World's Fastest Hybrid OK'd For Production

thecarchik writes "The Porsche 918 Spyder hybrid supercar, first shown as a concept at this spring's Geneva Motor Show, got official approval as a production model today from the company's board of directors. Just consider the specs: a 500-horsepower, 3.6-liter V-8 engine with a 9200-rpm redline, 0-to-62-mph acceleration of 3.2 seconds, and top speed of 198 miles per hour. Oh, and did we mention it gets 78 miles per gallon on the European cycle? The astounding fuel efficiency comes courtesy of an E-Drive mode that lets the 918 Spyder drive up to 16 miles on pure electric power, though [ahem] not at 198 mph."

0 to 62?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero to sixty-two? Why sixty two? Since when did we start measuring 0 to 62 instead of to 60? Did it just go instantly from 59 to 62, skipping all other speeds in an instant? What's the deal?

Re:Fitting since Porsche made the first hybrid

[netsavior]

d'oh broked link
Sorry about that [wikipedia.org]

Re:Tesla

[NoPantsJim]

Wow, did they really need to have an auto-playing video ad with obnoxious music at the bottom of the page? I'm pissed that I gave them even that one pageview. I won't be reading the article.

Re:SI units

[moreati]

The standards to which the EU are trying to move are litres/100 km or kWh/km

Re:SI units

[TheLink]

If/when more cars start using lots of electricity to run, you'd probably want distance/kWh since most electricity rates are by kilowatt hour (whether they are taking money from you, or crediting you :) ).

FWIW there are about 34 megajoules in a litre of petrol. So that's about 9.5kWh/litre. BUT that's not so useful if your fuel supplier doesn't charge you in kWh. After all what most people would want to know is how much it would cost them. For a hybrid car the fuel may be converted to electricity, but it also may not be.

So what you'd want is a "100% liquid fuel" only distance/litre rate, and a "100% electric" distance/kWh rate, then you can get the distance/$$ for both, so that you can better decide on whether you want to fill up at the fuel station, or charge at home.

You don't want some marketing bullshit MPG rate, with fine print stating lots of assumptions about electricity cost (which varies a fair bit) and how much you drive on "electric only".