Are We Reaching The Limits Of Performance?

If you had a time machine and were able to go back to the late 1990s, back then a 0 to 60 time under 5 seconds was almost unbelievable. Only the most spectacular supercars and the most highly advanced sports cars could manage that, such as the McLaren F1 and the Ferrari F50. Even the most powerful Audis and BMWs did the sprint in 5.8 or 6.0 seconds. 

Come the year 2000, and all of a sudden those very same Audis and BMWs were going 0 to 60 in 4.6 to 5.5 seconds. Supercars started to get close to the 4 second barrier, with a few ducking under it to 3.9 or 3.95 seconds. Engine evolution, advances in technology, and sheer mechanical grip had cars starting to go faster and faster off the line.

Along came the hypercar soon after, with the Bugatti Veyron setting a new speed record, and also being one of the first production cars able to consistently accelerate 0 to 60 in under 3 seconds. All of a sudden, the impossible was possible, and (wealthy) people could push a car to over 200 MPH consistently.

Yet, as the years have passed, faster and faster cars have been coming out all across every segment of the automotive industry. Hell, you can get a hot hatchback these days that will do 0 to 60 in under 6 seconds, and a few mid-range sports sedans that can break the 5 second barrier, without them bearing badges like AMG or M. 

At the tip of the spear of hypercars, however, things are starting to get properly ridiculous. There are at least two that can hit 60 MPH in well under 2 seconds, both of them electric. There is an entire class of hypercars known as “The 500 Club” that can break the 300 MPH barrier consistently. These are absolutely unbelievable figures, but they also raise one very important question:

Are we getting to the limit of what we can handle as humans?

The Limits Of The Human Body: G Forces

While a vehicle in and of itself can handle all the forces it’s been designed to handle, we are speaking here about the limits of us, the squishy water-filled meatsack that is operating the vehicle. First of all, there are humans that can handle extreme g-forces and extreme speeds with the physical fitness training and the reflexes needed. Fighter pilots, open wheel race car drivers, and the like train endlessly specifically to do that, and they are proof that it is possible.

For the average human, however, the most that we can handle is between 3 to 4 G’s of acceleration, which is why a really fast roller coaster with tight corners can make someone pass out or be violently ill. Many people do not train their necks to handle consistent cornering G forces, and many, even healthy and fit adults, cannot think fast enough to react at the speeds that many hypercars go these days if topped out.

For the purposes of this article, we will consider 3 G’s as the standard limit of the average human. Yes, it can be pushed to 4, but that is rather uncomfortable on your body and neck.

Take, for example, the absolutely diabolical McMurtry Spierling. A fan car that sucks itself down onto the road, guaranteeing almost a literal ton of downforce, that can do the 0 to 60 sprint in a recorded, verified, and repeatable 1.4 seconds. That is nearly 2 G’s worth of acceleration slamming into you from nowhere. 

Read differently, that is two-thirds of the way to the limit of the average human. In fact, the acceleration is so brutal that several factory drivers complained of mild headaches after doing the test runs. It turned out to be because their brains had literally been pushed back in their skulls from the violence of the car overcoming inertia and took a split second to catch up to the rest of their head.

The thing about the Spierling is that it doesn’t stop there. It will continue to plant a rather large elephant on your chest as it howls up to its top speed of 155 MPH in under five seconds. That is why we talked up the 0 to 60 times of the late 1990s at the start of this article. We’ve gone from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds to 0 to 155 MPH in under 5 seconds. 

Let that sink in for a moment. Progress is cool, isn’t it?

Now consider that a Rimac Nevera does 0 to 60 in 1.74 seconds and tops out at 256 MPH after just 21 seconds. During that entire time, you’ll experience anywhere from 1.3 to 2.0 G of acceleration. As said before, that’s about two-thirds of what the average human can handle before neurological effects start to creep in. 

Also, to note, both cars are also faster than actual race cars in those sprints too. IndyCars and Formula One cars take about 2.0 to 2.1 seconds to hit 60 MPH. Yes, those figures are correct, there are cars available to buy that can go faster than a race car, and you don’t have to progress through your teen years in karting and junior formulas to buy and drive them!

The Limits Of The Human Body: Top Speeds & Reaction Times

We will preface this section with the statement that of course a decent, sane human being would not take a supercar or hypercar to its absolute top speed on public roads. That’s what tracks and drag strips and abandoned airfields are for, where if you lose control it’s only your life that is affected.

That being said, not even seven years ago, the thought of going 300 MPH consistently in a hypercar would have had you committed for psychological evaluation. Now, however, there are several hypercars in “The 500 Club.” It’s called that because 500 KPH was the target of several hypercar manufacturers, and 95% of the world operates in metric. There are plans to keep pushing for even higher top speeds, but the question really must be asked: Is it safe to do so?

Put another way, if you were in a vehicle going exactly 300 MPH, you are covering 440 feet per second. In layman sports fan terms, that’s roughly 1.5 American football fields per second. In scientifically relative speeds, it’s just shy of one-third the speed of sound. 

Yeah, it’s f-a-s-t.

Now, consider that the reaction time for the average adult human in excellent health is between 200 to 250 milliseconds, or 0.2 to 0.25 of a second. That is seeing/hearing something, the signal reaching the brain, the brain processing it, and then sending the command to your body to do something. While all of that is going on at 300 MPH, you’ve covered 88 to 110 feet, or between a third and a half of one football field. 

