Most supercars suck. No, really, they do. But that’s not the point.

^ I bet this is you right now, after hearing that.

But please understand that I am absolutely, 100% correct in this opinion. On a technical, practical and financial standpoint, most Supercars, from the likes of Pagani, Bugatti, Ferrari, Lamborghini and so on, are stupid purchasing decisions that make absolutely no sense to the large majority of people, even to those whose net worth could actively afford them.

As vehicles, they are pointless. They serve no practical purpose. They have little to no cargo capacity, little to no utility on regular roads. They’re loud, obnoxious, and, for all intents and purposes, they’re frivolous, wasteful and pointless. The fact that people oftentimes aspire to own such monstrosities is frankly, baffling.

But that’s entirely the point, and it’s why If I ever see a world where the Internal Combustion Engine lives on, it is only in these kinds of vehicles that I want to see them flourish. Their purpose is to be entirely frivolous, wasteful and vulgar. That’s the point. That’s why I do not aspire to own one, and despite my aversions towards them, I can understand why they exist.

Comparing my Tesla to a Lamborghini.

Now, This is… Frankly a hilarious idea to the average car bore. But, I argue that in most ways, if you were to use the standard of what makes a car a car, my Tesla is in every way better than a Lamborghini.

Let’s think about this for a second. Let’s compare say, my Standard Range Model 3 to say… a Lamborghini Revuelto.

This car is an absolute monster. It packs a 747kW (1015hp) V12 engine with an electrical hybrid assistance system that technically makes this thing a plug-in hybrid. But, whilst it has absolutely monstrous power output and speed, let’s think about things for a second. How much of that 747kW are you using on a daily basis? The speed limit on the roads in Australia is on average, about 110kph in most states, and 130kph if you happen to take a trip down the Stuart Highway.

It can accelerate from 0-100kph in about 2.5 seconds. Which means that within four seconds of overzealous pedalmashing, you’re already in license loss territory.

This is because, in Australia at least, any speed that is 40kph or more above the posted speed limit is grounds for a loss of license. 4 seconds is frankly, not that much time to realise you’ve lost your license. Whilst the police might not catch you, you certainly cannot outrun a CCTV camera which has your plate, and you’re certainly not outrunning the radio whose information will then be passed on to ensure your license loss is cemented.

By contrast, my Model 3 Standard Range, has a 208kW Rear motor, which can accelerate this boring grey nugget from 0-100kph in about 6 seconds. It’s a veritable snail by comparison to the Revuelto.

Now there is a faster variant of this, the Model 3 Performance, which will do that 0-100kph sprint in 3.1 seconds, but in all honesty? The 6 second 0-100 time of the standard range car is already extremely quick for the large bulk of people. In fact, it’s often so fast that most of the time, I just leave the car in Chill mode, which nerfs the 0-100 time to about 8 seconds. Helps to keep my partner’s stomach in one piece when we drive.

However, the big difference here is that the Lambo stands out in traffic. It makes an ungodly loud noise when it does that speed. It’s also orange. Like, bright orange. That’s basically just a big, fat “look at me” choice in both sound and appearance. Cops are absolutely noticing you and since that Lambo also comes with a “rich guy” badge? Well, i’m sure as hell they’d want to pull your arse over to get some proper justice.

The thing is, the Revuelto is also outclassed in both speed and acceleration (to some degree) by the Tesla Model S Plaid, a frankly, boring looking vehicle by comparison. But I find even that car to be practically pointless, despite how cool it is.

That’s because I don’t find that speed, power or performance characteristics are important aspects to a vehicle. In fact, the simple fact that the reason why said Lambo accelerates that quickly, is because it requires an entire Model S Plaid’s worth of ICE engine to get there.

It gets an eye-watering 17.9L/100km in real-world driving, even with the Hybrid assistance. That’s the electric equivalent of 159kWh/100km. Put it this way. To go 100km in the Revuelto, with the equivalent energy output of my Tesla, I could go for a staggering 1,200km.

EVs are just a lot better at extracting energy from fossil fuels than ICEVs are, because the engine in an ICEV is designed to push the car, plus its passengers. The resultant drivetrain losses of a big, heavy AWD system, a transaxle gearbox, and a big, heavy, complicated engine, means that well… there’s no room for rear seats, or grocery bags, or even yourself. Seriously, Supercar interiors are not designed for the rotund, or the tall for that matter.

And the best part, for the $1.3 million dollar after-tax cost of one of those Lamborghinis, I could buy 20 Model 3 Standard Ranges. Or I could buy five of them and have enough left over for a decently sized house.

As both a Vehicle and a financial decision the Tesla is an incredible deal compared to the Lambo. In every way, unless you were a billionaire who has more dollars than sense, Purchasing the Lamborghini is a frankly, stupid decision.

