I was talking to some folks I know about cars and the subject of ‘too fast to enjoy’ came up…
One of the guys I know has some kind of Mercedes AMG GT that’s really pretty fast, and another has one of those new ‘fish mouth’ BMW M4 Comps which is also pretty fast.
Now, “pretty fast” is different for me than most folks – we’re talking cars that can keep up with my Hellcat – so zero to jail in about four seconds.
Both of these guys were lamenting that they spent six figures on these cars, and a year or two in they have some buyer’s remorse; the cars are expensive to own, expensive to maintain, have depreciated quite a bit, and outside of a track they’re kind of boring – so they don’t think they’re getting their money’s worth…
They both mentioned that the steering is dead at anything under a hundred miles an hour, and the cars are so over engineered that an exciting corner in any other car is just another function of getting from A to B.
These are surgical, precise, track-day weapons that kind of fall flat in the real world outside of High Plains Raceway…
I wanted to commiserate, but the Hellcat expressly isn’t this sort of car… It’s a big old unrefined, low-tech American coupe with all that entails. It’s not a high-tech “driver’s car”, and therefore has a more compliant suspension setup – so a corner at 40+ is still pretty exciting and the steering is fairly vague at any speed because that’s comfortable.
The Challenger comes at the enjoyment component of owning it from another angle; it’s all about the presence of the car – the sound it makes, that huge cammed V8 shaking your soul, its ability to sink your eyeballs into the back of your skull at full throttle, and the look and feel of this being some sort of barely contained wild animal that wants to kill you…
The Hellcat is just as entertaining at a stoplight as it is at the far-end of a ten second quarter mile run.
My Hellcat was also about half the cost of these other cars – even when new – so I’m less paranoid about putting miles on it or parking it somewhere.
My CFO owns a Lotus Emira – another six figure car – but it too comes at the entertainment aspect differently. The Emira has about 400 HP – but weighs about a thousand pounds less than the three cars above and about half the size of the Hellcat… So it makes a twisty mountain road at 40-50 miles per hour extremely entertaining.
Hell, it makes a random trip down the highway entertaining because it looks and sounds super exotic and everyone points and stares. And while it takes the Lotus six seconds to land you in jail, it’s a lot more fun at less-than-jail speeds on real world roads.
So, I guess the moral of the story is that the German super-coupes are a bit lost in the sauce – they’re super specifically engineered for a single purpose: getting a good time around the Nurburgring – but outside of that they kinda suck as a “car”.
Meanwhile if you want to have fun with a car, buy a car that’s more about having fun than one with impressive numbers…
Leave a Reply