I realize that these are expensive vehicles, but you know,
because they are at that same price point and they
are considered kind of these entry level supercars, you can
(20:12):
compare them and uh, and maybe I don't know, judge
them based on the sensation that they give you when
you drive them. And on paper, it seems like there,
as it says here in the article, there should be
no comparison. The Nissan does zero to sixty and something
like three seconds flat and the the Aston Martin zero
to sixty speed is four point six seconds. So it
(20:33):
seems like the g t R would be the car
to drive, right, That would be the fun one to drive,
and the it's definitely faster, and um, it should be
should be the one that you choose, right based on
zero to sixty. So the idea here is that if
the zero to sixty times are are helpful, which they
should be. Here, the difference between the cars isn't just
a couple of tents of a second. It's it's actually
a pretty big gap there. I mean there's there's um
(20:54):
you know, between three seconds and four point six seconds.
That's a that's a lot of distance between a lot
of time. Rather be when the zero to sixty when
it's reached. But but they do say this, And I've
never driven either one of these cars. I've seen both
of them on the road and and they're both very impressive,
but I guess when you're driving them, it's a lot different.
The thing is, the Aston actually feels a lot faster,
(21:14):
and the reason is because the Nissan, I mean the
Nissan GT are that the the function of getting up
to sixty is so easy, it's achieved so quickly and
in first gear, that there's really nothing to it. As
I just mentioned before, it's just simply a matter of
you know, dumping a collection going sixty miles an hour.
Anybody can do it. All the all the sensation, all
the feel, all the engine sounds, all of that is
(21:37):
is relatively tame. And I understand that it's a it's
a brutal car, I get it, but tame compared to
the Aston. Martin so um, they say that, you know,
the aston Martin acceleration is a little bit more exciting
because it's more visceral. You hear the engine noise, you
feel the vibration, you feel the steering wheel. Uh, you know,
there's more feedback to the car, and that gives you
(21:58):
a better sensation of speed. Even though you're getting there
in four point six seconds, which is still lightning quick.
Really you're still feeling that car and and it feels faster.
It's kind of if I had to compare this to anything,
I might even say that, Um, it's like when you're
in a go cart or even an open top car
and you feel like, you know, when you're low to
the ground, you've got the wind blowing in your hair,
you can hear the noise, you can feel it. It's
(22:19):
it's kind of rough. Uh. You could be in a
go cart going thirty miles an hour and you think
you're going a hundred miles an hour. That's just a
sensation that you get. And that's it's kind of the
idea behind some of these cars we're talking about, and
and how they have you know, that that visceral feel,
that sensation that you know they're going faster than they
really are. And um, I know, just as a side note,
I know my my my wife always thinks I'm going
(22:41):
way faster in my car than she's going in her car.
She's got a Jeep Jeep Wrangler, and it's a relatively
you know, tall vehicle, and uh, I don't know, it
just doesn't have the same sound and feel as my
car does, which is it's just a sedan. It's nothing special.
It's a it's a Volkswagon c C. And um, it's
just lower and it just has that since sation of
(23:01):
of a faster speed. So we'll look over and think,
I'm going, you know, ninety miles an hour and I'm
going sixty miles an hour on the highway. It just
has a different feel when you're that much closer to
the pavement and you know, you don't have maybe that
commanding view that you have above. It's a little bit
maybe she feels a little bit less in control, uh
than when you have that that high view advantage point.
I do want to talk about a couple of cars
(23:22):
here that have, you know, some slower times and some
faster times. I guess that you know the best and
the and the worst cars for acceleration and we will
do that quickly and uh and I promise you we're
gonna get to this, uh, this other thing because there's
a new I guess you'd call it a new record
claimed by one of the manufacturers, and we do want
to get to that. But we'll do that after we
take a break for a word from our sponsor. And
(23:48):
we're back and you're listening to the Fast Track, and
I'm your host, Scott Benjamin, And just before the break,
we were talking about some of the best and worst
acceleration rates or speeds for cars in the in the world.
And you know, I want to start out with a
couple of cars here, the current production cars in the US,
and then we're gonna talk about some of the uh
the slowest cars in the world and some of the
slowest cars in the world. Has zero to sixty times UM.