…But that’s not the point.

And i’m going to use watches as an example of this.

It is frankly, honestly, a work of pure craftsmanship, it just so happens to be extremely vulgar at the same time.

The same can be said for Lamborghinis. They aren’t at all practical. They are, for all intents and purposes, a wasteful purchase. But, the fact that such a sculpture on wheels exists is tantamount to an incredible feat of human creativity. There’s immense engineering which goes into the design of the V12. There’s thematic styling in the interior that makes you feel like you’re not behind the wheel but behind the controls of an F35 fighter jet.

But I don’t even think the Revuelto is a great example of why a supercar should exist. To me, the Revuelto is a lot like say, owning an Omega Speedmaster or a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. It’s too… Practical and reliable. It’s too German. It’s not showy enough, and not that dramatic, really.

For something i can compare to a Richard Mille, you need only to look at what De Tomaso puts out.

This is the interior of De Tomaso’s newest car, the P72.

Every single piece of this Interior is an exquisite piece of machining and engineering brilliance. None of it serves a single purpose other than to make your jaw drop into your lap. There’s no reason why the air vents need to be made of copper-anodised aluminium. There’s no reason why the leather needs to be stitched by hand when a machine could do it. The engine doesn’t even make that much power… But it does sound phenomenal.

In truly proper supercars, practicality is not the point. They’re not trying to volume-sell these things, the entire point is to make a statement of intent. This is what a car, when given no market constraints, could be. This thing doesn’t even have a radio, or GPS navigation, or even a boot, and yet it screams “I want one” because… Well, just look at the thing.

…It’s stunning.

Screw efficiency, practicality, or anything. This is all about breaking necks and making people go “Wow, that’s cool”

That’s the point of supercars. They’re by no means good at being vehicles, but they are, rolling works of art. Who cares that they get shit fuel economy, have no space to store your bags, can’t drive themselves, make noise that both wakes up the entire street and sends them into tears of joy with their sonorous tones? that’s not the damn point.

Is my Tesla a better car than any supercar ever made? Absolutely, to live with on a daily basis, my Tesla is about as perfect of a car as you can get.

However it doesn’t break necks. It doesn’t make people want to look at it, and in fact, the only car that Tesla makes that can break necks as hard as a De Tomaso P72 is perhaps the Cybertruck, but that causes people to both break their necks, and flip it off in absolute disgust, and that’s because of what it represents and the statement you make when you own one.

Statements have meaning and importance (a rant about the Cybertruck and Ferrari Luce)

Now I have a controversial opinion about the Tesla Cybertruck. In some ways, I kinda like it, but sadly, I would never own one.

(Kim Kardashian’s CT’s pictured and in all honesty, it’s one of the better looking Cybertrucks out there)

I don’t like it because it is practical. It isn’t. Nor is it a good truck. It isn’t. I don’t like what it represents even, because it is the modern take on the Hummer H2. A rolling representation of the current day issue at hand, a tech bro monopolisation crisis wherein we’re seeing AI slowly but surely ruin the internet we once loved, and we’re seeing our very rights to access our own data being stolen and robbed by big-tech oligarchs buying up all the RAM and GPUs. It is the vehicle which most represents the slop-filled present in which we all face in our day-to-day lives.

No, I like it because of the fact that it does have some pretty cool technology underneath it all. Steer-by-wire, four wheel steering, Stump-pulling torque from its up to three electric motors, and a really cool battery which can bifurcate to accommodate different chargers of different voltages, meaning it is capable of getting maximum charge speed no matter where you plug it into. It’s also the only Tesla that has Vehicle-to-home capability, and it can power a huge amount of external devices out of its bed, meaning that there’s at least some value to contractors who can stomach the cringe that comes alongside owning one of these.

But despite all that cool tech, I can never own one. Even if it came to Australia, it just represents something else to me, it represents, as i mentioned, the problem which we all face.

It says to the world “I’m okay with your privacy being taken away, i’m okay with corruption, i’m okay with all of this, because I am in a rolling stainless-steel armoured box, which I sit inside at the Superchargers, blaring AI generated music and watching my AI-Generated slop content, whilst I do everything possible to piss you off.”

It very much screams to the world that you’re into a scammy, non-earned kind of wealth. You’re not into craftsmanship, or quality, you’re into a world devoid of creativity, and despite the absolutely awesome technology underneath that stainless steel skin, I could not possibly ever drive one of these. It, unlike many of the other vehicles i’ve mentioned, represents pretty much everything I am against.

