just watched a few videos of fast muscle cars.
Dodge Demon, Hellcat, Shelby Mustang. and a tesla beat every single car in a race.
the Shelby did the best against any car vs the tesla plaid in the 1/4 mile but how or why is the tesla so much faster than every car?
this was a tesla plaid but watched some videos of tesla s and that thang was fast, too.
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Internal combustion engines develop power proportional to their RPM. To marry up an engine at high RPM with wheels at stationary, you need a gearbox and a clutch. The gearbox steps down the RPM, but only so far. The clutch is essentially two plates in oil, which can either be placed together or held slightly apart. When slightly apart, only some of the energy goes from one side to the other, but it counters for differences in velocity.
This clutch loses a lot of power to heat.
Then, just when the clutch is fully released, and the engine is putting down all its power… the engine now needs to spin too fast to keep accelerating, so you need to change down a gear, and now the engine is going slower, and producing less power.
Electric motors, however, produce 100% of their power at stationary, so off the line acceleration is very high. But the power drops off with increasing RPM, and its rare to put them through gearboxes with more than one gear ratio, so they get worse and worse as they get faster.
Teslas are awesome in a quarter mile, but pretty poor at a mile long drag race, and don’t have amazing top speeds. One trick pony
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