Cars, Engineering and Other Ramblings: You Will Never Quote 0-60 Times Again

Zero to sixty times are a terrible way of comparing performance. If you are already convinced that 0-60 mile-per-hour times, from herein referred to as 0-60, are not a good benchmark for automotive performance - thank you and move along. If you are a stat-junky who lives and breathes 0-60 times, this article is for you.

False Advice? "It's not how you stand by your car, it's how you race your car"

So why are 0-60 times a nonsensical way to compare performance? They simply do not tell you enough and can be misleading. For the sake of argument, assume two cars have identical 5-second 0-60 times; one of these cars can still be further ahead by the time it reaches 60 miles-per-hour. How is that possible, you ask? Let's turn to Calculus for an answer.

Calculus put men on the moon, pay attention.

Calculus tells us that the derivative of position is velocity, and the derivative of velocity (speed) is acceleration. Okay, so what does this mean in practice? If you have a graph of a car's speed versus time, the area under the curve (anti-derivative or integral) is the distance the car has traveled in that time. So let's say that Paul Walker is the blue line (see graph below) with his all-wheel-drive Eclipse GSX and Vin Diesel is the green line in his rear-wheel-drive RX-7. Walker and Diesel line it up and race to the next stop light, and in the process they both happen to hit 60 miles-per-hour in exactly 5 seconds, but Paul Walker is ahead. How?

Speed vs. Time to 60mph: Blue is Walker, Green is Vin Diesel

This phenomenon occurs because Paul Walker's AWD Eclipse initially gripped and accelerated faster (see the blue line again) and covered a lot of ground, acceleration then fell short and the car's speed over time did not increase as rapidly as 'ol Vin Diesel's RX-7 (green line). Vin's rear-wheel-drive RX-7 struggled for traction off the line, but once rolling it's superior power-to-weight ratio became the driving factor. As a result, the Eclipse covered more ground than the RX-7 and made it to the next stop light first, even though both cars had identical 0-60 times.

Whether you win by an inch or a mile - Winning is winning.

Why be concerned with who covered more ground in the same amount of time? Because that is how racing works. No racer or sanctioning body (IHRA, NHRA) cares if your car made it to sixty first. What matters is who made it to the next stop light first, or who made it to the finish line first.

The sexiest cover of Motor Trend, ever - No arguments here.

So what is a better benchmark for Vin Diesel's RX-7, you ask? Time to travel a distance and the associated final speed. AKA: The 1/4 mile. If you have ever looked inside the cover of a popular car magazine, such as Motor Trend, you will find a dizzying array of comparisons based on 0-60 times affiliated with 1/4 Elapsed Time (ET) and 1/4 Trap Speed. There is more information in these numbers than is on the surface. Let's decode a sample from the mid 1990s, a heads-up comparison of two Japanese Titans, the Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 and Toyota Supra Turbo.

Excerpt from the Motor Trend article

If you notice, the all-wheel-drive 3000GT makes it to 60 miles-per-hour faster than the similarly powered low-gear spin-happy Supra, but again - we have thrown that benchmark out the window. Moving on, the 3000GT and Supra finish the 1/4 mile simultaneously in 13.6 seconds. This means that if both cars leave the starting line together, they would both cross the finish line at exactly the same time. Fantastic! But there is more. The 3000GT had accelerated to 101 miles-per-hour in the 1/4 mile, while the Supra is now traveling a staggering 106 miles-per-hour; this means that if the race were to continue for another inch, the Supra would walk past the 3000GT.

Based on this information, we know that the 3000GT must have a lot of "Low-End" in the form of traction to be able to complete the 1/4 mile simultaneously with the Supra. We have also learned that the Supra must lack traction, which we knew, and have superior acceleration once rolling.