Because Kubelwagon mentioned it, I searched for the car stats file I did 5 years ago. The test was made on a selfmade map and includes all cars one can drive in GTA2.
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/ILYyCUz.jpg[/IMG]
Cars with light red background can only be found in Multiplayer. green text = best value, red = worst. t1, t2, t3 are times(secs) for the 3 checkpoints of the test track. XYsp are the times(secs) the car needed to reach a speed of XY. dmg is the amount of damage the car can sustain, in number of rocket launcher hits it takes to destroy the car. + or - means if you would shoot it with a Machine Gun f.e., it can take more or less shots. max_sp is the real maximum speed of the car (not all numbers in the handling file correspond to real speed). acc_t is the time(secs) the car needs to reach its maximum speed.
This seems to take into consideration both top speed and acceleration, but what about brake stopping distance?
Most cars stop from max speed in like 1-2 tiles and in about 1 second, so it doesn´t matter that much. Note that each map is 255x255 tiles big.
Btw about the max speeds, I also measured some speeds in tiles per second (tps) using coordinates:
Schmidt - 5.8 tps Beamer - 11.5 tps Shark - 10.94 tps M.Roadster - 11.2 tps Hachura - 12.1 tps Ped - 1.9 tps Tank - 3.03 tps
With this the speed of the character is roughly 62 - 63.
