As a 'car guy', the biggest draw to a Tesla [for me] is the acceleration ... and since the model 3, handling is 'good nuff for a stock car'. A model 3 even won scca solo b street.

Eventually they can get their electronics switching fast nuff to maintain torque above 100 (or add a gear), and it will probably be a pretty good track car too.

I never cared for the self driving and whatever else. I just care about the basics. Tesla basics are pretty good.

The down side of tesla is that you can't fix it yourself. Their parts are coded to each other, and even if you replace a bad part with a good one, it won't work till the ECM is coded to it. Pretty much a repair monopoly.

You can replace some control boards/software to help with that, but Tesla detects it and punishes you with a quick charge lockout.

Don't really feel comfortable owning a car I am not allowed to fix.

For someone like me, Tesla has only 1 vulnerability : Other manufacturers can choose to make fast EVs, too.
That's all it would take [for someone like me] to change Tesla from 'the only game in town' to 'just one of many'.

-scheherazade

YES, PLEASE.

Also, why do the authorities always wait until the city is over-run by mindless zombies? The first time someone turns into the undead, you drop a nuke on the city, update the maps, and pretend the whole thing never happened. You don't wait around until a multi-ethnic foursome show up with shotguns, witty banter and a love of stock cars and carnival rides. No, you go Fat Man on the fuckers ASAP and score an easy 57 hits on YouTube with the video.

HEY! Don't roll your eyes at me -- this at least twice as sane as anything Donald Trump's shit out in the last 48 hours!

I think they're equally skillful, just in different ways. I don't much care for NASCAR, but I do know there's just as much sweat and skill in the top tier of stock car racing as there is in F1.

For those who, like me, has no idea who this gordon dude is : "Jeffery Michael "Jeff" Gordon is an American professional stock car racing driver" (Wikipedia)

>> ^Yogi:

You have to have unbelievable reaction times to race F1 cars. I'd imagine regular slow life must be pretty boring to these super humans.

One common thing I've noticed when reading interviews is that they tend to drive really boring cars. When you're used to driving at those speeds every road legal car will feel boring no matter what, so you might as well be practical.


But yeah, those things are simply astoundingly fast. Even in simulators you first think you're going fast driving a stock car, then you try a GT car and the stock ones feel like they're standing still, and then you jump in an F1 and GT cars feel just as slow. And in reality the differences are even bigger. The fastest lap in the 2010 GT1 race at Spa was 2:17.605 (qualifying time). Same year Mark Webber managed 1:45.778 in his Red Bull. Same layout. Over half a minute over 4.352 miles, the F1 car would lap the GT car every four and a half laps or so.

while interesting idea, it does look like the primary purpose of people that created this car was "huge government contract".
if there are ~800k cops in US, i'd guess there's ~400k cars. that's a pretty big order. plus all the profit from maintenance, repair, parts, etc etc.
benefit of using stock cars is maintenance is much cheaper.

this car looks way too aggressive and intimidating. we wouldn't want our police departments to turn into Detroit PD from Robocop.

imagine stock car racing in convertibles, with random obstacles that appear and disappear randomly in random positions. that would be stupid, right?

so yeah, superawesome, but damn what a stupid sport.

The film that inspired this video is Vanishing Point (1971).

"Barry Newman is "Kowalski", an enigmatic figure who has tried everything in his life from stock car racing to the military, and failed at every one of his endeavors. Working as an auto delivery man, he gets an order to transport a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T to San Francisco, and makes a bet with a few friends that it can be done in an impossibly short time. After loading up on "ups" and throttling the car westward, he is soon pursued vigorously by the police and embraced by the public as something of a hero. During a time when national speed limits were all controversy, this film provides a compelling argument against them: A fast car in the hands of a capable driver is not dangerous. Even the police, so caught up in their own system, don't realize that they are the only ones causing accidents and endangering the public while blindly trying to keep up with and capture Kowalski."

That's amazing! Real racing right there, not any of that stock car crap.