I was watching an episode of Pawn Stars last night. They had an opportunity to buy a Lamborghini that could go just over 200 mph (they passed on the deal). However, they made a comment about how extremely difficult it is to build a car that can top the 200 mph barrier. Why is that? It seems almost like the sound barrier for planes.
Almost any modern car can go well over 100 mph even without a big engine or sleek aerodynamics. A rather common and fairly inexpensive sports car like a Ford Mustang can easily go in the 140 - 150 mph range if it the speed limiter is disabled and other non-exotic cars can top that a little especially if they have straightforward, off the shelf modifications.
However, it seems like you hit a severe wall over 160 mph and then you get into the range where the cost increases almost exponentially. Most cars that can tease out that last 40 - 50 mph speed improvement cost in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
I can’t see an obvious reason for that. Air resistance is a large factor but many small planes can top the 200 mph mark without giant engines. Tires are another factor but 747’s can land and takeoff going most of that speed and they weigh close to a million pounds. I have even seen a jet assisted tractor trailer cab that hit 300 mph in a straight line and they aren’t known for their fine handling.
What is about cars that makes the 200 mph mark so insanely difficult to achieve in a street legal vehicle? Please note, I am not interested in the practical or moral aspects, just the engineering challenges.
Well where is the demand for 200 mph cars coming from? You can’t drive it that fast anywhere except the german autobahn and even then you can only hit that speed for brief periods due to the other traffic. Most tracks wouldn’t have a straight long enough for you to get to 200 mph.
One relevant factor is that power requirements in order to overcome drag increase with the cube of speed. If you double your speed, each unit of air that the car displaces is pushed aside at twice the speed, which requires four times the kinetic energy, and you’re displacing twice as many of them since you’re covering twice the distance per second.
So, making a car that can go 200 mph requires 8 times as much power as making it go 100 mph. Going from 150 to 200 requires 2.37 times the power.
So it’s clear technology is up to it. There’s just the questionable potential market. It took nearly 20 years to up the speed of a standard battleship from 20 to 30 knots.
Well, as Bill Cosby would tell you, you’d have to make sure you get the gunk out of it before you can go 200 mph. Driving fast up any side street should do the trick.
These are all very good answers so far. It looks like it can be done fairly inexpensively with the Shelby as an example. However, I wonder why the 200 mph mark was such an elusive target to begin with. I know there isn’t a large market for people that actually drive 200 mph but there is one for people that can honestly say their car can go that fast if they want to. Why was that such an elusive goal to begin with?
In other words, why can’t you just build a decent sports car, slap on a huge engine and put on some good tires and achieve that goal easily? Until recently, buying anything that could do that cost more than most houses do for only a 40 - 50 mph speed gain over more mundane sports cars. Those last few percentage points in speed gain took a lot of research and work to make it happen. I am still not sure what the huge difference is between 160 mph and 202 mph.
You can, take any $50,000 sports car like a Supra and spend $20,000 on some after market tuning and you can make it go 200 mph. It just uncommon for any manufacturers other than the exotic sports car market to bother to sell a production model car that can go that fast.
The technological challenge hasn’t been the speed, but a car that can do it that’s drivable for a dentist with a couple of track days under his belt, and still has all the creature comforts, reliability, and safety features of a Toyota. And as the Paul Walker incident shows, it’s very tricky making cars that fast that even talented people can survive owning - Enzo and Carrera GT accidents/fatalities have been numerous since those cars hit the sales floor, both on public roads and tracks. The pool of drivers that can afford cars that fast is small - the subset of drivers in that group that can handle such speeds is miniscule.
Keep in mind that the extra energy thirdname speaks of is being applied to the car, not just the road. If you take a car designed to go 150 mph and apply enough engine power to it to make it go 200 mph, some part built with a 50% margin for error may fail when you apply 237% more power to it than it was made to handle.
I think the main reason, as other have noted, is that so few manufacturers thought it worth shooting at. For a very large increment in cost and risk, you get a very small increment in real-world utility.
I don’t think it difficult at all. The issues are cost (not enough buyers) and to whom you would sell it (99.9% of the people on the road would kill themselves or others). On the engineering side of the ledger there would be an issue w/regard to ride height. It would be much to low to the ground for use on the street.
