Can South Africa’s Cheapest Car Beat A Bicycle In A Drag Race?

Like everyone, I enjoy watching a good drag race but the actual utility of the drag test is kind of questionable these days. This drag race, though, is one of the best bits of consumer journalism I’ve seen in years.

The competitors are the Bajaj Qute and a man named Ashley. To be fair, the Ashley in question is an accomplished racer and he’s on a pretty fancy-looking bicycle. The heart of the question is, can a person capable of kicking out 1.2 kW (1.6 hp) outrun a Bajaj capable of 8.08 kW (10.8)?

This test is actually quite clever for a couple of reasons, though. Firstly, the Bajaj technically isn’t a car. Legally, it’s a quadricycle with a 216 cc engine that came from something with two wheels.

Read More: Bajaj Qute Is South Africa’s Cheapest Car But Is It Worth It?

That means that it has a top speed of just 70 km/h (43 mph). Put a couple of people inside, though, and it’s not hard to add a proportionally significant amount of weight to the 400 kg (881 lbs) car and slow it down considerably.

In an earlier review, host Ciro De Siena said that the Qute can actually keep up with traffic with only him in it.

“In my experience from having driven this around Cape Town for a bit, it’s actually okay in stop-start traffic and sort of on normal roads where the speed limit is 60 [kph, 37 mph],” says De Siena. “It’s actually fine. I wasn’t expecting it to be, but it’s fast enough off the line, it’s fast enough through the gears, it gets to 60 Ks an hour fast enough.”

With three other people in it, though, can it still keep up with traffic? The results of the first drag race would seem to indicate that it cannot because the bike takes off and beats the Bajaj handily. The trouncing is so bad, in fact, that they decide to run the race again with fewer people in the Qute.

I won’t spoil the results of the second race, but the first one might be enough to make South Africans think twice about putting down 75,000 Rand ($5,300 USD) for the Quadricycle. Mind you, it isn’t as hard as you might think to spend much money on a bicycle, either.