What is the difference between a sports car, supercar and hypercar

You’ve all heard the terms “sports car”, “supercar” and “hypercar” and all these cars look plus or minus the same. If so, then what is the difference between a sports car, a supercar and a hypercar, or are they the same thing? Let’s figure it out.

And so, surprisingly, the history of motor sports began in 1884, that is, a year before the German engineer Karl Benz patented the world’s first car with an internal combustion engine. At the same time, the first sports cars appeared, or, as they are now fashionably called, sports cars.

Time passed, progress did not stand still, due to which cars, including sports cars, became more powerful and faster from year to year, and sports cars also acquired an increasingly streamlined body shape, which emphasized their belonging to the corresponding class.

Until 1920, all sports cars were literally sports cars, that is, their scope was limited exclusively to motor sports, and the first sports cars designed for public roads appeared around the mid-1920s.

After that, it became necessary to distinguish between sports cars intended for motor sports and for public roads, as a result of which the latter began to be called supercars.

The term “supercar” has been around for a long time to refer to sports cars designed for public roads, but in the 1990s, supercars began to appear that could accelerate to speeds of 350 kilometers per hour or more.

To somehow emphasize that these supercars are special because they have incredible performance, cunning marketers began to call them hypercars, which automatically increased their cost.

It is believed that the first hypercar was the McLaren F1, whose maximum speed was 386.4 kilometers per hour, thanks to which from 1993 to 2005 he held the title of the fastest production car on the planet.

It is noteworthy that in no car classification (except for the American one, where there is only the Supercar class), there are no such classes as supercar and hypercar, but there is a class of sports cars, to which the so-called supercars and hypercars actually belong.

As a result, it turns out that a supercar and a hypercar are nothing more than varieties of sports cars allegedly invented by marketers, but in fact, they are all the same.

For example, the Italian sports cars Ferrari SF90 Stradale and Ferrari LaFerrari have similar characteristics, but the former is called a supercar and the latter a hypercar.

That’s the whole difference, or rather none, because all this belongs to the same class, namely sports cars or sports cars.