Perhaps this is one of those questions you just happened to ask yourself recently, or maybe you saw that one scene from 2 Fast 2 Furious where Brian O’Conner drives his Evo VII at highway speeds in reverse. In any case, you’re here because you’re wondering how fast a car can actually drive in reverse. So what’s the answer?
As you might be able to guess, this entirely depends on what kind of car you’re talking about here. Some cars can’t drive very fast in reverse to begin with, while other cars potentially could but are restricted from doing so for safety reasons. Regardless, a car’s reverse top speed will always be lower than its actual top speed.
Today, we’ll be going over all the facts about your car’s reverse gear and explaining what exactly it is that affects a car’s top speed in reverse.
Can a Car Go As Fast In Reverse As It Can Going Forwards?
In short, no. This can be for one of two reasons, as we’ve mentioned; either the design of the car simply doesn’t allow for high speeds in reverse or the car has a safety feature designed to prevent high-speed reverse driving from happening.
In the case of most cars, their top speed is restricted by their gear ratios. As you probably know, almost every car has multiple forward gears, which are necessary because an engine that drives the wheels directly would be unable to reach a very high top speed or be unable to accelerate very well.
A car’s top speed and acceleration at any given time are largely determined by what gear it’s in. Lower gears have a higher gear ratio, meaning that they’re better for acceleration and torque, and higher gears have a lower gear ratio which is better for top speed.
The reverse gear in most cars usually has a pretty similar gear ratio to first gear, meaning a car’s top speed in reverse is usually pretty similar to its top speed in first gear. Most cars have a first gear top speed of around 30 mph or so, so you can expect a car’s reverse gear top speed to be about the same as this if not a bit slower.
What Is the Fastest Car In Reverse?
Obviously, no one has bothered to test the reverse top speed of every car in the world, so it’s hard to say for sure what the actual fastest car in terms of reverse top speed is. However, there is at least one car that is known for having an unusually high reverse top speed.
What might surprise you to learn is that this car isn’t a Ferrari, Bugatti, or some other hypercar that you would probably assume would hold this title. It is, in fact, the Ford Crown Victoria, which you probably know as being the car of choice for police forces and taxi drivers for pretty much the entirety of the early 2000s.
Ford Crown Victoria was able to achieve the reverse speeds it did largely thanks to the gear ratio of its reverse gear. The Crown Victoria had a 2.32 reverse gear ratio, which allowed it to reach a top speed of about 63 mph in reverse.
Another car that is surprisingly quick in reverse is the Nissan Leaf. This electric car uses a single-speed gearbox with a 7.94 gear ratio, which in a gasoline-powered car wouldn’t provide the wheels with enough torque to even get moving. However, since electric cars make all of their torque at 0 rpm, this isn’t a problem.
The thing about electric cars is that they don’t actually have a reverse gear; instead, the entire motor can change what direction it spins in. This, coupled with the single-speed gearbox, means that electric cars can travel the same speed in reverse as they can going forward. However, cars usually have an electronic limiter installed to prevent this.
As for how fast the Leaf can actually go in reverse, this was tested by stunt driver Terry Grant at the 2012 Goodwood Festival of Speed. Grant managed to achieve an average reverse speed of about 55 mph on the 1.16-mile long hillclimb course.
A much faster electric car like the Tesla Model S would probably be able to go a lot faster in reverse than this, although Teslas have reverse speed limiters in place to prevent damage to the car. Some of the moving parts on a Tesla require lubrication, but the lubrication pump doesn’t work when the car is driving in reverse.
Do All Cars Have Multiple Reverse Gears?
For the most part, pretty much any car you buy is only going to have one reverse gear, since that’s all that most cars really require. However, there are a few cars out there that do indeed have more than one reverse gear.
Perhaps most notably, any Mercedes cars that used the 7G-Tronic automatic transmission had two reverse gears. One of the reverse gears is used when the car is in sport mode, and the other is used when the car is in comfort mode. Mercedes recommends comfort mode for snowy conditions, so we can assume that one of the reverse gears provides more torque than the other.
A lot of vehicles that are intended for off-roading can also have multiple reverse gear ratios. Basically, off-roading vehicles have the standard set of multiple forward gears, but also come with additional gears that can modify the gear ratio of the regular gears.
These are referred to as “range change” gearboxes, as they give cars a high and low range of gears. The high range gearset is what is used for regular street driving since it provides a balance between torque and wheel speed.
The low range gearset, on the other hand, significantly lowers the car’s top speed and acceleration but massively increases its torque.
So, while an off-roader vehicle like this might only have one reverse gear, it might still have multiple reverse gear speeds thanks to having a range change gearbox.