The fastest and most fuel-frugal sports cars
You don’t have to spend a fortune at the gas pump to go fast and look good doing it.
Sports cars are true dream machines. Sleek and stylish, they’re able to race the sun to the horizon with neck-snapping acceleration or wind their way tenaciously through twisty mountain roads. Unfortunately, some of them can also be true gas-guzzlers.
For example, the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 gets a mere 12 mpg in city driving, while the rip-roaring Dodge Challenger SRT doesn’t do much better at 13 mpg around town. At that, high-performance cars further drain wallets by requiring costly premium-octane fuel that can cost as much as $1 more per gallon than regular grade gasoline, depending where you live.
And driving a car that gets fewer miles to the gallon means you’ll be spewing additional pounds of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year that are said to be major contributors to climate change.
Fortunately, just because you lust after the quickest coupe or convertible on a dealer’s lot doesn’t necessarily mean you have to drive an ecological nightmare or make daily visits to the gas station. Weightreduction measures along with various advancements in engine and transmission technology help make some of today’s performance cars faster and more efficient than ever.
We searched the Environmental Protection Agency’s fuel economy ratings for the 2019 model year, as well as automakers’ estimated 0-60 mph times, to come up with a list of the 10 fastest sport coupes and convertibles that get the best fuel economy among performance cars. Each can make the sprint to 60 mph in less than five seconds and still get 20 mpg or better in city driving.
We’re featuring the 10 fastest and most frugal sports cars, along with their fuel economy ratings, 0-60 mph times, and the EPA’s estimates regarding their annual fuel costs (based on 15,000 city/highway miles driven per year at national average gas prices) in the accompanying box.
In fact, the quickest and most energy efficient vehicle
on the road consumes no gasoline at all. The top version of the full-electric Tesla Model S can make the sprint to 60 mph in a rocket-like 2.4 seconds in its appropriately named Ludicrous mode. That’s especially quick for a car of any kind, but the Model S is a sedan, not a sports coupe or convertible, so it’s excluded for our purposes here.
One caveat: The EPA warns that “aggressive” motoring, including jackrabbit starts, driving at sustained high speeds, and heavy braking — which is how one tends to drive a sports car when given the opportunity — can slash a vehicle’s gas mileage by 15-30 percent at highway speeds and by 10-40 percent in the city.