If you want to buy a car like that new it will cost you a ton of money but second hand with a bit of searching you can find that kind of car easily, top speed of a car is irrelevant anyway, in this case it was simply a result of age, low mileage, budget and trim. And there is no way I am going to delude myself and think I am a good enough driver for speeds like that whatever the tires under it are.
Edit: not sure to which part of the comment you were replying, I probably misinterpreted it and you're talking about a sports car, not a Honda Civic. Still impressive but less crazy :)
The trick is that there is another regime for cars older than 15, for those cars you add 33% of their actual value to your income if they are company owned.
There is a small set of cars that are still viable after 15 years, that you can find with low mileage and whose actual value is low enough that there is substantial difference between 33% of that and 22% of the new value of a much newer car.
Low mileage old cars tend to be of a few brands only, it would be very hard to find an old Civic with few miles on it, I just checked and the lowest mileage Civic that is older than 15 years still has 100K+ km on it.
200 mph is pretty serious speed and people are interested what it is.
A Corvette or maybe a Porsche? Both seem a stretch at the price and age.
Agreed ;) Also, the number of Corvettes on offer of that age is super low and I don't like them to begin with. Porsche is nice but as you noted expensive as well as very expensive maintenance wise. I did look at a couple but could not find one in my price bracket that would last even a year without major repairs.
Sure the average person hasn't gone that fast but if you want to it's not that big of a deal
These sorts of mods are common enough among drag racers, except most of them aren't optimizing for top speed.
Cars with more than 600hp or are tuned so well as to need less surely aren’t average. We’re taking at least $75k which really isn’t something an average person will ever be able to buy.
Sure you could probably build something with an engine capable of producing enough power— but I don’t think I’d want to do 200mph in a 96 Honda Civic.