Your Dream Car

[Zen Badger]

While I can see the appeal of super cars like the Veyron, they don't appeal to me because they don't represent what I consider good engineering. To me good engineering is constrained optimization of the sort that makes the best out of real-life limits, and do so in an economically competitive manner. Back in the 1960s, the Soviet Union tried to build a super high performance supersonic jet liner that would be economically competitive in the world market. The Soviets were not slouches in building some world-beating advanced jet fighter But it took them far longer to come up with the Tupolov-144 supersonic jetliner than it took for them to develop any of their top drawer military aircraft, and in the end the Tu-144 flopped.

Even during the cold war, the Soviet designers publicly conceded it was far harder to build a jet liner that would be economical to operate, competitively priced, and safe to use, than to build the world's best fighters whose cost is no object.

This is why a mid-range sports sedan costing less than $50K impress me more as an epitome of an engineering challenge well met than the $1 million Veyron.

A good performance sedan meant to be sold in the hundreds of thousands is a really engineering challenge similar to building a competitive jet liner. A Veyron is just a extravagant money burner developed without regard to economy, like a jet fighter.

The reason a supersonic airliner was so much harder to build than a fighter is because the airliner has to spend most of its time at supersonic velocity.(Otherwise what's the point)

A jet fighter on the other hand spends very little time at plus mach speed.

It can't or it will run out of fuel in very short order. The fuel consumption has been liken to pouring JP-4 though 8 milk bottle sized throats.

But in those days to go supersonic mean't use of afterburners, Gen 4 fighters like the F-22 are capable of supersonic speed in dry thrust.