Today’s EVs are Stupid Quick
Is Environmentalism Passé? Part 4
While some readers might have been startled when I explored the question of whether EV owners are interested in environmentalism these days, others may have known exactly what I was talking about. It is certainly true that EVs eliminate most noxious emissions coming out of the tailpipe. But they can do lots of other things as well. One of those things is that they can be designed to provide insane acceleration.
How insane? To get some perspective, let’s start with a little peek into the automobile enthusiast handbook.
From the earliest days it wasn’t enough to talk about cars… there was an intense need to compare cars. Soon after the end of World War II, a handful of journalists turned this into a profession. One of those journalists – Tom McCahill – took a cue from baseball fans and decided that a statistical shorthand for performance would be useful. He began to compare cars by determining how fast it took each one to accelerate to sixty miles per hour from a stop. The resulting statistic – a car’s “0-60 time” – was born.*
It’s an interesting statistic. Some car enthusiasts love to talk about “top speed.” But that is a statistic that few drivers will ever get to experience firsthand. However, given the right road, like a highway on-ramp, accelerating quickly from a stop to 60mph is not only legal, it can be useful.
So what’s a good 0-60 time? It depends on the era, the type of car, and how much money you have in your pocket. But looking at the classic American sports car – the Corvette – can give you some idea of how things have gone over the years. Car and Driver recently pieced together all the 0-60 times it has recorded in its Corvette reviews over the last seventy years. This data is a bit wonky since they weren’t always driving the fastest Corvette available each year, but it isn’t bad for a rough estimate.
As you can see in the graph, the Corvette wasn’t exactly quick when it was first launched. The original 1953 model took 11 seconds to hit 60 miles per hour. By 1967, however, the Corvette 427 with a 435 hp engine broke the 5 second barrier for the first time. In the 1970s things slowed down. The addition of catalytic converters and the weight of newly required safety measures like crumple zones had an effect on acceleration. But ever since, the 0-60 times have steadily decreased. By 2023, the magazine was able to drive a new Corvette Z06 (the extra high performance Corvette that year) from 0 to 60mph in 2.6 seconds. That involved a 5.5 liter V8 sending most of its 670 horsepower to carbon fiber wheels, providing a neck snapping experience for two people carefully cradled in contoured racing seats.
That’s pretty impressive. Here’s the catch, though…
For about the same price as that Corvette Z06 you can buy an EV from an up and coming car maker, Rivian, that is slightly quicker than the Corvette. Its $120,000 R1T Quad Max Ascend shaves off 0.1 of a second and does the 0-60 run in 2.5 seconds. The Rivian website notes: “That’s Silly Fast.” Technically Rivian is wrong there. “Fast” refers to speed, not acceleration, and the top speed of the Rivian is electronically limited to 130 mph. The Corvette keeps going until it hits 195 mph.
But “silly” seems an appropriate word when you think about that acceleration combined with all the things that the Rivian can do that the Corvette can’t. Because while the Corvette is a sports car, the Rivian is a four door pick up truck. Therefore, with the Rivian you can take 4 friends with you on the drive. If you need to move some bricks, you can throw 1700 pounds of them in the bed in the back. If you need to move more weight, you can hook up a trailer and tow five and a half tons. Need to get to a campsite in the middle of a National Forest? Not a problem. Whereas the Corvette can struggle to navigate a speedbump, the Rivian is an incredibly competent off-roader. And when you get to your campsite, you can pull out the Rivian’s speaker/lantern to play your tunes at the picnic table and use the onboard air compressor to inflate your paddle boards or kayaks.
The reason all of this is possible is that electric motors can go from not turning, to turning really fast really quickly. In physics-speak, motors have significantly more “torque” than engines.** And if you really want to put all that power to the road quickly, then you eliminate all the differentials, shorten the axles, and put a motor right next to each wheel like this Rivian does hence, the “quad max” in its name.
While the Rivian is pretty crazy, it’s certainly not an outlier in the EV world. Motor Trend recently did a review of the fastest electric cars out there. It noted that the 2022 GMC Hummer EV can move all of it’s 9,000 pounds from 0-60 in 3.0 seconds. Four and a half tons aren’t supposed to get up and go that quickly.
