Do we need to do 100 km/h in 0.9 seconds?

To be honest, I don't even know what is going on anymore. All the speeds are going insane as of lately. Charging speeds, discharging speeds, top speeds, 0-100km/u speeds, the speed of which my attention is grabbed by the next new and shiny thing or innovation. Pretty much everything except the speed at which my mind works, but I've heard I have to use AI to compensate for that.

Talking about compensating: Dreame, the maker of robotic vacuum cleaners, probably felt the need to compensate for the very useful, but pretty unsexy products it's selling by presenting a car (the Nebula NEXT 01 JET Edition) that can do 0-100km/h in 0.9 seconds. Not one, but less than one. And that, dear reader, is meant to sound really cool and fun and things like that. Mostly because the vehicle uses actual rocket engines to make it happen.

I need to get a bit nerdy here, because I need to explain to you why rocket engines are actually a must to reach the insane time Dreame is claiming the car can do. It has to do with the rubber on the wheels, you know, the tires. Depending on the compound, it would be possible to provide enough grip for a massively powerful car to reach sub two second sprint times, but getting it below 1.9 seconds would be almost impossible, simply because the rubber won't be able to provide traction, and just slip. Which actually means slower sprint times, because the car will remain stationary, smoke up tires until they find grip again, and then start going again. Having engines that push air out the back, pushes the car forward without depending on the grip of the tires, and therefore might help it push to do 0.9 seconds.

That all is still very theoretic and unproven since Dreame is just using the insane claim to get the name out there and have us look at the weird little cleaning robots they also have. Which, I hope for the company, works 60 percent of the time all the time.

We're, you and me in this case, are glancing over the fact that that 0.9 seconds to 100 km/h not only sounds insane on paper, I'm willing to doubt it's physically so demanding the driver could simply pass out from blood loss in the brain while performing the trick for a group of hungry 13 year old with camera's that hope the hypercar will crash within zoom range.

In other words: at what point are we going to say: "nah mate, that's enough for me. I'm out"? At what point do all these tiny speed increases go too far beyond the point of diminishing returns? At what point do we find that they no longer provide anything useful at all (except for marketing and entertainment purposes)?

The focus on these weird numerical increases takes away from what we as humans have always valued more in the end: skill and craft. There is a reason the every car enthousiast loved the speed record Bugatti set, but nobody cared about the fact BYD broke it this year by some margin. There is no human skill or craft in a BYD, but the Bugatti oozes it.

I'm not saying that technologic advancements are all shite and we should stop researching at all. I'm saying not everything has to go faster, be optimized to the absolute maximum or be hit with a pan to make the jaws look better. I'm saying it's not all about the numbers. Throw a bit of human craft, skill and engineering in the spice mix every once in a while. It makes the number soup taste so much better.

That being said: if somebody from Dreame is reading along, I'm very much willing to try to go from 0 to a 100 km/u in under a second once in my life. I'm looking forward to the invite.

In other news:

Well, I feel a bit weird now. I know there is news out there, but having just written a whole rant about not having to go as fast as we do all the time (it's between the lines), I feel like I should protect you from the news. Especially since it's the weekend. It's your time off. Be free from the chains of the news cycle. You don't have to pretend to know what's going on in the world or wether Trump's weird spot on his hand means he'll die next week or not. Keeping up with the news starts tomorrow again. Go play with your car, or cat, and just start tomorrow by not talking about the news, but by asking your colleagues where your red stapler is.