When your car-obsessed buddy, a professional car journalist, or even the automaker itself says something like, “The McLaren 750S gets from zero to 60 miles per hour in 2.3 seconds,” you know that’s a quick car. Highway speed from a standstill in about the same amount of time it takes to phonetically say “McLaren seven-fifty S” is no small feat.
A car’s 0-60 mph time feels like one of those conventions that’s simply been around forever because, for most of us, it kind of has. There used to be a car magazine literally called 0-60, and there are even memes of former President Joe Biden pointing at [insert comically slow motorized vehicle here] and marveling at its ability to go from “zero to 60 in 4.1 seconds.”
But how exactly did 0-60 specifically become the universal yardstick of automotive acceleration? To explain, we need to flip to the chapter on the origins of car journalism itself. Motor101 is in session.
Clarkson Before Clarkson
The very notion of measuring how long it takes a car to reach 60 mph originated from American automotive journalist Tom McCahill. In fact, he didn’t just pioneer 0-60 testing, but arguably the entire idea of car reviews as we know them today.
The son of a Mercedes dealer and grandson of a wealthy New York lawyer, McCahill turned to freelance writing after the Great Depression wiped out his auto repair business. In that time, having an objective third-party journalist test and report on what a car was like simply wasn’t a thing. The sentiment from automakers back then, in fact, was “We test our own cars and aren’t interested in outside opinion,” per MotorTrend.
So, McCahill hatched a plan to essentially lie his way into what would unofficially become the industry’s first press car loan. According to Hemmings, he pretended to be a photographer and “conned a railyard employee” into pulling a 1946 Buick off its train so he could shoot it. Lo and behold, a full written first drive review of the car appeared in the February 1946 edition of Mechanix Illustrated. The road test magazine feature was born, and soon the manufacturers gave in and played ball, supplying cars directly for the sole purpose of journalistic evaluation.
The very notion of measuring how long it takes a car to reach 60 mph originated from American automotive journalist Tom McCahill.
McCahill’s prose, directly or otherwise, would influence how generations of future car reviewers would write and present. This being decades old, it hasn’t aged well. But to give you an idea of his style, this is how he once described a Jowett Javelin’s ashtray: “Like the cup your favorite dentist tells you to spit your teeth into, it hinges out but spends most of its time just rattling.”
Another review of a 1966 Dodge Coronet characterized the car’s Hemi engine “as snarly as a Bengal tiger in a butcher shop.” Said to have “never met a metaphor or simile he didn’t like,” he was basically Jeremy Clarkson before Jeremy Clarkson. Another key part of McCahill’s schtick? He’d always record how long it took for a car to go from zero to 60 mph.
So, the practice of citing 0-60 mph as a measure of speed was not born from, say, a Road & Track staffer having an eureka moment in the middle of a road test one day. It’s more like McCahill writing the entire blueprint of the car review format back in the 1940s, and 0-60 was simply a part of it.
Why 60 MPH?
Dodge Challenger SRT Demon
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like anyone ever bothered to ask the man himself why exactly he picked 60 mph as the benchmark and not, say, 50 or 70 mph, but it’s not hard to come up with a few theories.
Back in the day, state-level speed limits already hovered around 50-60 mph, with Washington officially raising it to 60 in 1951. So, measuring how quickly a car could get from a standstill to the speed the average driver would realistically, regularly ever go made perfect sense on vibes alone.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like anyone ever bothered to ask the man himself why exactly he picked 60 mph as the benchmark…
There’s also the convenient fact that 60 mph is approximately 100 km/h, but something tells me New York-born McCahill wasn’t thinking about the metric system when he came up with the test. If you want precision, 60 mph is about 97 km/h, while 100 km/h is actually 62 mph. That discrepancy, by the way, is why certain exotic manufacturers only ever officially quote a 0-62 mph time, not 0-60.
Another thing you may or may not know is that a lot of the 0-60 times published today are timed with a one-foot rollout. Inherited from drag strip timing light behavior, the timer only starts after the car has moved about one foot forward—tiny, but when you’re benchracing with margins measured in tenths if not hundredths of seconds, every foot counts. In fact, Car and Driver explicitly tests and publishes both 0-60 and 5-60, highlighting differences in powertrain flexibility.
Does It Still Matter?
Through much of the modern era, a production car being able to reach the big 6-0 in anything less than about five seconds meant pretty serious performance, although the bar has definitely been raised in recent years. In the context of six-figure high-performance machinery built in 2026, three is arguably the new five, and the speediest machines on the road are now consistently flirting with figures that start with one, especially when electricity is involved. Chevy, for example, made a lot of noise recently when its new, hybrid Corvette ZR1X hit 60 in just 1.68 seconds.
Kudos to every powertrain engineer, aerodynamicist, and tire supplier involved… but does it even matter anymore? In an era when Porsche’s electric family SUV can out-accelerate its own seven-figure hypercar from just a decade ago, a mind-bending zero-to-60 time isn’t that impressive anymore. It’s table stakes. When everything is quick, quick is no longer special.
Car people love a single, simple stat, though, and when you’re debating the merits of, say, the latest Ferrari against the Lamborghini-loving jabroni at the bar, little shuts them up quicker than a showstopping 0-60 time. Thanks to McCahill, the stat has been deciding sports car pub debates for the past 80 years—and as every seasoned drag racer knows, there are few things more powerful than sheer inertia.
How’s that for an analogy, Tom?
