BPT- I don’t see any cars in this thread that are worth a second thought, even the ones mentioned as jokes. The fancy cars of today are just scaled down versions of private jets for the road. There’s no craftmanship to admire, no efficiency to speak of, no willingness to sacrifice some comfort in exchange for high performance. A fast car just has a bigger and fatter engine – what’s the kuntz to get speed out of a 45.6L V64? A “sport” car just has gyroscopes to handle curves while compensating for the imprecise center of gravity – what’s the kuntz to having a computer fix your mistakes? You don’t even feel the road, what with all the super-duper shock absorbers. I’ve test driven quite a few of these, once my car became street illegal, but hated them all.
Like I said, it’s just a road version of the private jet. All show, but nothing admirable. It won’t be long before they start installing jet engines in these cars as the final move of one-up-manship.
Now my MG, that was a car. With a 1 liter engine, but an engine that outperformed. There was a sacrifice in comfort to get the low center of gravity, in the tube-like cockpit, but you were actually driving the car, not computers. That’s the sport of it- getting what you can with as little as you can get away with. Compare it to another sport- would you respect the NBA player who gets computerized joints that auto-correct his jump shots over the natural athletes? Would you respect the baseball player with a spring-loaded bat over the (non-steroid using version of) homerun king?