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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Unless you live in Germany you're not really ever going to hit that top speed. You will however have ample chance to take advantage of the acceleration.

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Raced a Porsche Cayenne Turbo on the 101N in Palo Alto, kept up till around 140mph, at which point my transmission ran out of gearing and he kept going. I was impressed.

Sure you can, just take it to a track day at local race track.

Sure, but I start my car from a standstill many times a day. I take my car to a test track -- once every five years?

Do you accelerate at 100% each time though? I dont think I ever floor my car "off the line", I think I only use maximum power to go from 60-80 on the motorway.

Not all the time but sometimes for fun. I would do it a lot more in an electric because the "gas" is "free" (assuming it is charged with solar). At least it is something I can legally do, as opposed to going 155mph.

Oddly enough accelerating like that isn't always "legal". Where I'm from it could be classed as dangerous driving, and I believe in the USA it could fall under "Exhibition of Speed".

By and large it is more efficient to accelerate at full power, assuming your goal is to reach a certain top speed regardless, so if you were _really_ concerned about conserving petrol then you should be going full blast off the line. That said I expect the fuel usage such a situation to be negligible anyway, especially to someone who can afford/justify a car that does it in 4 seconds.

My car isn't that fast, or particularly economical, but I know I've never thought "I'd love to accelerate at full power here to show how fast my car is, but I just can't justify the pennies it will cost me"! Outside of hyper-milers I wonder how many people do actually think about it.

Huh, I just looked up my state's statute on this and it contained verbiage like "Includes, but not limited to". How the heck can they get away with defining a law so vaguely? I guess I wrongly assumed that a law had to actually define what it was making illegal.

i wouldn't be bringing a 2.5 ton car onto a track, but i also can't afford it, so my opinion probably doesn't matter anyway.

The above poster is drawing a distinction between faster (top speed) and quicker (acceleration). Auto-journalism usually uses this language. In everyday speech, "faster" is ambiguous.

The origina posted qualified it with 0-60, which lets you know he means acceleration. A car can't have a "faster" 60mph than another.

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