I speak of the commercial where the sun is setting, the guy slams on the accelerator, stops, and watches the sunset again.
I know that even a plane flying westward cannot keep up with the setting sun; ergo the commercial is bulldung. But how fast would you have to be traveling westwards to keep the sun just above the horizon? Since I assume your latitude affects this calculation (since things near the poles get wacky), so lets assume I’m over the equator.
The earth rotates at about 1,000 mph. That must be one fast car.
But if you were at the poles…
You would not have to go quite so fast.
At any rate, why do you care?
It’s a freaking commerical.
It’s a freaking curiousity.
I remember reading that the SR-71 Blackbird used to outrace the sun fairly regularly, during flights from Nevada. So mach 3 is more than enough to do it, I guess.
In the Book “Skunk Works” by Ben Rich, he mentions that one SR-71 pilot once saw three sunrises over the course of a single mission. The Blackbird can hit some 2,045 MPH, though altitude does, of course, have something to do with it. 
Who cares if it’s just a commercial. The question and it’s underlying curiosity were valid.
I mean hey, you’re not going to next try and calculate the muzzle velocity that new Dorito nacho chip was travelling when it knocked that babe on her keister? Why didn’t it fracture her skull? At least cause a bruise, and not just a Dorito-orange smear? Do you think that kid can actually throw a 3-D Dorito against a fire hydrant hard enough to make it bounce back into his mouth?
New Nacho-Cheese SuperBalls!
But I digress.
Doc.
Jeez, I’m just wondering how Taco Bell found a talking dog…
Two race horses were chatting in a bar. One says, “It was incredible! The bell rang, the gate opened, and I felt a jolt of electricity run through my body. Before I knew it, I won the race!”
The other horse said, “Hey, the same thing happened to me in my race! The bell rang, the gate opened, and I felt a jolt of electricity run through my body. Before I knew it, I’d won!”
A dog that was passing by overhears the conversation and says, “Hey! They same thing happened to me!”
One horse looks at the other in surprise and says, “Can you believe it? A talking dog!”
I think the bigger problem with the commercial (and most car commercials) is that it glorifies driving really fast.
BAN NASCAR!!!
I see the sun set twice most evenings. I work in a valley. The sun sets over the western hill as I’m on my way home, then I drive up and over the hill, and, hey, there’s the sun again. Don’t even have to drive real fast.
That’s it! He’s just driving over a series of long, gently-sloping hills! Problem solved. Go back to work. 
is that you in the fast lane doing 25mph ?!?
At the Equator, the Earth rotates at about 1000 miles per hour (damn English units). At the poles, that velocity is zero. So you need to remember that the velocity you would travel has a latitude dependence, specifically, the cosine of the latitude. So the velocity you need to go is 1000 x cos(latitude) miles per hour.
At the equator, lat = 0, cos(0)=1 so you need to go 1000 mph. At the poles, lat = 90 (or -90) and cos(90) = 0, so you don’t need to move at all. At 45 degrees latitude (close enough to where I am) cos(45) = 0.7 or so, so you’d need to go 700 mph.
Hmmm… at least. You’d have to go faster than this to actually outrace the Sun.
Try this: the next time you are at a beach, or other very flat place, crouch down to watch the sunset. At the exact moment (as near as you can) the Sun’s upper bit disappears, jump up. You’ll see it again for a split second. It’s pretty cool, though it doesn’t look cool to watchers nearby. Don’t try to pick up someone this way.
I’m going to be more shameless about metric measurements, since the earth’s circumference is easier to remember that way:
The earth’s circumference is 40,000 km, give or take a couple km. A day lasts 24 hours, so you must travel 1,667 km/hr to keep up with the sun. As the Bad Astronomer said, multiply by cos(latitude) to get the speed at your location.
Assume a top speed of 200 km/hr for your vehicle. Solving for latitude gives ( arccos (200/1667) = ) 83 degrees.
Using the above circumference, this is about 760 km, or 470 miles from the pole. I’d recommend you do this in Antarctica, if anywhere. Or the moon, where you’d only have to travel about 10 mph to catch the sun.
I realize now that the above latitude may only work on the equinoxes, if you’re chasing sunsets.
As for myself, I’ve seen three sunrises in one day from a car – and I was traveling east as well. The first was at 8000 ft., then another after descending several thousand feet, then yet another one after we’d headed southeast and a peak had obscured the sun.
well this doesn’t answer the question, but I think it’s been answered already. I just wanted to say that I love that commercial, it’s really cool