(24:10):
If you're still paying attention to zero sixty times after
you know what we've just said here on this on
this podcast, you want to get the best vehicles that
are on the road right now in the US. You
want to look at a couple of cars that are
fairly expensive. There's the portion on eleven Carrera S, which
is around four point one seconds zero to sixty per hour,
and then the Corvette Stingray comes in next, the three
L T at four point three. There's a Jaguar, the
(24:33):
Camaro S S. There's the portion of seven eighteen Boxer,
which is the base vehicle, comes in at four point
four seconds. There's the Ford Mustang GT Premium, which comes
in at four point nine seconds. Then there's a bunch
of others here on this list. We're not gonna list
all of them. You can find these lists if you
want to at Consumer reports dot org and they're listed
under the best and worst car acceleration. I'm gonna give
(24:55):
you possibly a better site to had to go to
even than that one in just a because um there's
a site that is dedicated to nothing but zero to
sixty times if you want to go buy these numbers.
But on this list of best acceleration vehicles, we we
just kind of wrapped up with the Ford Mustang, and uh,
we'll mention here that there's also a Tesla, the Tesla
(25:17):
model excess on their Mercedes Benz, another Tesla BMW, couple
of them. Uh, there's a Nissan, there's a Maserati, of course,
Dodge Jaguar. There's a whole bunch here on this list.
And then they list the slowest vehicles, and I'm going
to tell you that the slowest cars in the list,
these are the current US production vehicles slowest times, and
so that the slowest one on the list is by
(25:40):
far not the slowest one ever to be recorded zero
to sixty, and I'll get to that in just a moment,
But the current slowest production vehicle zero to sixty in
the U S is the MITSUBC Mirage E S, which
comes in at twelve point one second zero to sixty,
and uh the Chevrolet Spark one LT which comes in
at twelve seconds, then the Fiat five hundred Sport, which
(26:01):
is funny that they call it the Fiat Sport at
eleven point three seconds, and then the Toyota Prius, the
Toyota c HR, then the Honda Kona, the Buke Encore
Leather Edition, Ford Focus s E, which is the one
leader engine, and then the Hyundai Tucson. All of those
are right around eleven seconds, you know, somewhere around eleven
point one, eleven point two three, you know, et cetera.
(26:22):
Up to the Mitsubishi Mirage, which comes in again at
twelve point one seconds. Now, those are the current US
production vehicles. And you know, one one quick thing that
I don't know if I mentioned this, you know, we
we said that zero to sixty might not be something
that you necessarily pay a whole lot of attention to.
But I can tell you one case where it probably
does matter to you, and it's one that a lot
(26:43):
of people find. It's a bad position a lot of
people find themselves in. You pull out into traffic. You know,
you're you're exiting the shopping mall, or you're exiting you know,
the grocery store or whatever, and you kind of misjudge
the traffic that's approaching from the nearest stoplight. You pull
out and you realize, hey, that traffic is moving a
lot faster than I thought was going to try to
accelerate and get you know, ahead of them or stay
ahead of them. Uh so you know, you know, you're
(27:04):
not making a burden of yourself there in the middle
of traffic, and you realize quickly that you know, everybody's overtaken.
You can't get that little car to go as fast
as you wanted it to go, or that big car
to go as fast as you wanted it to go.
And that's one situation I think where it pays to
have a car that accelerates kind of quick those situations
where you you need to for your own safety go
(27:24):
just a little bit faster or get up to speed quickly.
And uh and I found myself in that position many
many times. And uh, and that is kind of scary.
So maybe that's one thing that you do need to
consider when you're when you're thinking about a a quick
accelerating vehicle getting back to slow accelerating vehicles. And this
is I find this to be a funny list and
and this is the site that I want to tell
you about. The site is zero to sixty times dot com.
(27:48):
That's zero to sixty times and sixty is six zero
times dot com. And they do have they have several
lists here. I mean, you can search cars by make
model ranges. You know, cars that are in the two
second range, cars that are in the five second range.
