The Quickest Cars of 2018 (Plus a Few of the Slowest)

Here at Car and Driver, we distinguish ourselves from the rest with our comprehensive performance testing of new vehicles. For nearly every car, truck, SUV, and wheeled vehicle that comes through our Ann Arbor, Michigan, office, we measure braking distances, lateral grip, top speed, and fuel economy. Of course, the most exciting data we record concerns acceleration, which anyone who grew up arguing about cars with their friends knows is the only performance metric that really matters. The sprint from zero to 60 mph is the benchmark time for judging a vehicle's quickness, and 2018 proved a banner year for it: We recorded our quickest times ever for a sedan, a rear-wheel-drive car (twice), and for an SUV. Here we present the five quickest from among the hundreds of new cars we tested in 2018, and, for fun, we've added the slowest, too. In the event of a tie (two or more vehicles with the same 0–60 time), we've used their quarter-mile times to determine their rank. For clarity, we've arranged our most extreme acceleration data starting with the slowest cars and moving to the quickest.