Oh, good, a topic that won't generate any arguments in the comments section. I just need to get my asterisk ready, and we'll be set.
Okay. If you want to go by what former CEO Tim Kuniskis said in Dodge's "Introducing the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170" video, the quickest 0-60 set by a production car is the 1,025 hp Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170's 1.66-second* 0-60. Oh, look, there's that asterisk. If you watch the video, you'll notice that "with rollout" caveat on the screen when he says this. Never mind that he once was quoted by The Detroit News as saying, "A real zero-60 is from a dead stop" — it's more fun to report the lowest time you can.
The concept of "rollout" comes from drag racing. At drag strips, two infrared beams ensure a car's front tires are in position for a run. The thing is, the timer starts after the front wheels leave the second beam, by which point the car is already going as much as 6 mph and has traveled about a foot. It's why 0-60 tests eliminate rollout from the reported time. It's industry standard, and any 0-60 mph elapsed time you read about in Car and Driver starting in 2019, for example, deletes rollout. The magazine said this would improve acceleration times for most cars by about a tenth of a second.
There's another asterisk to discuss here, and that's the VHT-enhanced surface on which the Demon 170 achieved its record run. Many drag strips use VHT, or as it's called these days, PJ1 Trackbite, to enhance traction (and yes, it's sticky enough to pull off loose shoes when walking across it).
Tesla famously made Motor Trend use a track prepped with VHT for the Model S Plaid's 0-60 time, or the automaker would pull the plug on the test. This ensured the car ran a sub-2-second 0-60. Once Motor Trend went back to test the Plaid on non-VHT pavement, that time ballooned to 2.07 seconds. Delete rollout from that figure, and MT says the time is 2.28 seconds. Not that 2.28 seconds is slow, but for automakers competing for the quickest reported acceleration runs, every tenth or hundredth of a second matters.
Getting back to the Demon 170, Jason Fenske of the YouTube channel Engineering Explained did a bunch of math that's way more complex than what I'm willing to do, and came up with an estimate of 1.79 to 1.91 seconds to get to 60 on VHT if you count rollout. On an untreated track, the 0-60 for the Demon 170 swells.
Jason Cammisa secured one for his Ultimate Drag Race series for Hagerty, and the Lucid Air Sapphire crushed the Demon 170, no matter the surface. The 0-60 time on an untreated track for the Demon was 3.7 seconds, more than twice as slow as the original time from Kuniskis. The Sapphire's time on non-VHT asphalt was 2.1 seconds. While Cammisa didn't record VHT 0-60 times, the fact that the Sapphire was quicker through the quarter doesn't bode well for that 1.66-second claim.
The actual 0-60 king could be the Rimac Nevera. (By the way, you can impress your Croatian friends with the proper pronunciation, "Ree-mits." We all love to point out Porsche is "Porsh-uh," so consistency, and all that.) Anyway, the EV Nevera pulled, according to Rimac, a 0-60 in 1.74 seconds when the company tested it at Germany's Automotive Testing Papenburg facility. While this time does account for rollout, Rimac says it was not achieved on a VHT-prepped surface. Wait, no, Car and Driver says the Nevera's time was recorded on a prepped drag strip. Considering Rimac said the Nevera's previous record 1.85-second run was on a prepped surface, that would make sense.
Or the champ could actually be the Pininfarina Battista, which uses the Nevera's powertrain and is among the fastest EVs in the world with a top speed of 222 mph. It ran 1.79 seconds to 60 (with rollout) at the Dubai Autodrome, and, assuming the company used footage of the actual test on the Automobili Pininfarina YouTube channel and didn't just stage the video to look nice, it seems that there was no VHT on the track, meaning it laid down that record time with no help from drag-strip glue. Still, I can't find any independent tests of a Battista, so if you own one, I'll happily test it for you.
So, with two asterisks, the 0-60 record holder is the Dodge Challenger Demon 170. If you don't like those asterisks and believe Rimac's and Pininfarina's marketing, then flip a coin between the Rimac Nevera or the Pininfarina Battista — assuming you have $2-plus million lying around to buy one.