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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

Weirdly the massive increase in car performance has led me not to care about car performance anymore. I've been driving for a long time and now everything is freaking fast (by 40+ year old standards).

Today you can buy literally any car on the market and have way more acceleration, power and top speed than you need day-to-day. Take a really cheap car like the crappy $16k Nissan Versa which has 122hp in the base model. Compare to a 1970's Porsche 911 (125hp). They both weigh about the same too if that's what your thinking - modern materials are light!

Unless you're towing it's not practical to care about car performance anymore. You have a car? You likely have more power to weight than a sports car from 50 years ago.

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We bought a Hyundai Ioniq 5 a few weeks ago. 330bhp, 0-60 in 4.5. If that’s what an EV grocery-getter gets me these days, I no longer care about performance, either, just like I don’t look at CPU clock speeds much anymore. I leave the thing in “eco” mode just so I don’t spin the treads off the tires (Hyundai really could use to mellow “normal” mode, IMO, and leave the neck-snapping for “sport”.)

But that’s what I love about modern cars versus the tuned-to-the-edge-of-reliability cars of old: I don’t have to put up with a stiff clutch and a lumpy camshaft for the 4% of the time I might actually use that performance. And I don’t make a bunch of noise doing it, either.

Agreed. Even my daily driver from the 80's would get along just fine in today's traffic. Acceleration hasn't been a problem since 1980 unless you were driving something by Wartburg or so.

Wrong. Most compact cars and midsized sedans from the 80s were downright awful. Sub 100 hp motors, with restrictive exhausts and poorly designed emissions systems. They were mostly garbage.

My family's Pontiac 6000 had a 2.5 liter 92 hp pile of hot garbage for an engine, and couldn't get out its own way.

Sub 100 hp is plenty for day to day traffic. 50 would be enough. A Pontiac is an overweight monstrosity, the fact that 92 HP isn't enough to move a personal car is proof positive of that.

There were plenty of anemic diesels in the 80s with 0-60 times over 20 seconds.

Highway merges, especially in PA (with many short merge zones) could be white knuckle affairs in those underpowered cars.

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