[jeremyc74]

Originally Posted by The Cthulhu

Not even talking about track:
I said that you can't compare a tuned car to a stock car, and stock for stock, I don't think there's a chance in hell a 135i could outrun a Lotus on the highway, unless it was over 140 mph. Stock against tuned, it's a toss up, the 135i should win. Tuned against tuned, it's the Lotus again. And it does it with a 4 and a lot less power... I think that's very impressive. Maybe you don't share my enthusiasm.

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You're the one that brought the Lotus into this comparision against a tuned 135i. I compare my tuned 1 to other vehicles on a regular basis, and I don't care if they're tuned or not. This isn't a magazine test were we're trying to make everything equal, it's about the real world and a car you run across while driving down the highway. I don't care if it's tuned or not, and my argument was NEVER that you can't tune a Lotus to be faster than a tuned 135i, it was that a kill story involving a tuned 135i and a Lotus isn't unbelievable, which you seemed to be saying was the case.

I honestly don't think the Lotus is very impressive. It's extremely expensive for a street car at the the performance level it's at, but that's just an opinion. The fact that it's got basically no interior at all at a $40k+ price point should leave a little more room for some additional power as far as I'm concerned, but again, that JMO.

Originally Posted by The Cthulhu

I don't consider top speed and acceleration to be tangents, even if it applies more to the Lotus than the Atom. One can talk about power to weight until he's blue in the face and still lose a race because the horsepower isn't there to achieve top speed, and it's because of air resistance. It applies to the Atom because it makes far less horsepower (it isn't the 500 HP one in the pic) than a tuned 135i. It's also pretty turbulent. The top speed is lower than the 135i. It's not much of an issue because it screams to top speed so quickly...

To reiterate, The 135i DOES have a higher top speed than an Atom. And it's extremely hard to minimize drag and frontal area enough to get out of needing loads of horsepower to hit very high speeds. I thought it was pretty cool that you can just play around with an equation to figure out minimum horsepower needed to hit a top speed... Obviously not appreciated.

You think I'm trying to demonstrate how smart I am (I'm not), but I'm just talking about car stuff. Get over yourself. This isn't a penis contest, we all have the same car.

I've addressed your points before, and I'm positive that I didn't miss a single one in this post.

Here's what you said before:

Originally Posted by The Cthulhu

Of course.

The Atom is much faster than an Exige, an Exige is much faster than a 135i.

Originally Posted by The Cthulhu

Light weight sports cars without LSDs are built to drive on tracks rather than drag strips. You might kill them on a drag strip, will not kill them on a highway pull (if they have a better pwr/weight and plenty of extra HP after they overcome drag), and definitely will not kill them on a track. Your car is heavy for no performance reasons.
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And that's why I've taken issue with this. In the context of this thread, it's simply not the case. This isn't about penis size, it's about maintaining some sort of truth to the stuff that's posted in forums like this. If you don't want someone to disagree with what you're saying, don't post things that aren't true.

I never really intended to compare the 135i and Lotus head to head, only to point out that neither are in the same class as an Atom, but since you're insistant on doing so, here are tests of the two cars by Edmunds:

http://www.edmunds.com/apps/vdpconta...8/pageNumber=5

http://www.edmunds.com/bmw/1series/2008/testdrive.html

The 135i is equal to 60, faster through the 1/4 mile, and has a higher trap speed. It's also running on vastly inferior tires, but still manages to come up only 2ft short on braking, and post a reasonably solid slalom time as well, for about $15k less. The Lotus just isn't that impressive as a street car, and for that kind of money there are better options in a track car (with the Caterham and Atom being good examples). It just doesn't seem to do anything really well.