If you’re looking for a super quick SUV, let me give you a couple options. You could go for the Ferrari Purosangue. It has a V12 gasoline engine, gets 12 mpg, and will rocket you and three friends from zero to sixty in 3.3 seconds. That will only cost you $433,686. If you’re willing to go electric, however, a car maker that isn’t exactly known for making high performance vehicles – Hyundai – will happily sell you a similarly sized SUV, the Ioniq 5 N. The $68,000 Hyundai EV takes 2.8 seconds to get to 60mph. That beats the Ferrari SUV by half a second and saves you over $350,000. Complete and utter madness.
And we aren’t done yet. One of the contenders to be the current EV king of acceleration is the Lucid Air Sapphire. It isn’t exactly cheap. It will set you back $250,000. But the manufacturer claims it will get you from 0-60 in 1.89 seconds and hit a top speed of 205 mph. And for those of you with charge anxiety, you can calm down because it has an estimated range of 427 miles. Lucid does want you to know, however, that “range and battery power will vary with temperature, driving habits, charging and battery condition and actual results will vary.” I’m pretty sure you won’t get 400 miles down the road if you choose to cruise at 200mph.
The amazing performance that electric motors make possible has upset the dominance of traditional “supercar” builders like Ferrari, Porsche, and Lamborghini. Their first response has been to build hybrid vehicles that allow them to pair the initial burst of acceleration enabled by motors with the sounds, higher speeds, and longer range of a gasoline powered engine.
In 2013 Porsche gave us the 918 Spyder, a plug-in hybrid that combined two electric motors with a V8 engine. For a starting price of $850,000 it will rocket you to 60mph in 2.2 seconds.
Not to be outdone, in 2019, Ferrari debuted its own plug-in hybrid. Its SF90 Stradale upped the ante with three electric motors and a twin-turbocharged V8. It wasn’t quite as quick as the Porsche (0-60 in 2.5 seconds), but it was more than $300,000 cheaper at $525,000.
If money is an issue, however, you might want to just go with the new Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray. You only get one electric motor and there are no turbochargers on its V8, but it boasts the same 0-60 time as the Stradale and you might be able to grab one for less than $110,000.
More crazy quick EVs are likely on the horizon as well. Lamborghini has already shown off an EV concept car called the Lanzador, which it says will go into production in three or four years. Porsche has been offering a full electric Taycan since 2019. Car and Driver says the latest 2025 version is the quickest car they’ve ever driven. They managed to get it from 0-60 in 1.9 seconds. A new Croatian company, Rimac, is supposed to release its full electric Nevera later this year, which it claims will be quicker than 1.8 seconds 0-60.
So yeah… EVs are not just for the environment anymore. They’re also coveted by boy racers who want to blow the doors off Ferraris.
Historians of technology have shown that sometimes a technology is developed for one reason, but then becomes popular for a different reason. For instance, the telephone was supposed to be a business device, but it probably became more important as a way to chat with family and friends. And sometimes a technology can mean different things for different people and get widely adopted for different reasons. For instance, pneumatic bicycle tires were embraced by casual cyclists because they were much more comfortable. Racers initially mocked them, but then realized the inflatable tires were faster. With both groups excited about them, pneumatic tires became the industry standard. It will be interesting to see whether the two groups being drawn to EVs right now - environmentalists and those hungry for quick cars - end up both getting what they want or if the industry starts favoring one over the other.
*In places where the metric system reigns, they use the even more attractive statistic of 0-100km/hr. While that is technically 0-62.1 mph, that last 2.1 mph comes so quickly in today’s quick cars, that they’re often taken as basically equal.
**Sadly for the electric car Irish Racing Team that I was on back in the 1990s, we didn’t quite recognize just how much torque our electric motor had. At one point we put lighter “half shaft” drive axles on our car. In at least two races in a row the power in the electric motor sheared them in half a couple laps into the race. Cars don’t go very far with broken axles, so we ended up with some disappointing finishes.