The type of prick who would own a Cybertruck in Australia would be the type of person who thinks that exploiting the Australian money Glitch of buying housing and leveraging Negative Gearing and Capital Gains Tax discounts is a valid way to become wealthy, and then when they end up getting told they’re not allowed to hoard any more houses by our current government, they chuck a hissy-fit and say that we’ve suddenly become communist, despite the fact that they’re really just exploiting a different kind of Government Welfare…

…in the same way Elon does with his goddamn SpaceX contracts, and through leveraging EV tax credits, ironically enough.

That or they’d be the kinda person who’s unafraid of rug-pulling a pensioner who got scammed into a shitcoin scheme. Those pricks drive Cybertrucks.

The Cybertruck is in some ways, an Anti-Supercar. It’s a car that is trying in all ways to not be a car. It’s a truck, it’s a taxi on wheels, it’s a rolling bunker, it’s a Mars Rover, It’s an affront to all things design, because it has very little design to begin with, but it is and always will still be a car, and it’s a Tesla no less, so you have to compare it to other Teslas.

Previous Tesla products were all about efficient driving, advanced tech, insane power, and practicality. Now whilst the Cybertruck scores high on the power and tech fronts, it’s missing the efficiency and practicality that makes a Tesla so good. It deviates so far from what the brand is supposed to represent, that it’s made many people resent Tesla. It’s certainly made me look at alternatives for a future car.

Likewise, the Ferrari Luce is honestly, another one of these Anti-Supercars which represents the times well.

And not to go on a Luce rant, this is a car which goes against everything that the engineers at Ferrari in the past have worked for.

Now the Luce on its own, if it didn’t wear a Prancing Horse badge, isn’t a bad looking car. If it donned an Apple or Xiaomi badge and cost a tenth of the cost, I might actually like it.

But, because it does indeed don a Prancing Horse, and because it costs about $1.1m Australian dollars, it has faced serious criticism because of its departure away from what makes a Ferrari a Ferrari. Electric powerplant aside, it’s hideous by comparison. So much so that if you want to buy an Electric Ferrari, just buy a Pininfarina Battista instead.

Hell it’s not even that good of an EV! My Tesla smashes this thing for a tenth of the price in all metrics that EVs are meant to be. It’s less efficient even than a Polestar 2, which is in my opinion, a better looking car than both my Tesla, and the Luce.

Now even without the assistance of Pininfarina, Ferrari can make a beautiful car. In fact in the past, it’s made one of the most beautiful cars ever, the Ferrari 250 California.

The fact that this brand has made both that California and the Luce is probably making most people shit themselves and piss their pants simultaneously. “You mean to tell me Ferrari, you know, the supercar company, made the freakin’ Magic Mouse on Wheels?”

And it’s little wonder why the Cybertruck gets hate… At least it comes from a brand known for making EVs.

When you make a statement, you need to back it up with genuine intent. Ferrari’s Luce is indeed a compliance car in the truest sense. Ferrari doesn’t have VW to back it up to make sure it makes a bunch of EVs, so it too has to basically bend to the whims of the EU’s automotive regulations, because unfortunately, to the bean-counters of Brussels, Ferrari’s range of fuel-thirsty thoroughbreds are cars after all, and they unfortunately, see supercars as thirsty, inefficient monstrosities that have to be shoeboxed into the “car” category.

I mean, they could make a carveout for supercars, they could come up with a way to allow companies like Ferrari or DeTomaso register as low-volume automakers, meaning they’d probably put more effort into making cars that people who see them as the halo brands that they are, want to see. We might not ever get to own a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, but to see one of these cars without a firebreathing V12 under the bonnet or in the boot, means that the Supercar might be dead as we know it thanks to these bean-counting arseholes.

Supercars should go the way of the horse, and so should the ICE engine in general.

Mate Rimac, who owns both Rimac Automobili and Bugatti SpA, says it best. He owns one of the most forward-thinking electric power supply companies for vehicles on the planet. Rimac makes the Nevera, one of the quickest, best handling electric hypercars ever made. It also makes the Bugatti Tourbillon, a car that literally inspires its design off of bespoke watches akin to the RM series.

Essentially, In both his and my opinion at least, Supercars will always be machines of pure mechanical craftsmanship, for those who can afford to access that craftsmanship. The point of the Nevera is to demonstrate the capabilities of EV power systems… Not many people will buy Neveras, but many companies, like say, Aston Martin and BMW, are already looking to Rimac to say, buy batteries or power control systems from them. The Nevera is a demonstration platform sold as a supercar to those who want one, with the main focus of promoting Rimac as a Tier-1 supplier of EV componentry to the mass market.

Bugatti, to Rimac, and indeed to every gearhead, will always be about the analog experience of ICEVs. It’s why Bugattis don’t come with current-day infotainment systems. The entire point is for the car to be truly timeless. To not need software updates. To not be recycled and disposed of at the end of its life. To not be practical at all. Practicality lends to usability, which lends to disposability. The Tourbillon is meant to be a thing that is meant to be cherished and occasionally displayed on the road, not to be thrashed about as a daily driver and abused. You daily drive an Apple Watch, and save the Richard Mille for a Gala ball where you want to show off.

