We all love to go benchracing, but using car magazine 0to60 tests won't tell you what happens in the real world.

The zeroto60 test isn't actually measuring from a stop, at least not by U.S.based car magazines. They use a term called "rollout," which comes from the dragracing world.

Basically, when car magazines record testing numbers, they omit the first foot of travel (or "rollout"), resulting in a time that's more than 0.2 seconds too short. Sometimes as much as a halfsecond.

Additionally, the techniques that car magazines use to launch cars is brutal, abusive, and sometimes even fatal to the car. All is fair in love, war, and instrumented testing: nobody seems to mind if we blow up a car during testing, so long as we got great numbers in the process.

The bigger issue is that 060 is such an important yardstick that it feeds back into the engineering of cars. Manufacturers sometimes make decisions to improve instrumentedtesting numbers that come at the expense of realworld acceleration: things like ultralong first gears or difficulttoengage launchcontrol. And when an advantage can be programmed in via software, you can be sure that car companies will cheat, err... optimize for this occurrence.

And now you know.



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