It Started With My First Car And Went Downhill From There

It was an innocent (Are any of them really so innocent though?*) Facebook question about your first car.

Mine was a brand new 1983 Toyota Tercel.  I wanted to wryly comment on how underpowered it was and guessed a 0-60 of about 18 seconds.  But this is the information era, there is no need to guess anymore, about anything.

The 12 Slowest Cars of 1983

18.3 Seconds, not bad guessing!

Just a click away, was link to the fastest cars from 1983:

Porsche 911 SC Cabriolet: 7.0 seconds

Which got me thinking about how fast the fastest car we ever had was?

The 2007 SAAB 9-3 Aero Sport-Combi

"The 2007 Saab 9-3 Sportcombi Aero accelerates from zero to 60 mph in 6.9 seconds"

So that car may not have been the hottest thing on the road when we owned it, but it was hotter than anything from a couple of decades earlier.  It was over a second faster than the 1983 Ford Mustang GT, which had a 5.0 Liter V8!  And it beat the Pontiac Firebird by almost 4 seconds.

Naturally, I wanted to see how some of our other, not so hot, but maybe pretty impressive compared to 1983, stood up:

1996 Buick Regal 3800 0-60 8.7 seconds  Not bad for a 4 door family sedan and quite a bit faster than the 1983 Porsche 944: 9.2 seconds.

1997 BMW 318ti 0-60  "Pressed hard, our 318ti managed a 0-60-mph best of 8.9 seconds" About 1.6 seconds faster than the 1983 BMW 528, which had an in-line 6 and an extra liter of displacement.

*Those Facebook thing is probably an attempt to scrape-together enough information to guess a few security questions.