Also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH.
Some cars come with "Donut Mode" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
Cars seem so full of gimmicky features these days. A friend's car yesterday stopped us when exiting because it thought we left behind belongings in the back seat - it was just an empty package. That was not something I would have ever thought a car would flag. It's not that fancy of a car (entry level SUV) but it is fairly new, it just kind of bothered me.
One reason I hope Slate does well - newer cars have too much useless tech across the board. At least with a sports car the gimmicks are part of the appeal. Entry level new cars should be simpler, modular, and cheaper. Just let me drive and stop trying to be so helpful.
The back seat thing is probably the things cars have been adding to try to combat those freak memory accidents when parents forgot to drop the baby off at daycare and left them in the car in the sun all day with disastrous consequences.
Good point, I don't have a kid and would have never thought of that as something that system was hedging against. I'm not sure it changes my mind overall (I think also this particular implementation was still rather clumsy) but it does at least make that feature far more defensible in theory.
I don't think this is true: drag increases with the square of velocity, so that's close to double the drag from 150 to 200, and I believe somewhere above 60/70 mph, aerodynamic drag starts to overtake road resistance as the main friction source, i.e. it takes significantly more horsepower to be able to do 200 than 150.
Kinda, but not really. In Germany you can do that on public roads. And there are many circuits you can do track days at that only require a street legal car and a helmet.
Meanwhile even the suction functionality of the roadster will probably be banned at most track days because it throws a bunch of rocks and dirt at cars behind you.
Tyres also throw stones and dirt at cars behind, sometimes with remarkable force. But you're right, road debris is a serious question here. I can only imagine that this is so obvious that it cannot have been overlooked.
Surely the intake will need to be minimally filtered, my guess is something similar to fly screen mesh (screen door material, for the yanks) or finer. Debris would then just fall to the ground when the fans aren’t running.
List of cars I know to go over 90MPH. Supposedly. 2000 Dodge Neon with 800 pounds of man in it and only 3 out of 4 cylinders functional. 2004 Toyota Camry with broken O2 sensors, and it loves it. Anything by VW. Pretty much anything parked in your local highschool.
Most modern cars can hit 90 MPH with ease, that's what modern aero and 145HP being "underpowered" means! Supposedly cars are electronically hard limited to 115mph and I have never been able to confirm that in practice
Of course, this implies that you might be able to own some of these features, with the actual crime being using them. Like that Beetle with a helicopter jet turbine.
It's an awesome performance, but I don't know why you'd want this in your actual day to day car and pay a premium for it, all power to you if you do but I wouldn't call not sharing that preference 'poo pooing the incredible tech'.
