QOTD: What's The Quickest 'Vehicle' Out There? (Because It's Not A Tesla)

Earlier today, one of the commenters on Bark’s article reiterated the oft-discredited claim that the Tesla P-whatever-D in “Ludicrous Mode” is the quickest production vehicle. Listen — I think the Tesla is a great car, and I accept that there is probably some highly-specific situation in which it’s the quickest production sedan.

But quickest production vehicle? No fuggin’ way. It would be the fifth-quickest vehicle in my garage, if I owned one…. and I don’t have a particularly quick set of vehicles.

Let’s start by throwing out the ridiculous idea of using a 0-60 time to determine “quickest.” That won’t even get you to freeway speed. At the very least, we’ve got to use the traditional American measurement of the standing quarter. The best quarter-mile time I’ve seen is 10.7 seconds, courtesy of a pair of on-site generators and chargers.

That’s pretty quick for a car, but you won’t hear anybody in the Tesla community talking about trap speed, because it’s pathetic. The trap speed of the 10.7 quarter mile was 122 mph. Any garden-variety Corvette Z06 will beat that by five or six miles per hour. My wife’s C5 Corvette can trap 120, just to put that in perspective. And by the time the Tesla reaches its top speed of 155 mph, it has been left behind by pretty much every performance car you could name, including the Chevrolet SS sedan that brother Bark was recommending earlier this week.

Needless to say, even in the quarter-mile the Tesla is easy meat for supercars. The McLaren 675LT I drove last year turns the trick in 10.5 @139, which is pretty much a different universe from the P100D in the best conditions. The Ferrari 488 and Lamborghini Huracan can’t quite match that, but either of the two will put lengths on a Tesla to the quarter and disappear shortly afterwards.

Keep in mind, however, that our commenter said “production vehicles.” That includes motorcycles, you know. Feel free to wander through the Sport Rider quarter-mile times; you’ll find remarkably few bikes that cannot beat the Tesla. All of the recent 600cc bikes, including the old Yammy R6es that you can buy for $2500 out of Craigslist, turn a faster ET and a higher ET. It would be out of character for me not to mention the 9.69 @ 148.7 turned by the ZX-14R. That’s not a time I can personally match, but even in traction mode 2 with my somewhat elephantine self aboard, the big Kwacker can see off a Tesla any time it wants.

We haven’t even begun to talk about snowmobiles — some of them are quicker in the quarter-mile as well. But maybe this is the place to turn it over to the B&B: How do you define “quick”? And in your definition of the term, what’s “quickest”? Take your time; I’ll wait for you the same way my old Porsche 993 and I would wait for a Tesla driver after a fifty-mile sprint. Patiently.

[Image: Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY-SA 3.0)]