Question · Car types & culture
What is a supercar?
A supercar is a very high-performance, high-price sports car — a description enthusiasts and the press use loosely, rather than an official classification.
There's no strict engineering definition of a supercar — no cut-off displacement, power figure, or price that a car has to clear. It's a description built from a combination of things: exceptional performance, a striking, low-slung design, a price that puts it well beyond an everyday car, and usually production numbers small enough that seeing one on the road still feels like an event.
What counts as "super" has also moved with the times — the outright speed that defined the category decades ago is now matched or beaten by plenty of ordinary performance models, so the label increasingly leans on drama and exclusivity as much as raw numbers. A common follow-up question is exactly how quick these cars actually are, which is where 0-60 times come in. If that obsession with the extreme end of car design belongs on a wall, car gifts is where it lives here.
Written by Craig Fearn, Petrol & Ink.