You can search classics, hatchbacks, whatever you want. You can
break this down just about any way. Really, you can
browse by anything, manufacturer whatever you like. Uh. They have
(28:11):
current and vehicles that were are out of production. And
that's where this list comes in because this is the
slowest cars in the world. Zero to sixty specs of
the slowest cars in the world. Some of these are
kind of funny, um and some of them you would
absolutely expect. Now, I know, a lot of cars aren't
built for speed, and that's for the reason that they're
on this list. They're built for practicality. So a couple
(28:33):
of the cars here that are on this list, and
I'm gonna just mention one right now. It's not the slowest,
but the Tata Nano is one of the cars that
we've kind of made fun of in the past a
little bit on car stuff, but the car does have
its place in the world. There's a there's a purpose
for the Tata Nano, and the purpose was that it
was it was a vehicle that was at a very
very low price point. I think brand new vehicle was
(28:54):
something like you know, three thousand U S dollars whatever
that translates to UM in India. I can't remember exactly
the price point there, but it's a vehicle that was
created for people that normally would be driving or riding
on a motorcycle or a moped to work and to
school and around, you know, just around the city, and
it's very dangerous. Have you ever seen any of the
(29:15):
these uh intersections that are just chaotic and crowded, and
you know, you see three, four, sometimes five people on
a motorcycle and any know, I'm laughing a little bit,
but it's it's funny, it's humorous, but it's also exceedingly dangerous,
and a lot of people are injured or killed on
these every year. And this gets them into a vehicle
that you know, I don't know if any of them
(29:35):
have air conditioning or anything like that, I'm not sure,
but it gets them into a vehicle that has some
type of structure around them. There's a there's there's something
there to protect them in the event that, you know,
there's a collision. And if you do look at some
of these, you know, these crowded intersections UM and some
of these UH these developing nations, you'll find that, you know,
the traffic control system, if there is one even at all,
is definitely not what we have here in the United States,
(29:57):
and it's it's it's exceedingly poor and and there's a
lot lot of collissions that happened and it's it's very,
very dangerous situations. So the Tata Nano is a perfect
example of of you know, a vehicle that is on
this list not for speed necessarily, but because you know,
it was it had a purpose in mind. It was
built for a purpose. And some of the other cars
in this list are classics. They're they're older vehicles that
(30:17):
were just simply commuter cars. There were city cars again,
you know, one step above many or micro cars even
or even you know, maybe that's what they were. Many cars.
Really they weren't built for performance and or for getting
up to top speed. And sometimes sixty is the top
speed of these cars. That's another issue with some of them.
You know, I think the Tata Nano the top speed
is sixty two miles per hour. That's the very maximum
(30:39):
on them. In fact, the number one vehicle on the list,
that is the maximum speed. So I can understand why
it takes along to get there. I'm not gonna go
through the whole list, but we'll start down at number ten,
which is the night Fiat eight fifty in Romatic, which
goes zero to sixty and twenty five point four seconds. Now,
that's a long long time. If you were to start
(31:00):
a stop watch, you would realize just how long that
is to you know, to get out into traffic, Try
to accelerate, try to get up to speed with what
you know, the type of speed of traffic that we
see typically here in the modern day. Number nine on
the list is the fourteen Tata Nano Twist x T,
which which goes zero to sixty and twenty seven seconds. Um.
Then there's a couple more a couple more Tatas here
(31:22):
on the list, and then the nineteen fifty Triumph Mayflower
is another one that's on the list twenty seven point
nine seconds. So we're creeping up a little bit here,
but only up by one second as we get up
to the midpoint on the list, as the two thousand
nine Tata Nano, which goes zero to sixty and twenty
nine point four seconds. And then we go back to
nineteen fifty four for a Triumph of a model of
(31:42):
the Triumph called the Renown, and the Renown is pretty slow.
It's at at twenty nine point five seconds, but that
is not the slowest vehicle, and they do jump up
incrementally here, just very very small amounts. We're talking about
the nineteen fifty nine Austin Mini Cooper eight fifty m
K which goes zero to sixty and twenty nine point
six seconds. Then another triumpher noun model again twenty nine
(32:05):
point nine seconds. Another Triumph again, So the Triumph is
represented on this list many many times, as is Tata.
This is the Herald model, the Triumph Herald from nineteen sixty.
It's editions so less than a less than a leader
in this car, it's a little coupe model UM twenty
nine point nine seconds. But the number one vehicle on
this list, the slowest zero to sixty time according to
(32:27):
zero to sixty times dot com, is a car called
the Mia Electric Car. Now. It's an all electric vehicle.
It's a French made vehicle does zero to sixty and
exactly thirty seconds. Now, I have the MEA pulled up
here on a website and I'm looking at it right now.
