I don’t have any direct experience with exotics, but I can tell you about a couple of relevant terms of art in automotive engineering:
BSR = Buzz, Squeak, and Rattle. When you’re driving down the road and something behind the dashboard or door panel is creaking or rattling, you’re experiencing BSR.
NVH = Noise, Vibration, and Harshness. If the ride seems rough, or engine/road vibration seems to make your seat or the steering wheel vibrate in a physically unpleasant manner at certain speeds or engine RPMs, that’s NVH.
If you’re going to sell 350,000 Honda Accords this year at $30K each, your engineers can afford to spend a LOT of money engineering in good BSR/NVH characteristics. And if you’re only modifying the previous generation’s chassis a little bit, then you’ve already got a head-start.
OTOH, if you’re only going to sell 4000 Lamborghini Murcielagos in total at $400,000 each, you can’t afford to do nearly as much R&D to get rid of BSR/NVH. Or get the same quality of fit/finish in the mass-produced parts of the car. Instead, the money goes into engineering and low-volume production of the performance parts of the car (i.e. the drivetrain/suspension), and into the hand craftsmanship that goes into putting the whole car together.
“When you pull up to the curb in your Countach and get out, it’s like walking down Fifth Avenue with Pia Zadora wearing five yards of Saran Wrap. No one is going to be looking at you, exactly, but they will be wondering just what kind of bad boy you are.”
CandD was such damn fine writing in its day, before the aging boy racer schtick got the better of them.
It depends how you define “exotic.” Porsche sells more cars every year than Ferrari has in its entire existence (and did even before Porsche expanded into the SUV and executive saloon niches). But most people would still tell you that Porsches are exotic cars.
Ferraris, for the most part, are highly stressed, highly tuned vehicles built to be very, very exciting for a very short time. They simply don’t build enough cars to have high production values. The fit and finish of their interiors is usually impeccable, but when they still made cars in sheet metal the panel gaps were usually miles off. That’s not a knock on Ferrari, just the reality of small-volume manufacturing, especially hand-building. Not incidentally, Ferraris break down a lot, whereas a Porsche will reliably start every morning.*
Now that supercar chassis are mostly built by outside vendors that specialize in carbonfiber, build quality for even small volumes has improved. Engines, not so much.
*My dad had an early model 944 Turbo which already had 240,000 miles on it when he bought it. We could never figure out how anyone did 240,000 miles in seven years in the UK. He kept it for five years and 50,000 additional miles, and sold it for more than he’d originally paid.
I think it still is, if you shut off the computerized stability control stuff. But with it turned on, not as much anymore.
Anyway there’s always a continuous hierarchy of ‘you can get almost all that for less’ going from super cars to quasi super cars (absolute top of the 911 line definitely challenges ‘entry level’ Lambo now, though isn’t that much cheaper), to top Corvette (which is a pretty good value no doubt) down to Subaru BRZ/Toyota FRS. And especially when people compare after market tuning up of the cheaper alternative to stock for the more expensive step up the ladder, as they often do.
There aren’t AFAIK stats for the reliability of high end sports cars, assuming you consider stats like Consumer Reports’ valid for regular cars. There’s just anecdote. But from what I’ve heard and gathered the higher end cars of the ‘mass’ luxury/sport brands aren’t as reliable as their more truly mass produced cars either. Like BMW M’s v regular ones. Some of the same factors that affect small production companies apply when they substitute racing optimized parts and hand fitting, even though under the umbrella of a relatively large production company.
My ‘tuned up’ BMW 328i can go faster than I have any business going in almost all public road situations and is comfortable and quiet, deals with rough pavement relatively well (though not as pillowly as other cars), the particular model has a pretty good reliability record per CR and my experience has been good. But I know, a Mazda 3 is virtually just as good, for less!
No, the original Turbo was terrifying because Porsche had still not solved the lift-throttle oversteer problem, nor quite balanced the chassis for that much horsepower.
Nearly all supercars have extensive stability and braking control systems now. It helps the actors and drug dealers to get home alive from the dealership.
(Somewhere out there is a page of totaled Enzos, titled “Can’t Anyone Drive This Car?”)
Hyperbole to illustrate the idea that most drivers of exotics never come close to utilizing the full performance of their monster. Personally, I lose my nerve around 160 - anything going faster than that is wasted on me. That doesn’t stop me from wanting a P1, even if I could ever come up with that scratch.
Yes actually, the basic configuration of having the engine so far to the rear makes that car tricky still if you turn off the electronics. That’s what ‘solved’ the problem. But you can turn them off and it comes right back! If you go to Porsche driving school it’s one of the things they try to teach you, handling the car at its limits on a deliberately wetted slippery surface with the electronics turned off. It’s still very difficult.
Car and Driver has a digital version of its Countach review online.
I was reading a supercar review a while back—i think it was for the latest McLaren—and the writer observed that he would actually find such a car incredibly annoying to own, because every moment that you drive it on public roads, you are acutely conscious of just how overpowered and overengineered it is for regular driving, and just how little of its performance you can use. He essentially described it as an exercise in frustration.
