Something rather dramatic is brewing in the land that builds more electric cars before breakfast than Europe manages in a year: the Chinese government has proposed slapping a hard limit on acceleration for every new car sold in the country. Five seconds. That’s what you’ll get from 0 to 100 km/h. Not 4.9, not 3.8, not the 2.1 that makes your eyeballs try to escape through the back of your skull. Five flat. The sort of figure that used to belong to a warm family hatchback with a diesel heart and the charisma of cold porridge.
The reasoning is brutally simple. When literally anyone can buy a two-tonne family saloon that delivers a thousand newton-metres the instant you breathe on the throttle, things tend to end in tears, bent metal and very expensive phone calls to the insurance company. Too many drivers have discovered that instant torque is hilarious right up to the moment physics reminds them who’s boss. So Beijing has decided enough is enough: every new car, electric or otherwise, will start in “grandma” mode. You can switch it off, of course – because nobody likes being nannied – but the system will politely reset itself every time you turn the key. A gentle electronic pat on the head saying, “There, there, let’s not kill anyone today.”
Now, I happen to love the ridiculous shove of a properly rapid electric car. There’s nothing quite like watching a passenger’s face rearrange itself when 800 horsepower arrives without warning or drama. But let’s be honest: ninety-five percent of journeys involve school runs, supermarket car parks and sitting in traffic wondering why you bothered leaving the house. We don’t need to turn every traffic light into a drag strip. If a five-second cap makes the roads fractionally less homicidal and stops insurers from having collective heart attacks every time a new hyper-EV is announced, I’m struggling to see the downside.
In fact, this could be the best thing that ever happened to electric cars. One of the last remaining excuses – “they’re too fast, too dangerous, too much for normal people” – just got torpedoed. A five-second electric car is still quicker than almost anything with a petrol engine that costs the same money, yet it suddenly feels responsible, grown-up, acceptable to fleet managers and nervous parents alike. In a market that already sells more EVs in a month than most countries manage in a year, this is maturity in motion. Europe is busy fitting annoying speed-limit beepers; China just went straight for the jugular.
Yes, the car makers are grumbling. Performance versions subsidise the cheap ones, and if everyone is capped at five seconds the marketing department loses its favourite toy. Prices might creep up, margins might thin, and the global supply of properly silly cars could take a hit. But if the trade-off is millions more people choosing electric because it no longer feels like piloting a missile, I know which side of that deal I’m on.
China isn’t killing performance; it’s putting it on a leash. And sometimes that’s exactly what the electric revolution needs to go truly mainstream: a bit less rocket ship, a lot more common sense.
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