The same person who perhaps owns a Tourbillon, will likely have a BMW i5 or Mercedes EQS as a stealthy, electric daily driver, or perhaps if they’re super rich, a Rolls Royce Spectre or when Bentley gets around to making it, a Bentley Barnato, to roll the streets of their home city in quiet stealth. Hell, they probably aren’t even driving the damn thing, they’re getting someone else to do it for them.

We’re talking about a class of people who have more money than you, I, or anyone else can imagine.

To place a Hypercar on the same pedestal as my Tesla is pointless… But that’s the point. They are pointless vehicles that suck at, well, being vehicles.

Horses used to be the primary mode of transportation for most people. The automobile, through lobbying, cost reduction and through straight practical reasoning, has mostly supplanted the need for the horse as a mode of transportation. Railways replaced the stagecoach, Electric trams replaced the horse drawn tram, and automobiles have replaced the personal ride-on horse. Our air might be dirtier, sure, but our streets are physically cleaner. We’re not mowing through thousands and thousands of horse carcasses a year, and we’re not stepping in and running through the literal rivers of horse excrement that once lined the streets of cites run on horseback.

However, Horses are still bred and are still owned as pets, as stock-horses on farms, and as athletes in sports such as thoroughbred horse racing and Polo. The latter is of course, another pursuit of the wealthy, but regardless. There is still some place for the horse in this world. There is no practical reason to own a horse, apart from the fact that you just love horses.

The electric car is simply a step in the right direction to clean our air and reduce our running costs, and thus, send the ICEV the way of said horse. We regulate the breeding and care of horses under animal cruelty laws, to ensure that those who own horses and other animals treat them with the dignity and respect they deserve. Regulation can in some ways, preserve the ICE as a means of powering the classic vehicles of old, as well as to ensure that if future ICEVs are to be made, that they are made in small numbers, by the same sort of skilled artisans that make fine bespoke watches, or fine bespoke saddlery for horses.

My point is, if enthusiasts are correct, and ICEVs are supposed to be soulful, joyful creations, why not allow the daily drivers of the world to be electric? The large bulk of fuel consumed by ICEVs is not consumed by classic cars, sports cars, hypercars and supercars, but by the thousands and thousands of disposable, replaceable econoboxes that roam our streets.

If we are to see these vehicles as throwaways, why are we throwing away valuable petrol at these boring things?

Why are we allowing a finite resource to be consumed by vehicles which are, at large, dreary, boring and soul-less. Electric cars have recyclable batteries, which means that at the end of their lives, we can recover those materials and make newer, better electric cars from them. Less mechanical parts means less issues with servicing.

An EV doesn’t need to be soulful or provide a driver with a sense of connection to be good. In fact, it’s this soulful character that often gets in the way of it actually serving its purpose. It’s why I find the argument a lot of gearheads throw at Teslas being “soul-less” as being hilariously off-base. They are aiming to build a car which you don’t even have to drive for Pete’s sake, why do you think they care about the “soul” of the vehicle, when their main goal is to eliminate the concept of driving all together?

Most normal people don’t want to even drive, let alone be connected to the road, and if most people had their way, they’d honestly rather not own a car at all. Cars are a financial burden which we must endure due to the nature of our cities and infrastructure, and the refusal of people to either embrace higher density cities, or high-rise apartments connected by public transit.

…But for those of us who do want to drive, for those of us who enjoy the thrill of rowing gears and carving up a back road, cars should continue to exist in such a way that allows people who want to enjoy them, to continue to enjoy them. Consider once again, when I was looking to purchase my Tesla, i was originally considering buying an MX5! I even got close to buying one.

And that leads me to my end point. Yes, Supercars, sports cars and hypercars all indeed suck as vehicles. They are, however important in my opinion, and should still continue to exist as ICEVs in an EV world.

If we are to phase out ICEVs, we need to do all we can to ensure that low-volume ICEVs are at least allowed to be made. On top of that, to help preserve classic cars and all these high-end cars, we should also be looking at SynFuels not to replace BEV infrastructure and shoehorn ICEVs into a carbon neutral world, but instead to focus on preserving classic motoring, sports-cars for those who can afford the fuel, and motorsport as a concept, akin to how we keep Horses around in our world as pets and athletes.

Let the daily drivers be electric, and let Ferraris be Ferraris. Whilst I attempted to compare my Tesla to a Lambo, they are entirely different types of machines, and as the Ferrari Luce’s disaster proves, we honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.

Instead of shackling a prancing horse to the role of a stage coach, it should run free as the thoroughbred that it is.

Beano out.