It was produced between June of two thousand eleven and
December of two thousand thirteen, and it was built in France.
(32:49):
It's a three door hatchback and there was also a
van edition of this vehicle. And it's not a car
that was sold here in the United States. It was
a European market vehicle, and of course it's just a
commuter car. The top speed on this one is and
one hundred kilometers per hour, which is equivalent to sixty
two miles per hour. So that is the maximum speed
on this vehicle. It had a small battery is I
(33:10):
believe that, you know, the equivalent horsepower in this thing
was something like I want to I'm gonna ballpark this.
I think it was like around twelve horse power or
something like that. It's a very very low, low horsepower
vehicle to begin with. And of course horsepower is not
all that matters in this We're talking about torque and
all kinds of other things, and electric cars typically have
a lot of torque, which is surprising. But you know,
(33:30):
I guess maybe this one just had such a small
electric motor that it was unable to climb up to
that that maximum speed very quickly, as we see in
in some of the other higher performing electric vehicles that
we do see today, because there are several that are
that are you know, decent performers. Now it wasn't always
the case, but there are some now. But again, the
Mida Electric, I think they gave the two thousand twelve
model the lowest rating. You know, I think I have
(33:53):
just about no more really to say about zero to
sixty times at this point. And uh, you know, if
you find zero to sixties still am a measurement that
you want to go buy for buying your vehicle, you know,
please do. If you find that still interesting, please do.
And I still do look at it as kind of
a standard, and it's just one of those equal playing
fields that everybody can kind of look at and say like, okay,
I can I can see where one car relates to
another one or how it compares on again, an even
(34:15):
playing field. Somewhat, Um, maybe that even playing field isn't
quite as even as as we're thinking when I when
I tell you what I'm gonna tell you next, because
there is a new article that came out just recently
from Car and Driver, and there is um gosh, I
don't know the best way to put this. Maybe there's
a there's a new king in town and it is
the Ford Mustang Shelby GT. Five hundred, and this one
(34:37):
goes by a different measurement, and it's a measurement that
we don't hear an awful lot about, but it is
out there, and it's something that manufacturers used for selling vehicles.
It's a marketing tool, really, and uh it is impressive.
I mean it is and until you maybe parse this
out and figure out exactly what we're talking about here.
So we're talking about a standing start up to one
hundred miles per hour and then back to us standing
(34:58):
stop again. And there's a little bit of trickery that
goes on here. And uh, I want to tell you
that the Mustang Shelby GT five currently holds this record,
and Ford claims the number is ten point six seconds,
So zero one d to zero in ten points six seconds,
which is really really fast. I mean that's a that's
a quick quick speed. We were talking about, you know,
(35:20):
cars that could barely muster up to sixty in that time,
and to climb from sixty to one hundred and then
back to zero again that takes an awful lot more
time in a lot of cases. And if they can
even do it, really, this car goes on sale this
fall and it will begin somewhere around seventy four dollars,
So there's a seventy four m s r P on
this vehicle. And the thing is you have to look
(35:44):
at this number and again break it down into what
it really means. This has been done by several manufacturers before.
And here's how this this all works out. And I
didn't know this until I read this article. I thought
that they were doing a a true you know, standing
start accelerate up to hundred and then back down to zero.
That's not the way that this all plays out. The
way these magazines kind of put these numbers together is
(36:04):
a little bit deceptive, but they're accurate in a way.
And I'll tell you how this all happens. What they
do is they take a car from zero to one
hundred and they measure that speed. So let's say that
a car can go from zero to one hundred in
I'm going to take the Camaro S S one ll
E as an example here. Let's say it goes from
zero to one hundred and nine point one seconds. So
they get that speed, and that's easy to achieve, you know,
(36:25):
you just hammer the accelerator and you get to nine
point one second, sets zero one. Then they take another
separate test where they're already going one hundred miles per hour,
and then they break as hard as they can without
lock up. And for this car this Camaro S s
L E and one L E that I'm talking about
one hundred to zero the breaking speed in in time,
I guess I should say the time is three point
(36:48):
eight seconds. So they add together the nine point one
seconds and the three point eight seconds, and then they
get the estimated zero to one hundred zero speed of
twelve point nine seconds. So I think, I mean, everybody
can understand how this is all working out right, It's
not it's not zero to one D zero, it's it's
more like zero to one hundred. And then we'll start
a new test one D zero and then add the
(37:08):
two numbers together and that's what we get. And that's
how they measure all these and uh, that is something
that I just I had no idea that that's the
way they were doing. And I think there have been
cars in the past that have done this. Now, Carol
Shelby did it back in nive in the Shelby Cover
and you might be surprised to learn that the Cover
seven had a speed This is still quick at fourteen
(37:30):
point five seconds. But when you consider that the Ford
Mustang Shelby GT. Five hundred, the current vehicle that's gonna
be on sale this fall does it in ten points
six seconds. Uh, four teen point five sounds relatively slow.
