Quote:
Originally Posted by Turbowned
2,465 is very light; is it not the lightest current production sports car?
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The Miata is 133 lbs lighter.
The 220hp Elise is 410 lbs lighter.
Neither of them need a carbon tub to get lower than the 4C, both cheaper (the Elise albeit barely) too.
The 4C is an excersise in superatives for the sake of spec sheet bragging. Which is fine seeing the target market Fiat was going for with the car, but the whole isn't more than the sum of its parts, and as an engineer I cannot like it because of the sheer inadequacy of it's design optimization. At its size, cost, and level of spartan-ness it should beat the Elise handily. Instead a small English company shows all the might of the fiat group what they can build for 58grand is significantly faster than the Italians can do for 63k. Hell even the 190 HP Elise gets damn close and is 15 grand cheaper than the Alfa. Yes the Alfa is fast and it's like an assault on your senses on the track, but so is everything else with close to those power/weight and grip/weight ratios.
The 4C sounds amazing on paper, but once you dig deeper you realize that's all it was meant to do. It's let down by more weight than it should be carrying, a crap gearbox, and an engine that's not very well suited for a sports car. FCA has shown plenty of times that since Ferrari left they kinda phone in the engineering. Like how they bragged they desiged the Giulia in 2.5 years. That's not a good thing. That means you rushed it and you'll pay for that later when it proves to be unreliable. Oh wait. That's exactly what happened.