While there are more rich people than ever willing to shell out high six and even seven figures for supercars and hypercars, technology has brought real speed and handling well down the economic ladder. A bog-standard V6 Toyota Camry now gets to 60mph faster than Magnum P.I.'s Ferrari 308 GTS, and will also beat the 308 through a slalom. The same sort of money will get you a hot hatch like a VW Golf GTi or a Ford Focus ST, or maybe a Subaru WRX, which are even faster and more fun to drive.
If you’ve got about 50 grand to spend, you can get something like a BMW M240i, which will get to 60 about than a second quicker than the Countach 5000S, will do a standing quarter in under 13 seconds, and will do it in climate-controlled, GPS-directed, fake-exhaust-noise-piped comfort and style. For M240i money, you can also get a used version what is probably one of the best, usable sports cars available: the Porsche Cayman/Boxster family, which is fast but not insane, and apparently absolute perfection on a winding country road.
Yup. I remember those times fondly. I have the bad habit of buying old car or motorcycle magazines when I see them in junk shops and the like simply for the thrill of reading the articles from my youth and thinking about them from my current perspective.
And yeah, even though the the Countach looks still looks wilder, I like knowing that my current car’s performance specs beat the Lamborghini’s like a gong.
The Nissan Murano family wagon will destroy any 1960s V8 muscle car in acceleration, top speed, braking, and cornering. With all 17 cup holders full of big gulps and all 5 kids watching their own TV. While getting 2x the gas mileage.
Yep, similarly the Nissan GT-R is a supercar by performance standards, and it’s $109,000 US (considerably less in Japan). It’s also well made and has a reputation for being reliable. Those who are paying $200K and up for a Ferrari, Maserati or Lamborghini are paying mostly for the bragging rights, exclusivity and badge. I’d argue that the fit and finish and overall quality of any of these exotics is probably less than the Nissan GT-R. So engineering for high speeds and performance is really not the issue.
My neighbor in China had a Lamborghini of some type, and as were most of the people in my neighborhood, he was Chinese. Sometimes he covered the car, but he never kept it in his garage, and most of the time it sat out in the elements. On the occasions we would leave for work at a similar time, I always thought it was funny that he was creeping along a 50 km/h where the speed limit was 80 km/h. He was just a typical, unexperienced, timid Chinese driver, but with money for a status symbol.
I would never have asked to take it for a drive, though. Those things are made for tiny little Italian people, or tiny little Chinese. I’m not sure how Northern European stock like me could ever manage to fit into one.
The GT-R is mostly handbuilt, so fit and finish are mostly worse than a mainstream Nissan vehicle (other than the suspension, which is built to amusingly silly tolerances). Nissan isn’t even sure how much power each vehicle’s engine produces, because that’s what happens when things are handbuilt.
or put it this way: A 2.3 liter 4-cylinder mustang you can get from the factory right now is faster 0-60 and almost as fast in the 1/4 mile as the “legendary” 7.0 liter Boss 429 Mustang from 1969.
Frankly I have always found Lamborghini to be the most overrated car ever. My Honda Civic can beat it to the next major metro area from mine, about 400 miles. Damn thing runs out of gas at 200 miles and to get 400 to a tank, you have to drive at about 30mph.
I love fast cars and super cars generally, but the Lamborghini is fast and high acceleration and nothing else besides.
Probably, but again people make that same argument all the way down the spectrum, and also with some validity. Eg. I’m (supposedly, I’ve often heard or read it if not personally directed at me) partly paying for bragging rights, exclusivity and badge to have a BMW 3 rather than a Mazda 3. Less bragging rights and exclusivity obviously than a Lambo, and also the objective return in terms of extra performance per $ for $200k+ cars is obviously less. But the general idea is still similar.
It seems like this discussion is centered somewhere around 60-ish to 100-ish (BMW M240i or the Nissan car) as being reasonable in an all search for performance but $200k+ is not. Other people view ~$46k cars like mine as just vanity projects. To some people $200k isn’t much money. To other people $46k is a huge amount of money. In some cases you can absolutely nail down that a cheaper car is objectively as good or better from any perspective other than vanity. But typically it’s ‘very little gain for the extra money’ which is subjective for any given individual even if there’s a consensus.
Again to me it’s having one car which is practical for all purposes (I have to pay for a parking space and just don’t see paying for more than one) and a good balance, just for me personally between performance and frustration in being able to use too little of the car’s performance reasonably legally/safely too much of the time. At first I decided stock was a little low. Then I got the Dinan Stage 1 tuner (raised 328i to 312hp), and now just right. An M240i would be a bit off that optimum for me, a little less practical (two door, reliability of ‘M’ badges more questionable I’ve gathered), a little more frustration.
Go check some forums for the reliability of the Nissan GT-R versus an exotic italian car. Yes some of the GT-R is handbuilt, but it’s still much more reliable than most italian exotics.
Nearly all of that is poor tire hookup from 1970-era tires. While the musclecars are dreamily overrated in some ways and modern cars are in a true golden age, putting decent rear tires on the oldsters can clip several seconds from their quarter times.
And I had a 2.3L Mustang that could barely get out of its own way, and fail at that on a modest uphill grade.
