0-60 isn't ZERO to 60: the test is FLAWED! | Know it All with Jason Cammisa | Ep. 03

We all love to go bench-racing, but using car magazine 0-to-60 tests won't tell you what happens in the real world.

The zero-to-60 test isn't actually measuring from a stop, at least not by U.S.-based car magazines. They use a term called "rollout," which comes from the drag-racing world.

Basically, when car magazines record testing numbers, they omit the first foot of travel (or "rollout"), resulting in a time that's more than 0.2 seconds too short. Sometimes as much as a half-second.

Additionally, the techniques that car magazines use to launch cars is brutal, abusive, and sometimes even fatal to the car. All is fair in love, war, and instrumented testing: nobody seems to mind if we blow up a car during testing, so long as we got great numbers in the process.

The bigger issue is that 0-60 is such an important yardstick that it feeds back into the engineering of cars. Manufacturers sometimes make decisions to improve instrumented-testing numbers that come at the expense of real-world acceleration: things like ultra-long first gears or difficult-to-engage launch-control. And when an advantage can be programmed in via software, you can be sure that car companies will cheat, err... optimize for this occurrence.

And now you know.

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[RLF]

I thought there was going to be a clip of Jason racing his mom, until I realized he meant my mom....

[AutoTopnl]

FINALLY someone doing this. Go Jason 💪

[dar]

I could listen to Jason talk about stuff like this for hours. I'm not sure what that says about me.

[dbeckMSP]

My favorite magazine 0-60 test is when I think car and driver wasn’t getting a good result from a mazdaspeed3 and they called the engineers and Mazda was like “side step the clutch at redline. Don’t worry, it can take it.”

[jose]

This is why I like to race people from a 5mph roll in my honda odyssey

[Cartier_specialist]

A long time ago -- the late 80s to be precise I always wondered how the early 70s Porsche 911 turbo could go 0 to 60 in 4 seconds flat. Well in the late 80s I was fortunate enough to work with an attorney that just happened to own a Porsche 911 Turbo. I always wondered how you could get to 60 from a dead stop and shift between 1st and 2nd. And that mystery was solved when the attorney took me for a ride. Back then the Porsche 911 Turbo was a 4 speed and not a 5 speed. That car did 75mph in first gear! To this day I'm still amazed at how ferocious that car accelerated and how undramatic it was doing so. The ass end just squatted down and it just shot to 75mph like most cars shoot to 25.

[chevellechris]

How do I give this more likes, one is insufficient. GREAT presentation of the subject. Less time racing benches, more time racing our moms.

[LeoVillacorte]

There's so much James May pendanticness and Ryan Reynolds loquatiousness in this LOL

[tractioncontroldelete]

Great lesson! This contextualizes so much now. You’re the man, Jason!

[manekineko]

Very interesting about how the timing light on a drag strip is tripped by the back side of the tire, not the front. Also about how that initial foot of motion takes 0.3 or 0.4 seconds, which does not appear in the final time. This is very helpful in understanding these numbers.

The accuracy of a GPS is typically worse, though some units can do plus or minus 4 inches, for an uncertainty interval of 8 inches, and some research grade, units can go below that in special classes of application. Accelerometers too, are affected by the vibration or hop of the vehicle during the count down. The advantage of the present system is that it ignores the initial 'hop' of the vehicle, and it is easily replicated. Since cars on a drag strip typically hop around an inch or so, up and down, forward and backward, and in rotation about the center of mass, establishing where the car is 'located' at the start tends to be a weighted average kind of problem.

On another note, you might want to re-think attempting a German accent. You are not even close and it undermines your presentation. The German accent is a on a par with putting your finger in your nose.

[cirian]

The reverse is true as well, in the UK when the hot hatch thefts were through the roof in the 1990s, make car makers sand bagged their cars with passengers and luggage to make them slower so the insurance was cheaper

The Peugeot GTI-6 306 does 0-60 in officially in 8.5
However its closer to 7.1

[erniejoel]

So nice to have someone in the auto industry stating facts free from all the "influencers" BS.

[joeschmoe]

Not many car reviewers (if any) are this good at explaining technical details of the car industry in fun and easy ways to understand. Well done @JasonCammisa, keep it up.

[Bonesx]

IMO, using 0-60 as a gauge for a cars effective performance stopped being valuable as soon as it was common for cars to do it in under 6 seconds.

[markmendez]

Hagerty, what ever you do NOT get rid of Jason. This man makes learning fun haha. I may have watched all his videos already...twice. You found the right person to do these videos

[cosminmihu]

I think the 0-100 kph is the most pointless test possible. 80-120 or 80-180 is the most important. For overtaking maneuvers and high speed motorway acceleration.

[juanpablohinestrosa]

Jason is back at the top of automotive journalism, how dearly we missed you!

[Elbenito]

ND2 Miata owner checking in. I've always been leery of instrumented performance tests, but I simply cannot imagine the abuse that must have been doled out to obtain the published acceleration data for this car. Sub six second 0-60 times must generate some truly pungent odors.

[foadrightnow]

Professor Cammisa has spoken! And it is good!

[SolamenteVees]

My Father, may he rest in peace, preached this 30 years ago. Of course, he was an old drag racer who actually drag raced and could rattle of Mopar Performance part numbers in his sleep...