The reason we bring this up is that while you might not be able to max out a supercar or hypercar in North America, there are places in the world where you can on public roads. The most prominent of these are the unrestricted sections of the German Autobahn, and you can find videos out there of people pushing over 200 MPH, ripping by traffic in the right hand lanes. Yet, if one of those drivers has even a momentary lapse of concentration or isn’t looking down the road far enough, crashes can, and have, occurred. 

Because of the sheer momentum of a piece of metal, composites, and other materials going that fast while weighing a ton and a half at the least, the physics of those crashes are shocking. They are also pretty horrendously weighted against you coming out of the ordeal unscathed. We’ll spare you the details, but at 200+ MPH, the results are not life altering, they are typically life ending. We seriously do not recommend searching for it, but there are images out there of those crashes and they are graphic.

With that “pleasant” thought in your head, now think about a driver doing 100 MPH more than that, hitting 300 MPH. To give you a reference, if you skydive from a very high altitude and fall headfirst straight down with your hands tucked to your legs, you’ll reach terminal velocity, which for a human is between 180 to 200 MPH. 

That is the point we’re making here, and many manufacturers agree. Almost all of the hypercars that are part of the 500 club are built so it needs you to use a completely separate key in a special location in the car to activate top speed mode. They’ll still go over 200 MPH without the special mode activated, but the point remains that 300 MPH is quite simply too fast for the average human. It requires you to drive with your eyes and your brain several hundreds of feet down the road at all times, and even a momentary lapse of concentration can be disastrous. 

Those cars also have about a million warning screens you need to check through on their infotainment system to confirm you want to activate top speed mode. Some like the Chiron will refuse to activate the system if the ambient temperature is too hot or too cold, or the tires aren’t perfectly inflated to the correct pressures. It’s almost like they’re trying to tell you that going for V-max is a dangerous thing to do, even in a controlled, closed off environment…

Is There Anywhere To Go From Here?

For most of the 21st century, the biggest focus in the performance department has been acceleration and top speed. We’ve hit sub-1.5 second 0 to 60 times, and there are several very expensive hypercars that can hit 300 MPH consistently. Both of these feats deserve to be celebrated, without a doubt, as massive technical achievements. However, is there any point in pushing further?

The fact of the matter is that you’ll rarely if ever use the full potential of a supercar or hypercar in the real world. Speed limits, other drivers, your own physical limits, and many more factors play a part in determining how much of a car’s potential you will use. Even the Bugatti Chiron, one of the fastest cars ever made, is often driven at less than 70 MPH because there is just nowhere, and no reason, to push it. Also, in the places where you will find more than one, such as Monaco, there really isn’t any space to even push the car to 50 MPH repeatedly. 

There are the limits of that pesky thing called physics that need to be considered. There is a certain point, no matter how aerodynamic the car is, that the air resistance pushing against the car will be the limit of speed, not the shape or the power of the vehicle. To defeat that air pressure, exponentially more power is needed. That’s the reason that the Veyron had the W16 with quad turbochargers to thunder out 1,001 HP. 

It could get from 0 to 200 MPH on about 250 HP, but needed another 750 HP to go 60 MPH faster. It’s the same reason the Chiron Super Sport 300 had a massive 1,580 HP to reach 304 MPH. It took that extra 579 HP on top of a shape that was nearly twice as slippery as a Veyron to gain just 44 MPH. 

While speed is a superb metric of performance, to go much faster than those vehicles in The 500 Club will require a paradigm shift in engines, motors, or other forms of propulsion. We are already pretty much at the limit of road-legal vehicles with 2,000 HP EV hypercars, no matter how slippery the shape of the car is. 

To give you an idea of just how much raw power a vehicle needs to go properly fast, the only four wheel vehicle to ever break the sound barrier, ThrustSSC, used two gigantic Rolls-Royce Spey 202 turbofan afterburning engines from the British variant of the F4 Phantom II fighter jet. Stuck between the massive engines was a very thin, long body that was barely wide enough for a human to sit in and was shaped literally like a bullet with a very pointy end. 

At full afterburner, those engines were putting out a combined 50,000 lbs-ft of thrust, and that barely pushed the ThrustSSC to 764 MPH, and it could only sustain that for about 15 seconds. For reference, 50,000 lbs-ft of thrust equates to roughly 101,500 HP. 

In our opinion, we actually are at the limit in performance, both in terms of acceleration and top speed, right now in 2024. There is no reason to go any faster or accelerate any harder as well. Yes, that is akin to blasphemy on a site called Supercars, but hear us out. 

There might very well be the ability to increase in both, but we humans can’t handle much more than we’re already getting. At least, not without specialized training, and if you can afford a hypercar, you might be able to afford a personal trainer to help you with that. For the standard human, however, there is no impetus, and no real reason, to train hard to be able to drive a car at insane speeds and handle brutal acceleration and cornering G’s.

Being realistic, you will never actually go 300 MPH for more than a few seconds, and even then probably only on a private test track rented out for the day. If you want to go truly fast without needing to have a few million dollars, hop on a regional flight between Los Angeles and Austin, for example. It will cost you less than even a used beater, and you’ll be going over 500 MPH in a seat 40,000 feet in the air. 

On the ground, there are realistic and unrealistic speeds, something the Germans understand extremely well. Except for a very few rare exceptions, you won’t find a Porsche, Mercedes, or BMW pursuing even 200 MPH. There is just no reason to go that fast, even in the country that has the Autobahn. Those cars will get up to 155 on average to 185 MPH at the top end, with grace and style. You’ll also be going that fast in immense comfort and if you do lose control, at those speeds it is possible the safety systems will save your life, and that’s what truly matters.