Most of the time when we look at the high-performance cars everyone dreams of having one day, numbers are big—horsepower, cylinder count, displacement, price tag. But we often ignore some of the most incredible numbers performance cars can give us: their hilariously low fuel-economy numbers.
Good gas mileage isn’t the top priority for cars like this, of course. Most owners won’t take a Ferrari 812 Superfast on a cross-country trip anytime soon. The good ones will, at least.
But that doesn’t stop the fuel-economy numbers from being wonderfully low, and a bit surprising at the same time. That battle between the Bugatti Chiron and Koenigsegg Agera RS to see how fast each car could go from a standstill to 249 mph and back to 0 mph last year gets a little more laughable when you realize they were getting worse gas mileage than some of the less efficient 18-wheeler trucks do.
So we put together a guide of how many miles performance cars get to the gallon, with data pulled from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s website. Not all the cars we wanted to analyze were on there, so we took the top performance car available from each company and stuck it on here in order from worst gas mileage to the best. (You’ll notice that a lot of startups and hypercars aren’t on here.)
For the cars the EPA has record of, there’s a whopping 10-mpg difference between all of their combined fuel-economy numbers but huge variations in prices and horsepower:
As easy as it is to mock these low numbers, it’s impressive that these cars can squeeze such colossal top speeds and power figures out of each gallon of gas. You’d see similar fuel economy figures on something like even a mid-80s Oldsmobile Delta 88, which was as likely to break 200 mph as it was to grow wings. We’ve come a long way in fuel efficiency over the past few decades—a real long way.
Correction: This post originally misstated that the Bentley came with a W10, not a W12.