Fun fact, they short changed the horse:
Over a short period of time, they calculate, a horse can exert up to 14.9 horsepower.
Wasn’t horse power intended to represent the average energy output of a horse over a working day, rather than a brief maximum?
OK, just to sanity check, because it’s not clear from the comments below.
We all realize that metric areas do use hp for car engines as well, right?
And a lot of them also do inches for TVs, which is weird and forces you to go digging into the specs for the cm measurements whenever you want to see if a TV will fit in a space.
EDIT: Oh, I’m wondering now, do people use liters/cc for engine volumes in the US? I don’t know, but I also haven’t ever heard of a different way to refer to engine volume ever, so they must. What would they use instead?
EDIT 2: For my money the most annoying unit conversion in car measurements is the US going for miles per gallon, keeping the volume of fuel constant and giving you the distance while metric uses liters per 100km, keeping the distance and giving you the volume of fuel. It may as well be impossible to convert between the two.
In the UK we use metric and imperial so you can buy things in kilos but also measure your efficiency in MPG. Welcome to the island of the future/past.
Engine displacement is measured in liters or cc as standard. Harley Davidson demands in using cubic inches though.
Its just the old air cooled dinosaur old-man Harleys that show their engines in cubic inches. Here’s a 975cc Harley. Here is a 750cc Harley. The sportsters have been listed in cc’s for decades.
Suzuki does it too, on their cruisers. Like the M109.
we have to dig to the specs for tv size cuz the size of tvs is the diagonal screen area not the actual size
we use cubic centimeter for small displacement engines where the whole displacement is measured (is car) and cubic inches for the large ones where the displacement is measured per cylinder (ie trains)
yup, reciprocal area measurements are a pain
My electric vehicle, when set to imperial, will display charging speed in horsepower.
Apparently a wall outlet can provide 3.2 horsepower.
That’s 149KW (200hp) on that tiny car? That sounds like a hoot to drive
The Fortwo never got anywhere near that much power, not even the Brabus versions. Toyota did make a one-off version of the similarly-sized Aygo called the Aygo Crazy which really did have 200hp and RWD though, so the idea did actually come into being at least once
Man I wanna drive one of those on the autobahn. Probably would take on a Porsche or something with that weight to power ratio.
