I get it, dude. I’ve been there, too. You want to Vmax your car just out of curiosity, just to see how fast it’ll really go. But Bonneville is 2,000 miles away and you’ve got a meeting on Wednesday, your local track has a nice straight but it’s not long enough, and for some reason your local airport got “mad” that last time you just asked them to “take the planes away for a while, I got this.” That’s what YouTube is for.
I know, I know, I might be making it seem more complicated than it is. “Just look at your speedo, jerk,” but the biggest number on a speedometer is almost certainly not the top speed of your bone-stock car. “Just Google it and any number of sites will tell you how fast it goes, you don’t need a video, you dolt.”
But a lot of those sites are reporting manufacturer data, if anything, and you’ll remember that a lot of those officially have the phrase (claimed) next to those numbers. And sure, if your car is older, esteemed publications such as Car and Driver may have done an instrumented test, but we all know that in some cases manufacturers goose press cars (I’m not saying Lexus is really a company known to do that, just that it’s happened in the industry, and we’re talking about being precisely sure here.)
Anyways, this desire to be totally sure of what my own Lexus IS300 Sportcross can do led me to Youtube, where I found an IS300 doing a top-speed run at the Bonneville Salt Flats:
It looks as if it topped out around 139 mph, which looks about right considering Lexus’ claimed top speed of 143.7 mph and the notoriously finicky nature of the salt. But now, I know for sure that my car should do at least 139 mph.
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Let’s say you don’t own a Lexus IS300, though, in which case my pity for you is infinite. Let’s say you can only get so close to its supreme pleasures and driving dynamism. Let’s say you own a 2015 Lamborghini Huracan, instead, and want to know how fast it can go but for whatever reason you don’t trust Lamborghini. Well here you go:
It looks like it just tops out around 201 mph, which is right in line with Lamborghini’s own claims.
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There are all sorts of cars maxing out on Youtube, not just vaguely sporty-ish sedans or supercars. Here’s a Volkswagen Jetta TDI on the Autobahn hitting 219 kph, or 136 mph:
Truth be told, it may have gone faster than the 219 I saw in the video, but I stopped watching after a couple minutes because there’s only so much Jetta-driving-on-a-highway-video I can take. It’s just too intense. You understand.
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Want to know how fast your car goes and can’t max it out yourself? Look it up on Youtube. Have access to a salt flat or an autobahn or some other place where it’s safe and legal and cool to really send it? Be a peach, max your car out, and make sure to record it.
Your comrades in speed will thank you.
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