US vs Europe's Times

[BigRick]

Hi there,

Leadfoot had a good question in the just closed thread (I don't know why we keep closing thread when they're just getting warm...)

The question was why do Americans are always posting better times than European drivers... my answer would be really simple.

mph vs kph

Americans are normally measuring their times from 0 to 60 mph and Europeans are using 0 to 100 kph. When you do the maths you can see that 100 kph is not exactly 60 mph but more like 62.14 mph. I'm not saying this completely explains all difference between times but it can easily explain .2 .3 difference.

[Boosted-Bora]

That is very possible and may account for about 2/10th of a second cause I believe that the Euro version is always the faster one if there is a production difference

[chewym]

Also rollout can play a role in some tests. Read this link.

http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=3072334&postid=35856341#35856341

Car & Driver, Road and Track, and Motortrend all use this simulated 12" rollout. That means when you read any acceleration time in those magazines, it's not a true 0-60, 0-100, or 0-150 mph time. It's actually measuring 3 mph to 60, or 3 mph to 100, or 3 mph to 150 mph. The car starts from a stand still, but the clock doesn't begin to run until the car has moved 12", gained 3 mph, and traveled for 0.3 seconds.

GM and Ford also use rollout when claiming their factory times.

Because NHRA and dragstrips are basically non-existant outside the US...ONLY US BASED MAGAZINES AND MANUFACTURERS TEST WITH ROLLOUT.

This means that British, German, or Japanese magazines will clock times that are 0.3 seconds slower than US magazines for the same car as they time true 0-60 and true quarter mile times. They use no rollout.

[Cargo8]

definitely the 0-60, 0-62 is a factor. I saw one article which had both 0-60 and 0-62 in the same article and it revealed a difference of about .1-.2 seconds so.

[BigRick]

Adding up all these factors we can now better understand why there are so many different times.

Not strating another war here but imagine if we can't even compare 0-60, 0-100 on the same car between countries it's going to be nearly impossible to do it for different cars...

Maybe we should keep that in mind next time someone comes up with numbers. We already knew that driver, weather and multiple other factors were having an effect but now knowing that US and Euro times cannot really be compared is adding to the confusion.

Cheers,

[pampas]

True is the fact in europe, africa or australia, the RS4 always got little better times than different MB or BMW compared to the US tests..