Rimac engineer says 0-60 'below one second' is possible
Monterey Car Week encourages all kinds of questions that are answered with outrageous numbers. How much is the Pebble Beach lawn worth? How many metric tons of palm fronds were sacrificed to make the toquilla straw that make the numberless Panama hats? And how fast can a fast car go? The Drive spoke to Rimac Nevera Chief Program Engineer Matija Renić at The Quail about that last question, wondering what Renić believes is possible for a 0-60 time. His answer: “Below one second.” There aren’t many things humans can complete in less than a second other than say three-word sentences like “Below one second.” The idea of being at rest as one’s lips purse for the “B,” and traveling 60 miles per hour by the time the tongue comes off upper alveolar ridge to finish the “d” is, frankly, absurd.
Regrettably, either The Drive didn’t probe Renić as to what technologies will make the feat possible, or it decided not to repeat Renić’s words. All we have is the oracular pronouncement and little way to conceive of how it could happen, along with lots of questions about tires.
See, people like Engineering Explained who do math for a living have figured that, for a street vehicle on street tires on a regular street, about 2.05 seconds is the lower limit of the stoplight drag. When the Tesla Model S Plaid ripped off a 1.85-second teleport to 60 mph for Motor Trend, that was on “the super sticky VHT-coated surface of Auto Club Famoso Raceway.” On a non-prepped surface, Motor Trend got that down to 2.28 seconds, Car and Driver pruned it to 2.1 seconds. But C/D bettered the Tesla’s time in a Ferrari SF90 Stradale, hitting 0-60 in 2.0 seconds flat.
Rimac claims the Nevera will hit 60 miles per hour in 1.85 seconds, a time also achieved on a prepped drag strip, but we haven’t seen instrumented proof of that yet. Among YouTube videos of the Nevera running the quarter mile, one dedicated thrill seeker pulled off a 2.13-second rip to 60 mph.
Speaking of drag strips, top fuel dragsters are the go-to monsters for hitting 60 miles per hour in under one second, doing the deed in roughly 0.7 to 0.9 seconds. In 2019, Jalopnik tried to figure out the G forces involved in such dashes, the math concluding that getting from zero to 60 in 0.86 seconds put a 5.3-G strain on the body. Having that potential in your street car would be like having your own roller coaster, and what we imagine would be a monumental bill for tires. Until we see such things possible for the regular (rather wealthy) driver, we’ll be paying even closer attention to what what Rimac has coming.
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