alt Hacker NewsWhy do car manufacturers brag about hitting 60 mph in 1, 2 or whatever seconds? For a normal person, does this really matter - what is the big deal if a car hits 60 mph in 5 seconds instead of 1? There are more important things like safety, repairability, longevity etc right?
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It’s standard measure of acceleration. If you are going to sell a car on performance (like say… a sporty roadster), it’s a great metric.
People in the market for a car like this care far more about performance than they do safety, repairability or longevity.
That’s why performance oriented cars talk about their acceleration, and minivans talk about safety, and pickup trucks talk about longevity. Their target market determines which of the various metrics are going to be the headline.
It's just one stat and it makes for a good headline. Obviously those other things are important but they don't exactly fit into a headline. Oh and some people like fast cars. Why is that so confusing?
For the Roadster, it's a supercar. None of those things matter much.
For something like the performance versions of their high-volume vehicles, it's partially for the same reasons people like sports cars, or at least how some people like a sports car that is faster / quicker and gives them more excitement while driving (obviously a lot of the appeal for sports cars otherwise is the sporty look/sound of the engine, which Tesla doesn't really deliver on at all).
People are interested in speed performance. What other measure should we use?
You answered your own question in your very second sentence. “For a normal person”. The modern economy increasingly does not cater to the “normal person” and they prove this constantly. Granted “normal people” stopped existing a long time ago. You have poor people, soon to be poor people, and people who think they will soon be rich but will really soon be poor. Of course then you have the rest but they are not people.
Not to mention top speed. The US should have a federal or at least NY/CA state law that modern cars be electronically limited to 112 mph, as it is in Japan. There is no valid reason for a street legal passenger car to be travelling faster than that.
Speaking for myself I love the quick acceleration of electric cars because it enables you to safely pass other cars quickly on two-lane roads without needing to linger in the oncoming lane.
This is a sports car with a deposit that costs more than an ordinary new car, and with a price that would probably buy you a decent house. Nothing about this is meant for a normal person.
The more powerful the motor, the better the brakes and safety features.
I hope.
It matters a lot, when playing Top Trumps [1].
It's one thing they can brag about, you know. Dumbing everything down to a single number, regardless of whether it's meaningful, feels impressive.
The vast majority of LLM users -- not the average person here on HN -- doesn't know which "model" they are using, can't tell the difference and don't care, including many software engineers. You could ask the same thing about those LLM benchmarks.
Even assuming it’s real and they genuinely are working on selling these to consumers (they aren’t), why on earth would you think this is built for the average person? At the absolute cheapest this car would be $5M off the lot. It’s for the ultra rich (assuming they ship, which they won’t) who want to drive it one day a year on the track