10 mph. Today, we can go a LOT faster… so what's changed?

Hey motorheads, Trace here for DNews. Over the last 130ish years, car speed has come

a long way. As of February 2016, the fastest car you can buy is the Bugatti Chiron, which

is limited to 261 miles per hour. (420 km/h). But why is that car faster than yours? How

did we figure out how to make cars go faster?

First of all, and it's probably obvious, but the major reason cars today can move so fast,

is because engines have gotten a lot more powerful in the last 130 years. The 1908 Ford

Model T had only 22 horsepower and a top speed of 45 miles per hour (70 km/h). But today,

a base Honda Accord can easily clear 100 mph (160kp/h) with almost 200 horsepower!

Modern cars can pull more power from highly refined petroleum. Today's more powerful cars,

can push more mass, more easily. But it's not that car engines have gotten more efficient,

the Model T only got 3 miles per gallon less than the average car today! Only 14 to 30

percent of the power from gasoline combustion is used to pull the car forward; most of the

energy is lost to heat and friction. So, to give cars more horsepower engineers have either

added more engine, or reduced weight… or BOTH. It all comes down to the Power to Weight

ratio.

That super-fast Bugatti Chiron has 1,500 horsepower, but needs TWO V8 engines to get that -- that's

a lot of weight. So, to make the car go fast, they needed to make it lighter. The power

to weight ratio, is a simple formula… divide Weight by Power.

Lemme give you an example or three… A 1200 pound Model T, has 22 horsepower. It's weight

to power ratio is 54.5 pounds for every horsepower. That's not great. A 3000 pound 2016 Prius

has 121 horsepower so has a better ratio of 24.8 pounds for every 1 horsepower! While

the new car does have more power in a heavier vehicle it is a balance. By comparison, the

Chiron weighs in at 4,400 pounds with 1500 hp: for a ratio of 2.9. 2.9 pounds per horsepower.

That. Is. Crazy. Obviously, it's way fast.

If engineers can get a low weight-to-power ratio, they'll have a faster car. But to MAKE

a car with a heavy engine have less weight ain't easy. Ford mixed the steel on Model

Ts with the element Vanadium to try and make it lighter; engineers still do stuff like

that today. The Prius uses aluminum, plastics, and special high-tensile, high-strength steels.

The Chiron, however, was built with ultra-lightweight materials like titanium and carbon fiber,

keeping the weight down even further and making for an even lower ratio! Of course, the Chiron

is 100 times more expensive than a Prius, partly due to that lightweight material, so

there's that.

Tweaks like these are the reason horsepower has increased 80 percent from 1980 to 2004…

but even then, we can only do so much. If you have a big engine, and a light car, you

can still only make it go so fast. And the faster you go, the more air friction will

start to affect top speed. For this reason, the car that holds the fastest land speed

record in the world -- 763.035 mph (1227.985 km/h) -- looks NOTHING like a Chiron, or even

a car. It looks like a jet, because jets are perfect for minimizing drag from air.

But basically, for every pound added either more power has to be coaxed from the engine,

or a bigger engine has to be built. The power-to-weight ratio is a delicate balance even for the muscliest

of cars. Without understanding it, we'd never have made cars go fast.

Sponsor? It also takes a lot of effort to keep your

car clean. Techron by Chevron’s patented Precision Clean Technology targets and removes

deposits left by lower tier gasolines. It bonds with and breaks apart carbon deposits,

more effectively than other additive technologies. Techron gets into the deepest parts of the

engine, where the most destructive deposits built up, and sweeps them away.

No matter how fast we can make cars go, though, there will always be speed limits holding

us back. How we decide speed limits isn't arbitrary to get me pulled over every other

week... in fact, there's a ton of research on it! I checked! Take a pitstop and watch

here.

What's your favorite speedy car? I always loved the Lotus, any of them. They're so curvy!

Tell me the car you had on the poster hanging in your childhood bedroom...and subscribe

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