One of the canards of eighties cars is how performance returned over the decade. I’ve accepted this for many years, but recently, I got interested enough to put some time into it.
I ended up plotting about 175 individual 0-60 times of cars I have blogged about, and this chart was the result. The curving green trendline is a polynomial best fit, which drops from 12.5 seconds in 1980 to 7.9 seconds in 1989.
The quickest car I’ve written about is the 1989 Turbo Trans Am, which Car and Driver got to 60 mph in 4.6 seconds—still very respectable even in 2025. The slowest car was a 1980 Cadillac Seville with its standard diesel engine, at 19.7 seconds. Outliers on the lower performance side include the 1986 Hyundai Excel (16.1 seconds), while the 1983 Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer stands out with its 5.0 second 0-60.
The chart definitely supports the premise that performance improved in the 1980s, but there are challenges with the data:
- The only data points are from my blog entries. I like to think that I write about a wide variety of cars, but I tend to choose the more interesting ones—which are often the faster versions. So, this skews the data, but likely by about the same for every year.
- Some 0-60 times are hard to find, especially of less glamorous or little-changed cars. About 15% of my blog entries did not have a reliable enough 0-60 time for me to usefully plot.
- I find that the 0-60 estimation tools are often well off compared to “real” 0-60 times. Thus, I do not trust these tools to create reliable placeholders when I do not have actual data.
- There are also the classic differences in 0-60 times between various automobile magazines. Car and Driver was almost always faster—sometimes significantly. An example that comes easily to mind is the 1983 Volkswagen Rabbit GTI, where Car and Driver recorded a 9.7 second 0-60 time, and Road & Track managed a 10.6 second 0-60. Which one to trust?
What do you think?
Eighties Cars 