Difference between muscle cars and sports cars?
In: Engineering
There is no actual rule differentiating the two. However, you can lay out features that most people would associate with a ‘muscle car’ or a ‘sports car’.
But the most critical distinction is likely the driver’s intentions.
Driving a muscle car is about *the car*. Frequently, muscle cars are noteworthy only to others with a decent knowledge of cars. Muscle cars frequently look like the car your Dad drove to work for 30 years – the difference is in what is under the hood.
Driving a sports car is about *status*. The actual performance of the vehicle normally isn’t relevant compared to how it looks to others. You want others to look at your car and immediately perceive you (the driver) as a high status individual of some sort.
A good example of this is the Tesla. If you watched the Fast & Furious movies (at least the early ones), you’re probably familiar with the phrase “10 second car”. This is a description of a car that can complete a quarter-mile in 10 seconds and would ordinarily be used to describe a ‘muscle car’. Our heroes in Fast & Furious went to considerable lengths to build “10 second cars” out of stock vehicles.
But that phrase also describes the Tesla you can drive off the lot. You don’t need to do any tinkering with nitro, stack blowers or timing computers to get 10 second performance out of it (and, indeed, you’d get some pretty strange looks down at NAPA if you tried).
However, no one would describe Tesla as a ‘muscle car’ because no one buys a Tesla for Thunder Road. You buy a Tesla to impress your buddies – who probably know nothing about cars. So it’s a “sports car”.
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