Also, you may find that it has negative effects on the fire extinguisher, your Italian racing shoes, and your starched scarf. And sadly, George Wallace is no longer available to take delivery of it.
Yeah, it’s not that hard. You do your R&D just like any other model of car, and you achieve your objectives.
The challenge then is to sell enough units to pay for the R&D and tooling costs, which are at least as massive as those associated with any other model of car. If you sell a lot of one model, each one only has to cover a small slice of the associated R&D/tooling costs. Honda’s 8th-generation Civic (2005-2011 model years) sold 1.5 million units. OTOH, the Bugatti Veyron capable of 254 MPH, has some unusual features that account for probably greater-than-average R&D costs. However, the bigger factor in its $1M+ price tag is probably the fact that it has sold just 357 units in the past nine years.
Why so few? Well, how many households want a two-seater with no trunk space, uncomfortable seats, and an uncomfortably firm ride that gets 14 MPG on the highway? At any price? Even if it costs as little as the humble Civic? You have groceries to get and kids to haul to/from swim practice. You can’t afford the Civic and a “fun” car, so you stick with just the Civic. That describes the vast majority of households.
There might be an engineering issue. Wiki on Formula One Racing: A wide variety of technologies—including active suspension, ground effect, and turbochargers—are banned under the current regulations. Despite this the current generation of cars can reach speeds up to 350 km/h (220 mph) at some circuits.[82] The highest straight line speed recorded during a Grand Prix was 369.9 km/h (229.8 mph), set by Antônio Pizzonia during the 2004 Italian Grand Prix.[83] A Honda Formula One car, running with minimum downforce on a runway in the Mojave desert achieved a top speed of 415 km/h (258 mph) in 2006. The speed of sound is about 767 mph. In drag races (typically done over a 1/4 mile straightaway) the cars go up to 329mph. 220 < 329 < 767: there appear to be some factors other than R&D or economics that limit car speed. They might involve driver control, power requirements or material science. But car racing is a fairly popular sport, so I’d guess that if it was straightforward to make a 400mph car, then they would appear.
Budgets: The total spending of all eleven teams in 2006 was estimated at $2.9 billion US. This was broken down as follows: Toyota $418.5 million, Ferrari $406.5 m, McLaren $402 m, Honda $380.5 m, BMW Sauber $355 m, Renault $324 m, Red Bull $252 m, Williams $195.5 m, Midland F1/Spyker-MF1 $120 m, Toro Rosso $75 m, and Super Aguri $57 million.
I don’t know anything about this subject, btw: corrections are welcome, invited even.
You may not think it, but tires are a huge factor. I watched a National Geographic’s Man Made special about the Bugatti Veyron. For those who don’t know, it’s a $1.5m supercar with a quad-turbo W16 (basically 2 V8s side by side) making 1001 bhp. Its top speed is listed by Guinness WR as 258mph. The tires are designed from the ground up specifically for this car. However, its gas tank is limited to a size that will only allow a driver twelve minutes at top speed - because, according to Bugatti, after 15 minutes at top speed the tires will melt.
The Veyron’s tyres can only be changed at two places in the world - for all intents and purposes they are AIRPLANE tyres fitted to a car.
So that’s big factor.
I’m not an engineer, but to me there’s two factors at play in the concept of 200 mph “barrier”
The first is that it’s a nice round number, so symbolic as much as anything else.
Secondly, it’s the issue of driveability - while the car might have the power to reach 200 mph, can it be controlled, what about downforce? Can the brakes and tryes handle it?
For what it’s worth, a Lamborghini is typically fitted with Pirelli P-Zero tyres, speaking from memory they sell for around $800 per piece in Singapore ($500ish USD). So there must be some serious tech in them.
Disclaimer: I know very little about car, personally.
There was a “what if?” xkcd blog post that answered the question, “How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live?”. Blogger Randall Munroe also posited the question, “How fast would you have to drive to definitely die?”
This is relevant to the discussion in that Munroe mentions that among NASCAR fans, there’s frequently talk of a 200-mph “liftoff speed” if a car starts to spin. And a typical sedan (I know, Lambourghinis hardly qualify) would lift off the ground, tumble and crash before even reaching the speed bump.
Bottom line: Even speeds of 90 mph are dangerous and irresponsible, IMHO. 200 mph, even professional drivers are putting themselves at extreme risk.