What Defines a Supercar? 75 Years of the Genre’s Fascinating Evolution

Defining “supercar” is more complicated than you might guess. As an automotive journalist, I’d love to believe the myth that the late, legendary automotive scribe L.J.K. Setright coined the term while reviewing the 1967 Lamborghini Miura, but that’s been pretty well debunked. Car Life magazine used the term “supercar” to describe the 1965 Pontiac GTO. I’m willing to bet the title is much older, probably dating back to the 1920s. How else would you describe the Bentleys that kept winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans? Then again, while W.O. Bentley’s “racing trucks,” as Ettore Bugatti used to insultingly call them, are sweet, it’s difficult or at least feels somewhat wrong to say race cars are supercars—even as blurred as the lines between race cars and high-performance road cars were nearly a century ago.

We could point to the 1954 W198 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, also called the Gullwing, as the world’s first supercar. I’m not here to argue against it but rather to point to a more obscure originator, the Duesenberg SSJ. Only two were built, and both were short-wheelbase roadsters with a supercharged straight-eight that, thanks to two carburetors, produced 400 horsepower—in 1935. Obscure, sure, but one of the two did sell for $22 million in 2018, so somebody is in the know. Other prewar cars had enough power, performance, sex appeal, and X factor to be considered supercars (the Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic Coupe jumps to mind), but they seemed to be ultra-low-volume, tuned-up examples of existing cars. We’re talking just two SSJs and only four Atlantics. We can totally go with the Gullwing being the first, as it had its own platform, and although limited by its high price, it was a regular production vehicle. Except I wouldn’t.

Were muscle cars supercars? The gut says no. It’s difficult not to call a 1970 Hemi ’Cuda with a 426, a 4.10:1 Dana 60 rear end, and a four-speed manual a supercar, but muscle cars were more like their own thing. Like those prewar cars, the initial incarnation of the muscle car—let’s go with the 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88—was about getting more power into an existing car. Instead of modding an engine, another from a larger car was shoved inside—the Rocket 88 came upfitted with the 5.0-liter V-8 out of the bigger Olds 98. This formula stayed underground through much of the 1950s, as American OEMs were happy to let the hot rod aftermarket have at it. However, with drag racing’s growing popularity, some factory specials began to emerge, such as the Ford Thunderbolt, Chevy Impala Z11, and Dodge Dart 413. In fact, dragster specials like these were written about at the time as supercars but also referred to as muscle cars at least as often if not more so.

However, the 1964 Pontiac GTO, the brainchild of none other than John Z. DeLorean, captured the public’s imagination and popularized the term “muscle car.” Yes, the midsize Tempest got a biggish 6.4-liter V-8 to increase its performance, but it was a particularly American, specifically Woodward Avenue notion of performance: accelerating quickly in a straight line. Muscle cars, as cool and lovably antisocial as they are, have never been about total performance; if turning and stopping well were your passions, you had to look elsewhere. America did have the Corvette, but the European marques were the ones that were serious about all-around performance driving, with Ferrari, Porsche, Alfa Romeo, Jaguar, and Maserati building excellent sports cars.

Enter that Lamborghini Miura in 1966. Famed company test driver Valentino Balboni once told me a story about how when he was an unemployed 18-year-old in a rural village near Bologna, the local priest decided to take him into the city to find a job. They happened to pass by the Lamborghini factory in Sant’Agata where Ferruccio Lamborghini smartly pushed the colorful Miura bodies outside every morning for some free publicity.

Balboni, who didn’t even have a driver’s license at the time, took one look at the gorgeous Miuras, leapt from the priest’s car, and asked the security guard for a job. Lamborghini hired him, and aside from sweeping out the factory, his job was to push the Miura bodies outside every morning and haul them back in at the closing bell. That’s the power of Marcello Gandini’s design, the X factor that makes the Miura a supercar.

In terms of performance, was the Miura a massive step forward compared to its contemporaries? Well, kinda. Its mid-mounted transverse 3.9-liter V-12 produced 345 horsepower, whereas the contemporary (1967) Ferrari 275/4 made 300 hp from its four-cam 3.3-liter Columbo V-12. The Maserati Ghibli produced 306 from its four-cam 4.7-liter V-8. The raging bull had more power, no doubt, but the other Italians had decades of motorsport know-how between them. On a track or good canyon road, I’d expect Enzo’s car would prove to be the better-driving machine, and the Ghibli would hold its own. But no one thought to call either of those other Italians a supercar. The Miura? Just look at it.

Still, I don’t think the Miura should be thought of as the first supercar. That honor, in my mind, is reserved for its successor, the Countach. Another grand-slam Gandini design, the wedge-shaped Countach (named after a local Piedmontese expression that politely translates to “Holy cow!”) looked as wild by the time it went out of production in 1990 as it did during its 1971 show car debut. There may be others, but it is still the undisputed supercar, the poster car, the subject of countless magazine covers and even more childhood dreams. So transcendent was the Countach that 50 years after it began production, its layout is still the supercar archetype: a sleek if not wedgy two-seat shape, with a massive high-power lump mounted behind the driver, doors that open funky, a sky-high price tag, and an extremely limited use case. Take the 2023 Ferrari SP3 Daytona as an example of the supercar formula not changing an iota.

