McLaren 675LT vs Tesla P85D

I’m an F1 fan and can’t wait for the 2015 season to start at Melbourne in a couple of weeks. However, I don’t consider myself a “car guy”. I don’t fantasize about cool/fast cars, etc. but I did find this announcement by McLaren interesting.

The McLaren 675LT Takes Off at Geneva Motor Show, Fast and Street-Legal

Specifically, this section:

It has a 666bhp V8 engine with a 0 to 62-mile-per-hour sprint time of 2.9 seconds. Top speed is 205 mph. You’ll be hard-pressed to find anything street-legal that can beat that time, apart from a Bugatti. (Pricing has yet to be announced on this, but Car+Driver estimates it’ll be $345,000. I agree it’ll likely be a heck of a lot less than the $2-million-plus Bugatti Veyron.)

I found that comment interesting, given this article from November 3, 2014 (the fact of which has been widely publicized since) about Tesla’s “Insane” mode on the new P85D. There have been recent rumors that suggest the P85D’s 0-60 time could drop to 2.9s after an upcoming firmware update. Don’t get me wrong, the $120,000 price tag of the Tesla P85D seems ridiculous to me but pales in comparison to $345,000 for the P1. I know, comparing apples to oranges but if you are looking purely at acceleration…

Since I’m trying to write about science, here are a few graphs for you. This first one comes from a reddit.com posting and the second comes from dragtimes.com. The second graph is a V-T graph, so the slopes are acceleration, which you can see are pretty much linear (which is remarkable for a car). Insane mode provides a horizontal acceleration (also shown on the graph) in the neighborhood of 1g! Wow!