Here’s How We Define “Supercar.” What’s Your Definition?

In order to be considered a “supercar,” a vehicle must possess three of the four following qualities:

• It’s mid-engined.
• It’s got more than 500 hp.
• It has no more than two seats.
• It’s rare — under 5,000 built.

The rules are simple, and the “three out of four“ requirement allows for some variance while still keeping pretenders out. For example, a McLaren F1 has three seats, but gets in on the basis of mid-engine, 500-plus hp, and rare. A Ferrari 812 Superfast? The engine is up front, but it nails the rest of the requirements.

The final criterion, “rare,” is what keeps out the riff-raff. When I explained my supercar logic to the rest of the Jalopnik staff, my colleagues immediately began trying to poke holes in my flawless logic. A Honda Beat is mid-engined and has two seats, and could have gotten a pass on the 500-hp requirement ... but with slightly more than 30,000 of them produced, it’s not rare. Sorry. Same goes for the Alpine A110 — the French sports car recently eclipsed 10,000 produced, a number that should, and does, eliminate it from the “supercar” category.

But wait, you’re shouting, Lamborghini has made more than 15,000 Huracans! Yes, and each of them has more than 500 hp, two seats, and an engine in the middle. Get in the club, Lambo.

You’ll note that my criteria ignores price. That’s by design. The first company that builds a three-out-of-four vehicle for the cost of a Subway footlong will have earned its spot in the supercar pantheon.

I know my rules will be controversial. The C8 Corvette just misses the mark, despite offering performance that legitimately embarrasses plenty of cars that make the list. But rarity is not a Corvette hallmark, nor should it be. (Besides, the Corvette image is built on its “outsider” status. Iron Maiden isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and that’s good for Iron Maiden.)

The rules do, however, allow one notable domestic into the club. It’s not mid-engined, but it’s powerful, rare, and has no back seat. Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, welcome to the club.

Here is my take on the Supercar: it has to have 4 qualities…

1. A performance envelope that is beyond most cars (for its time)
2. A price point that is beyond most cars.
3. A level of exclusivity
4. A level of engineering that pushes the envelope (for its time).

You could argue that the Ferrari F40, Bugatti Veyron, and K’segg Agera all qualify in those four attributes.

A supercar to me is typically a two-door exotic — thinking to manufacturers like McLaren, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bugatti — with a price well exceeding the half a million dollar mark.

Typically mid-engine. Anything below that price or with a different engine placement... it’s just a sports car or very expensive sports car.

A supercar used to be something wild and impressive, like the Jaguar XJ220. Now, a supercar is just something below a hypercar on some ontology of The Cars. While a hypercar will be an aero dynamo making at least four-digit horsepower, the supercar will have anywhere around 525 hp, plus or minus some ponies. It’ll be way less powerful than a hypercar, while looking just as imposing and fitting the same number of people — costing about half of what a hypercar costs (or less!) and not getting close to the same street cred’.

Imagine if Superman was made less relevant by Hyperman, or if the Super Mario Bros. were crushed underfoot by the Hyper Mario Bros. It’s strange.

The irony, of course, being that The Cars got greedy and the arms race out of which hypercars were born dulled supercars and put these machines in a state of limbo where they’re not quite average, but not quite at the top of the heap. It would bother me that the superlative prefix “super-” no longer describes the most outrageous cars, but that’s the way it goes. And something like the legendary NSX is just normal now, in world of Valkyries and Ageras.

A supercar is a road-going racing car — a performance vehicle dedicated to providing a visceral, tactile driving experience to anyone seated behind the wheel. My supercar ideological ideal is the Ferrari F40.

Also, a supercar is not just barely street legal. It should keep its occupants comfortable, but not pampered. Sure, heating and air conditioning. I don’t want to see an infotainment system. I’d be infotained by just knowing how the car is running.

And when I mentioned occupants, I mean the driver and one (maybe two) passengers. Sedans and 2+2 coupes can’t be supercars!

My definition of “Supercar” is pretty loose. It’s so loose that it’s pretty arbitrary because all the car has to do to meet my definition is do something “super.”

That could be extremely high fuel economy like a Volkswagen XL1 or a Tesla Model S Plaid’s incredible acceleration. Heck, let’s throw a Tata Nano in for its bewildering cheapness.

Really, you have to find the distinction between a super car, and a supercar. The Mercedes SLS with its ridiculous gullwing doors is a super car, but it doesn’t tick the right boxes to be a supercar.

For me, those boxes are pretty simple. It has to have two seats, two doors and an engine anywhere except the front. For something to be a fully fledged supercar, it should also cost more than $127,307 (That’s £100,000) and it should have striking enough looks to warrant a spot on a bedroom wall poster. It also helps if it’s Italian.

Case in point, the Pagani Huayra

I can’t remember where or how I first heard the word “supercar,” but I assume it came courtesy of Jim Conrad, forever the voice of Need For Speed, spouting facts about a Carrera GT in Hot Pursuit 2 or something. (Fun aside: here’s a clip of the NFS guy doing an ad read for Kung Fu Panda.)

Anyway, back then I would have classified the Ferrari 360 Spider as a supercar, even though it had exactly 400 horsepower. Or the Viper GTS, even though it cost around $70,000 at the time.

Today however, you can get a Supra with almost as much power as that Ferrari, and a Corvette that will run laps around both of those cars for $10K less than the first-gen Viper (yes, we’re excusing markups here.) All definitions should be malleable just like our Constitution, and so I think the threshold for a supercar today is different than it was two decades ago.

For me, it’s got to have at least 500 horsepower and no more than two doors, excusing some funky 2+2 situation like a souped-up RX-8 or something. I was going to say it should start at a price above six figures as well, but apparently the new Z06 is expected to cost about $85K, so that seems like a good place to draw the line. Under this definition, every 911 beneath the Turbo is a sports car. That sits right with me.

Everyone else in this blog is wrong, and I will sacrifice their qualitative opinions at the altar of quantitative fact.

Evaluating the car as a whole is the wrong approach — instead, one should look for a set of Supercar Features; Things like interesting doors, number of seats, engine location, cargo room, price, exclusivity, et cetera. Each feature should be assigned a point value (something I planned to do in a spreadsheet today before GM announced a hybrid Corvette and took up my whole morning), and any vehicle totaling above a set threshold of points is a supercar. Interesting doors, a rear-mid engine, a high price, and low production all add points, while cargo room correlates inversely to point total.

Any number of seats above four is an immediate disqualification.