After the Countach, all sorts of supercars began emerging in the 1980s and ’90s. Some notables include the Porsche 959, a technological tour de force that cost the customer a quarter of a million dollars—and Porsche about the same amount for each one it sold. Ferrari had a string of supercars during this time, beginning with the undercover 288 GTO, continuing with the iconic and still highly coveted F40, and finally the odd-looking but revered F50, with its Formula 1–derived, partially stressed-member V-12. I’d also include the troubled but utterly fantastic-looking Vector W8 in this group even though all of the 22 units the company built drove horribly.

The Countach’s successor, in terms of the collective zeitgeist and moving the state of the art forward, was the McLaren F1. A moonshot of a thing, Gordon Murray’s uncompromising carbon-fiber spaceship took the Countach formula and ran with it. Another mid-engine wedge, this time it was a three-seater with a central driver’s position and center steering, a 617-hp BMW V-12, and an actual million-dollar price tag. A racing version won the 24 Hours of Le Mans outright. A model fitted with taller gears set the production car top speed record, 240.1 mph; with the standard gearbox it went 221 mph. The price was nearly unthinkable in the 1990s, but as car collector, historian, comedian, and former late-night host Jay Leno points out, a McLaren F1 is worth $25 million today.

Speaking of a million bucks, seven years after F1 production ended, Ferdinand Piëch’s fever dream, the Bugatti Veyron, landed in 2005. Whoa. The Veyron ushered in a new hypercar era, and that term is as nebulous to define as supercar. What set the Veyron apart was its stated purpose—it was the first production car to crack the 400-kph (approximately 250-mph) barrier. To do so, Bugatti crafted an 8.0-liter 16-cylinder engine with the pistons arranged in a W pattern and force-fed by four turbochargers. The quad-turbo setup wasn’t unique to the Veyron—the “Italian Bugatti,” the ’90s-era EB110, had four snails feeding its 3.5-liter V-12. In some ways, the all-wheel-drive EB110 with its carbon-fiber monocoque is the bridge between the Macca F1 and its own successor, the mighty Veyron, which managed 253 mph in a straight line and at top speed would famously empty its full fuel tank in just 10 minutes; that may have been by design, as the tires would fail after 12.

After the Veyron, it was gloves off. The world’s wealthy, specifically America’s 1 percenters, developed an appetite for supercars. Porsche built the phenomenal Carrera GT out of carbon fiber and a cast-off F1/Le Mans V-10. The Veyron begat the Chiron. Pagani began with the Zonda and followed that masterpiece with the Huayra. I’m going to do the Holy Trinity a true disservice here and just gloss over the Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1, and Porsche 918 Spyder. Sweden’s Koenigsegg has been at it for more than two decades, making lightweight beasts that beat all the Bugattis in terms of top speed, save for the one model with no speed limiter that Bugatti won’t sell to the public, the nearly 305-mph Chiron Super Sport 300+. However, John Hennessey, the Texan horsepower junkie, will sell you the Hennessey Venom F5, which will allegedly do 310 mph.

Yes, nearly two decades after the Veyron arrived, the definition of supercar is murkier than ever. The problem is, where does a sports car end and a supercar begin? Where does a supercar stop and a hypercar take over? The Porsche 911 Turbo S offers what’s undeniably supercar performance, but is it one? Or is it just a really swell GT? Let’s always remember, today’s Turbo S is only as mighty as it is because of the bat-guano-insane performance of the R35 Nissan GT-R. Is Godzilla a supercar? Probably. Back to Porsche, what to make of the newest GT3? Or even more on point, the nutso 911 GT3 RS? The latter is the only production car I’ve ever experienced that seems to slow down once you exit a corner onto a straight—its handling is that good, but do we think of it as a supercar? Or at least, does everyone?

Then we have the mid-engine Corvette, which presents a similar conundrum at an even lower price point. The standard rear-drive base model scoots to 60 mph in less than 3.0 seconds—and that really meant something not long ago—while dynamically it feels like its mid-engine contemporaries, namely the Ferrari F8, Lamborghini Huracán, and Audi R8. Supercars all. And again, this is the regular ’Vette, not the hybrid E-Ray, the track bully Z06, or the upcoming 800-plus-hp ZR1. Here we get into the nuance and minutiae of what makes a supercar. The badge? The price? The similar-to-pornography notion that an enthusiast knows a supercar when they see one? Flipside of that coin, is the new Lamborghini Revuelto a supercar? Or does its hybrid powertrain elevate it to the realm of the hypercar?

What about the electrics? Mate Rimac built a four-motor, 1,914-hp thing called the Rimac Nevera that smashed essentially every single acceleration record there is. How does a claimed 0–60 mph in 1.74 seconds, 0–130 in 4.74, and the quarter mile in 8.26 grab you? Sure, lots of folks bellyache that the Nevera has no soul, but that’s just a cop-out. I’ve driven the Nevera’s fraternal twin, the 1,900-hp Pininfarina Battista, and man, did it have soul! It also answered a question that’s plagued me for decades: How much horsepower is enough? Turns out the answer is 1,900.

The 1,972-hp Lotus Evira is also right around the corner, and who knows what the Porsche Mission X will be capable of? Can you imagine the cars we’ll discuss when MotorTrend turns 100?

Other Supercars Deserving Acknowledgment

The cars listed in our above story certainly aren’t the only supercars of note during the past 75 years, so here are some more to tip your cap toward. Keep in mind, however, this isn’t an exhaustive list, so don’t @ us with complaints about your favorite being excluded.

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