Know It All with Jason Cammisa

0-60 isn't ZERO to 60: the test is FLAWED! (1x3)

Data emisji: Lut 11, 2021

We all love to go bench-racing, but using car magazine 0-to-60 tests won't tell you what happens in the real world. The zero-to-60 test isn't actually measuring from a stop, at least not by U.S.-based car magazines. They use a term called "rollout," which comes from the drag-racing world. Basically, when car magazines record testing numbers, they omit the first foot of travel (or "rollout"), resulting in a time that's more than 0.2 seconds too short. Sometimes as much as a half-second. Additionally, the techniques that car magazines use to launch cars is brutal, abusive, and sometimes even fatal to the car. All is fair in love, war, and instrumented testing: nobody seems to mind if we blow up a car during testing, so long as we got great numbers in the process. The bigger issue is that 0-60 is such an important yardstick that it feeds back into the engineering of cars. Manufacturers sometimes make decisions to improve instrumented-testing numbers that come at the expense of real-w