Supercar vs Hypercar vs Megacar: Where the Lines Are Drawn

Threshold	Supercar / Hypercar / Megacar	What kind of number that is
Power	~500–800 / ~800–1,300 / 1,341+ hp	Only the last one is a line. The other two are where the market lands in practice.
Price when new	$200k–600k / $1m+ / $2m+	Above a million the price stops being a price and becomes a filter.
Built per year	hundreds–thousands / dozens / single figures	Volume is what actually separates the tiers.
How you get one	order / be offered / be known	Access, not money, is the ceiling on the top two.
Usable on a public road	daily / technically / not meaningfully	A hypercar is often slower on a real road than a good supercar.
In a rental fleet	routinely / no / no	Supercars are the tier you can book this weekend.

The tier that exists at street level Lamborghini Huracán Evo A naturally aspirated V10 with a setting for a public road. A supercar by every definition on this page. Dates and rate →

The three words, one sentence each

Nobody has ever agreed on where a fast car stops being a sports car and starts being a supercar, or where a supercar becomes a hypercar. But a megacar makes a megawatt, because a Swedish manufacturer built a car with a one-to-one power-to-weight ratio and the arithmetic came first.

A supercar is a road-legal production car designed round performance rather than round carrying people or luggage, built in the hundreds or thousands a year, usable on an ordinary road on an ordinary day: mid-engined more often than not, two seats more often than not, a price in six figures.

A hypercar is the tier above, where the limiting factor stops being engineering and becomes access: production measured in dozens, a price that starts at a million and is not negotiated, and performance that is only reachable somewhere you are not. A megacar clears one megawatt. What follows is a set of working thresholds rather than an official standard, because there is no official standard and any page that pretends otherwise is inventing one.

Megacar: the one word with a number in it

Koenigsegg built the One:1 in 2014 and named it after its power-to-weight ratio: 1,360 metric horsepower against 1,360 kilograms, one to one. In doing so it produced 1,000 kilowatts, 1,341 horsepower, at 7,500 rpm, and one thousand kilowatts is one megawatt. The word followed the arithmetic rather than the other way round, which makes it the only term here you can settle with a calculator: a car making 1,300 horsepower is not a megacar and a car making 1,341 is.

Whether that is a useful category or a very good piece of marketing is a fair question, and it does not change the fact that it is checkable, which puts it a long way ahead of the other two words. Only a handful of cars have ever cleared it, they were built in single figures, and every one lives in a private collection with a name attached.

Hypercar: where the price stops describing the car

The hypercar tier is defined by two things that have nothing to do with lap times. The first is production volume: a few hundred at most, often a few dozen. The second is that the price stops being a price and becomes a filter — Car and Driver’s MSRP band for the Bugatti Chiron runs from $3,300,000 to $3,900,000, which is not a number anybody negotiates. Two consequences follow that people find surprising.

A hypercar is often slower on a real road than a good supercar, because the performance is only accessible somewhere you are not. And a hypercar is almost never available to drive on any terms: the Chiron, the Jesko, the Valkyrie and the Senna are owned rather than rented, and the 488 and the Huracán are the cars to drive here.

Supercar: the tier that actually exists at street level

This is the category with cars in it, and it is where every exotic in Los Angeles sits. Four of ours, with the numbers that place them: the Ferrari 488, a 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8 at 661 horsepower, 3.0 seconds to 60, 205 mph; the Lamborghini Huracán Evo, a 5.2-litre naturally aspirated V10, 3.3 seconds, 202 mph; the Lamborghini Urus, a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 at 641 horsepower, 3.5 seconds, 190 mph, the super-SUV; and the Chevrolet Corvette, a 6.2-litre V8 at 490 horsepower, about 2.9 seconds, 194 mph — a sports car, arguably a supercar.

Look at the acceleration column and the argument answers itself. The cheapest car in that list reaches 60 mph first. Straight-line speed stopped separating these categories about fifteen years ago, which is exactly why the definitions moved to price, volume and access instead, and why anybody telling you a supercar is “a car that does 0–60 in under three seconds” is quoting a rule that a mid-engined Corvette breaks. The vocabulary for the shapes underneath the tiers — where a coupé stops and a berlinetta starts — is set out separately, and the marque argument inside the supercar tier is settled in this garage.

What it costs, and how it reaches you

The supercars here sit in the top deposit band — a $2,000 refundable hold, back 5–7 business days after the car returns, with the Protection plan priced per day off that band — and the Corvette, mid-engined and first to sixty, sits in a lower band. Collection from our lot on Robertson Boulevard is free and delivery to the partner hotels in Beverly Hills is complimentary.

Airport delivery is $150 both ways standard, where the car waits in the airport parking structure and you take the shuttle out to it, or $300 both ways VIP, where it is at the terminal, which on a two-seater with a shallow boot is the tier that earns its money; one direction is half. The rest is in the terms; the cars and their calendars are on the marque pages, Lamborghini rental and Ferrari rental in Los Angeles.