Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Dynolicious

I hope none of you would be immature enough to download an application to your iPhone that uses its internal accelerometers to create a synthetic dynamometer that can estimate your car's power output and performance. Furthermore, I hope none of you would pull over to the side of the road on the way to work, wait for traffic to pass, and then do a 0-60 run just to see if it worked. I just hope.

And for the record, the reported stats on the car are:

Horsepower: 160
0-60: 7.6

The difference between these figures and the actual observed ones on the chart is due to driveline drag (for the HP number) and driver (lack of) skill.

(My dad's first reaction on seeing the above graph is that the blue line is just the first derivative of the red line. Cool, huh?)