Originally published at: These guys can't stop laughing while drag racing an EV 1970 VW Beetle vs a modern 911 GT3 RS | Boing Boing
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@ 4:50 something worth watching starts to happen. Yes, I just saved you almost 5 minutes of your life, you owe me now. Big time.
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Pretty much a less funny Top Gear.
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That was fun.
Clearly the boys were enjoying it (as seen below). The sound of that flat 6, tho… Man.
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911 sounds fantastic.
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In a few years, EVs will completely own drag racing. Range may be a problem, but this is a motorsport where you only need to go a quarter mile or so. You simply can’t beat 100% torque and horsepower at 0rpm. No internal combustion engine can hope to touch the acceleration potential that EVs have.
I think the only reasons they haven’t already taken over are:
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Ignorance. Traditional drag racing culture is not… shall we say…a forward thinking group of people. They have…. opinions…. about EVs and the people who drive them. This blinds to them to their incredible performance in this area.
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Governing body regulations. I used to do endurance racing, and while not well suited for current EVs, the series I ran in was looking to include them. The problem is the fire safety crews need to be trained and have the equipment for lithium fires, and the track insurance needs to account for them. Safety technology has a little ways to as well. Like, you can’t buy an easy fire crew kill switch off the shelf for an EV like you can for ICE. Those wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly and the various racing series are all still trying to figure this out. A lot of tracks still don’t allow them at all because the operators are scared of them. That’s changing for the better quickly though.
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Electric vehicles pretty much already own ‘run what you brung’ drag racing at most strips around the US.
The Lucid Air and the Model S Plaid can both do high 8sec 1/4mi runs. The eCopo Camaro can do low 8’s. The Electric Hummer can do 11.5 sec in a truck that weighs 9k lbs! The Rivian R1T can also do mid 11’s in a pick up truck.
At local HPDE track days here in LA, I’ve seen Tesla Model S Plaids do some amazing hero laps before the onboard systems limit HP to keep the batteries from overheating.
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Less funny? How can you tell?
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Back in the day (like a half-century ago) roadable EVs were not to be found. An acquaintance made a practice of buying trashed VW bugs cheap and replacing the piddling engines with mills stolen from parked Porsches. Dude won a few pink slips in street drags. Whatever works, hey?
But the sport is all about putting on a spectacle, and the noise and flames shooting out of the engines are a big part of the show, right? I think EV racing may gain in popularity faster if the promoters can find a way to create similar types of spectacle. So add some gratuitous Jacob’s ladders or Tesla Coils on the back or something? I’m not sure that pure speed and acceleration alone will make it a popular sport.
Yah at my local drag strip.
Their’s a VW BUG. That runs high 12 seconds.
The RPM’S are insane. Kinda awesome but can’t see myself driving one.
That’s just old fashioned bias. Kids today are not impressed by smoke and flame and noise. They see it for what it is- inefficiency and killing the planet. They are completely turned off by rumbling V8s and such because it doesn’t represent anything good to them. All they see is a dumb way to solve the horsepower problem and they’re frankly not wrong. It’s what we had and we loved it, but it’s not great.
The new gear heads love the subtle high tech noises EVs make. They listen to the inverters whine and speculate on how many windings must be in the motor. It’s a different world, and more power to them.
People who think EVs will never be cool because they’re quiet haven’t talked to anyone under 30 about it. Just old men yelling at clouds.
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