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America's Cars Are Suddenly Getting Faster and More Efficient (bloomberg.com)
Kyle Stock and David Ingold, writing for Bloomberg: Sometime in the next couple of months, the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon and its 808 horsepower will show up in dealership windows like some kind of tiny, red, tire-melting factory. Yes, 808 horsepower. There's no typo. Last year, U.S. drivers on the hunt for more than 600 horsepower had 18 models to choose from, including a Cadillac sedan that looks more swanky than angry. Meanwhile, even boring commuter sedans are posting power specifications that would have been unheard of during the Ford Administration. The horses in the auto industry are running free. We crunched four decades of data from the Environmental Protection Agency's emission tests and arrived at a simple conclusion: All of the cars these days are fast and furious -- even the trucks. If a 1976 driver were to somehow get his hands on a car from 2017, he'd be at grave risk of whiplash. Since those days, horsepower in the U.S. has almost doubled, with the median model climbing from 145 to 283 stallions. Not surprisingly, the entire U.S. fleet grew more game for a drag-race: The median time it took for a vehicle to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour was halved, from almost 14 seconds to seven.
Essentially you can either use the same improvements to make the cars more efficient in terms of gas usage or you can make them have more total horsepower. Unfortunately, many of the people buying cars prefer the second, so this is what we end up with. The long-term results of this are going to be not at all good.
The idiots that hoon these things on normal roads provide one of the strongest possible arguments for a hard push for fully automated driving. Nobody (probably) wants a 4500 lb car rammed up their butt because someone wants to have fun. Take it to the track.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I never understood this fascination with having stuff you can't use to its fullest extent.
It's like spending thousands of dollars on a water cooled over clocked triple GPU computer so you can check your email and play minesweeper.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
I like the "more efficient" part. I'm driving a car that routinely gets over 40 miles per gallon. Back in the '70s I drove an old (60s vintage) Volkswagen Beetle that used to impress people with its great gas mileage: 26 miles per gallon. What I drive now is bigger, more comfortable, safer, faster, and in short better in every possible way, and still gets almost twice the mileage.
For cars manufactured prior to 1972, you have to adjust for the gross (bhp) versus net horsepower disparity. That alone can create a 20% difference.
Great. Muscle cars are back, and they're high-tech. Meanwhile, we haven't been educatiing, training, or testing drivers properly for at least 20 or 30 years, which means we have an entire generation on the roads who really aren't competent, which has sparked an entire legion of idiots who claim that 'humans aren't capable of operating a motor vehicle competently, therefore we need to ban them from driving and have self-driving cars instead!' which of course is nonsensical bullshit. So we'll have under-educated, under-trained, inadequately-tested drivers behind the wheel of vehicles as powerful as a goddamned Formula-1 racecar, who will wrap it around trees and telephone poles and kill more people, which will just strengthen the strawman argument in favor of taking away everyones' driving privilege and making us risk our lives riding in shitty so-called 'self driving cars' that are not anywhere NEAR up to the task.
Bull-fucking-SHIT.
What we REALLY need is reforms in driver education and trianing (read as: fund highschool driver-ed and driver-training programs again!) and reforms in how the DMV tests new drivers.
Oh and while we're at it: Educate and train new drivers to recognize and properly, safely deal with cyclists on public roads. There should never ever again be an excuse of "I didn't see him" when someone hits a cyclist.
Most of the early good big block TAs (watch for the ones with Oldsmobile engines, stay away) had two speeds and 2.83 rears. Monster torque geared to go over 150 made them just torque through DOT tires even at that gearing. Just put a 4.11 in the back and drag racing tires and you are good to go to the quarter mile. If you build the motor, you will have to also tub the back for big old tires. It's not a very popular choice to make into a drag car.
They are fat pigs. Wallow. Had one, don't really miss it. Hate to say it, but the Mustang is much smaller and somewhat lighter, even though it's a convertible. Motor was much weaker, but I 'fixed' that. 'Weak motor' is much easier to fix than 'fat pig'. I debadged it, but the 'blue oval of shame' is still there.
Get a box Nova and put a rat in that. Pontiac race parts are expensive and rare, so are box Novas. Use a Eurotrash car and put a tubular frame in it...e.g. Fiat 850 sport w. V8, my current proj, Chevy parts are still cheap and easy. If you're going to go good and fast, you're going to want the cage and restraints anyhow, make sure it's built to NHRA/IHRA spec for your target ET. Should be the same, double check with your local tracks tech inspectors before spending $. Rules could be changing, they know, ask them. Don't buy the restraint belts until the last minute, they expire and are expensive.
If you're small enough to fit, it's hard to beat a miata these days. Put a stock 5.0 ford pushrod motor and trans in it and you're good to go. You can't build that motor at all or it will explode the Mazda IRS...traction is an issue.
For street fun, get a Civic with a b-engine, if you can find one that isn't riced to hell and back, you want the sleeper. They aren't _that_ fast, but they are excellent for pissing off morons who spend way too much for dealer tuners. The demon would blow any Civic off the road, except the kind of people that buy it, won't know how to drive. Even with all the modern helpers, 808 ponies is going to be on the ragged edge of 'streetable'. No fun, at all, in traffic. I'd trailer it to the drag strip and install a cage before my first angry pass.
If I wanted a 808 HP challenger, I'd buy one with the right block and build the power myself.
Dealer tuners typically cost about (Base Cose + 5 * (RacePartsCost + ProInstallCost)), they only make any sense as collectables. Which, more or less, means they shouldn't be driven, beyond a few miles/month to keep the seals wet. Installing the cage would be a mistake. I'd buy the worn out 10 year old car with the right engine.
The old rule of thumb was: For popular motors, expect to spend about $1000/HP beyond 400 (obvious 'valid range' issues), if you want to be at the strip regularly. Pick your race class and bracket carefully or you will be broke with a garage full of parts but no running racecar. You will blow things up, it will suck. Using that math, buying the Demon can be a very expensive decision, but a numbers matching one will be worth a fortune in 40 years. Pulling the factory engine and setting it aside, would be the good move, if you're going to run it hard.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'