It's been that way for a while. Horsepower and torque numbers on mainstream vehicles - let alone "performance" cars regularly pushing out 500+hp now - lost much practical relevance to 99% of road driving situations even for "sporty" drivers about a decade ago.

> lost much practical relevance to 99% of road driving situations

You don't buy a sports car to drive to the grocery store unless it's a status symbol (which is likely the great majority of sports car owners). But there are plenty of people that still like to actually take their cars to the track. I know because I'm one of them.

The majority of people that want a nicer car to drive around the suburbs will opt for luxury over sporty, because the Porsche GT2 RS is really not comfortable for daily driving. However, the Audi A8 is incredibly luxurious and very enjoyable for anyone that isn't in a hurry.

If you really think nobody buys a Tesla because of the acceleration, then you don't know that many Tesla drivers. I personally know at least 3 people who bought a Tesla because it was cheaper than buying a supercar for the same 0-60 time.

They're taking their Teslas (or hypothetical supercars) to the track?

> You don't buy a sports car to drive to the grocery store unless it's a status symbol (which is likely the great majority of sports car owners).

You seem to agree on the core thing there: status symbol. Marketing. Gotta pump out bigger numbers to protect the status. Look at M or AMG cars now vs 30 years ago.

No one in the world _needs_ to do 0-60 in less than 5 seconds in a family car/public roads. These perfs aren't even sustainable more than a few times in a row so it 100% is a marketing thing.

It isnt about max speed, in which case i would agree with you, higher max speeds are not useful on public roads.

More acceleration is always beneficial in cases where you have to perform a safety maneuver or evade something.

Imagine, you are going in the leftmost lane, there is a car a bit too close to you behind (but still fine), in front of you there are no cars, but you aren’t speeding up because speed limits (and you just want to go at a comfortable pace). Someone in the lane to the right isn’t paying attention and trying to merge right into you, you honk, but it will be too late to react for the offending driver. Your only escape here in a slow acceleration car is to break and cause the car behind you to rear-end you, causing a collision and tons of potential injuries. In a car with fast acceleration, you can quickly speed up and that car will (recklessly) merge, all while avoiding an accident.

And that’s not even talking about stuff like avoiding something on the road or stuff falling out of a truck bed in front of you or just absolutely any kind of an avoidance safety maneuver.

> More acceleration is always beneficial in cases where you have to perform a safety maneuver or evade something.

That's what people want to believe but unless you have been trained by professional chances are more acceleration = more risks 99.9% of the time. In your example you can very easily go from being victim of an accident to being at fault in an accident you caused.

> And that’s not even talking about stuff like avoiding something on the road or stuff falling out of a truck bed in front of you or just absolutely any kind of an avoidance safety maneuver.

If something is in front of you acceleration is not really a concern. You either need good brakes or very agile car coupled with extremely good reaction time.

It's as simple as asking yourself if roads would be a safer place if everyone had a Nissan gtr.

Isnt left lane for overtaking usually? Just speed up a bit and merge to right. And safe driving style (keep your distance) would save you from falling stuff much better than car that does 0-60 in 4 seconds.

Ok, fine, let me tune my example to be a bit more specific. You are not in the leftmost lane, you are in the middle one, but there is someone directly to the left of you, so you cannot safely swerve to the left.

"in cases where you have to perform a safety maneuver or evade something."

BTW having 0-60 in 3 seconds helps you keep a safe driving distance.

> higher max speeds are not useful on public roads.

Not legal=/=not useful, unless you mean higher than what most nice cars can currently do.

Most of my vehicles have been able to do more than 100 mph on the highway, but I don't know how useful that actually is. There's just very few times it is reasonable and prudent to drive that fast in California.

At least in Europe we’ve got a plenty of highways where you can reasonably go past 120mph as long as you use the GPS to preemptively slow down for merging traffic.

Of course, this will certainly not be viable during the typical commute hours.

Drag is starting to kill fuel consumption past 60mph (aka more pollution and we don't really need that now)

oh no, I agree with you. I was just responding to the parent, cause they seemed to imply that the max speed hype is of very limited use on the roads, with which I agree, as opposed to acceleration.