I mean when you're talking about, you know, vehicles in
in this type of performance range. Other cars that do
it quickly are the Ford Mustang G T which has
(37:51):
the Performance Pack Level two. I don't know exactly what
that means, h third teen point two seconds. And then
of course there's the the Mustang Shelby GT three fifty
which does it and around twelve point six seconds. Other
cars that you know have done this. There there are
other vehicles, of course, you know, the corvettes always in
there somewhere. Of course, manufacturers do kind of play around
with these a little bit, as you can see, and
(38:11):
you know, they give you the best numbers. Obviously, of
course they want to turn in the best numbers, as
do you know some of the magazines that put out
these numbers that the testing is just a it's a
it's a little bit deceptive if you look at it
that way. And again I had no idea. So what
they're doing is they're extrapolating now how quickly the the Mustang,
the current Mustang we're talking about, the the Mustang Shelby GT. Five.
(38:31):
They're extrapolating that that one will be able to accelerate
in six points seven seconds. And that's based on what
they assume the breaking is going to be, and they
assume that it's going to be somewhere around three point
eight seconds because in this group, you know, in this
this this type of vehicle that we're talking about, you know,
the heavy end of this group, they're estimating that one
hundred zero times about I guess about three point nine seconds.
(38:53):
Then they subtract, you know, from the the ten points
six seconds, and you know, they get the number that
they think it's going to be. So and six point
seven seconds zero to one hundred is what they're estimating
to be the zero to one hundred times for this vehicle.
So again you look into this whole thing because there's
a lot of interesting ways that manufacturers play around with
the numbers and and make it kind of work for them.
And this is nothing new. Manufacturers has done this for
(39:14):
a long long time. Uh kind of played around with
the stuff and and kind of uh slant the test
to kind of go the way they want to, or
you know, gear the car so that it exceeds um
you know, certain parameters that they wanted to so they
can then have these bragging rights, you know, zero to
one hundred or zero to sixty or whatever it happens
to be. But definitely dig into that stuff if if
that type of thing is important to you, and you
(39:35):
can go to Car and Driver dot com or you know,
zero to sixty times dot com or any of those
sites that I've talked about. Digital Trends had some articles
on this. You can find zero sixty times zero one
hundred times for just about every vehicle out there. Really,
it's pretty easy to do. And you know, honestly, um,
I don't think I have a whole lot more to
say about this. Again, I hope you find it just
kind of a good starting point for your research and
(39:56):
you're you're delving into exactly, you know, what's important to
you when you're buying a new vehicle as far as
acceleration goes. And if you want to find us on Twitter,
we are the fast Track Pod, and on Facebook and
on Instagram we are the fast Track Show. And we
also have a brand new website that you can check
out and that it's called the fast Track Show dot com. Again,
(40:16):
the fast Track Show dot com. That's our new website,
and that's where we're gonna house all of our podcasts
from this point forward. So I know we're just beginning here,
and uh, we'll soon have kind of an archive of
material there for you to search back and you know,
check out some of the earlier episodes. Right now, we're
still early on and in this whole thing. Of course,
you can you know, leave reviews if you want to,
I mean, which I think is always nice to do. Um,
(40:37):
you know, good our badge. We will take it all.
We'd like to hear what you think. You can do
that on Apple Podcasts or on the I Heart Radio
Apple or wherever you happen to listen to your podcasts
and if you like what you're hearing, as particularly if
you like what you're hearing, and tell your friends all
about it, because you know, we'd like to gain some
new listeners. And thanks for listening. We really appreciate it,
and we'll see you next time.
The Fast Track News
Host
Scott Benjamin
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