What is today's "Wow... 1001 horsepower?!?!" moment?
I genuinely find myself looking for an answer to this nowadays because somehow... the excitement seems to have just died out.
Think about it.
Every few months there's a new 0-400-0 record, a new top speed record, or sometimes, a company trying to break its own record all over again. Heck, even "baby" supercars are now posting acceleration figures that not too long ago belonged exclusively to hypercars.
So where is this coming from?
I recently stumbled across the news that Yangwang wants to attempt breaking its own production car top speed record of 496.22 km/h by pushing the U9 beyond the 500 km/h barrier.
Now, the feat itself? Phenomenal. But somehow... the conversation around it feels bizarrely quiet.
My first instinct was to blame the obvious.
EV. A Chinese manufacturer. Their marketing team simply didn't build enough excitement around it. The more I thought about it though, the less convinced I became.
Go back a few generations of record breakers.
The McLaren F1. The Bugatti Veyron. The Chiron. Koenigsegg.
Yes, they were all remembered for the numbers. But underneath those numbers was an engineering story that was equally captivating.
A naturally aspirated V12 producing over 620 horsepower at a time when turbo engines seemed like the only way forward. A W16 with four turbochargers that rewrote what people believed a road car could even be. A tiny Swedish company taking on Bugatti with a heavily engineered 5.0-litre twin-turbo V8.
The numbers made headlines. The engineering made history.
Even the Rimac Nevera gave us a glimpse of that feeling again. Two thousand horsepower sounded outrageous when it first arrived. But somehow... that excitement faded surprisingly quickly too.
Which brings me back to Yangwang.
Today we are talking about nearly 3,000 horsepower and a 500 km/h target.
From an engineering standpoint, that's mind-blowing. Yet emotionally... it somehow feels worthy of little more than a shrug. And I don't think it's because engineering has become less impressive.
Quite the opposite. Maybe we have simply reached a point where numbers alone don't move us anymore.
Even in India, a 2020 Octavia vRS with its 245 horsepower and 370 Nm would now be comfortably out-accelerated by a Mahindra BE 6. I felt a tiny bit of pain writing that sentence... but it is what it is.
Maybe what we are really searching for now isn't another horsepower figure or another top speed record.
Maybe it is character. An experience. Or simply a story that makes us stop and say, "Wait... how on earth did they pull that off?"
Or who knows... Maybe Elon finally decides to launch the next Tesla Roadster with those bolt on rocket boosters and we will all be excited again.
Until then, if 3,000 horsepower and a 500 km/h road car aren't enough to make us collectively go, "Wow." I'm genuinely curious what will.