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smitherfield's avatar

I wonder how much of a margin of error there is for other numbers people rely on, like "unemployment rate," "profits per share," "breathalyzer test" or "election results." And don't forget that old chestnut, "R²"!

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MaintenanceCosts's avatar

This is a great piece.

All of what it contains is a symptom of a larger sickness. We're in a world where high-end cars' capabilities are completely divorced from any sort of reasonable usage of the cars by the vast majority of owners.. The street performance envelopes of all cars in the highest three classes of Lightning Lap are either the same, or different for reasons having nothing at all to do with their all-out capability on track. (And "street performance envelope" itself has little to do with making a loud noise as you leave Cars and Coffee or cruise down the A1A.)

So it's not the capabilities that are selling these cars, at all. It's the image, and the image is defined by whatever relative numbers people can Google to determine that one car is superior to another. The magazines are giving people something to Google.

None of this would matter except that it really does make the cars worse. Many of these cars--not just unattainable supercars, but also performance cars normal-ish people might eventually own--are less enjoyable to drive on the street because of their track capability. We're in a funhouse mirror world where OEMs are chasing split-second differences in numbers that aren't even meaningful, at the cost of what actually makes driving fun.

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