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Car Horsepower Rating

You have probably heard about horsepower from your friends, car racers or racing enthusiasts. Many vehicles today have a big sticker on them indicating their horsepower rating. But what is horsepower? What does the car horsepower rating mean in terms of performance?

The term horsepower was invented by an engineer named James Watt. He is most famous for his work on improving the performance of steam engines. His name has been immortalized by the definition of "watt" as a unit of power. This unit that compares the power of his machines to the power of one of the more common methods of accomplishing work at that time, the horse, seemed appropriate.

The story goes that Watt was working with ponies lifting coal at a coal mine, and he wanted a way to talk about the power available from one of these animals. One horse can do 33,000 foot-pounds of work every minute. It is that arbitrary unit of measure that has made its way down through the centuries and now appears in many vehicles and other household appliances like chain saw and vacuum cleaner.

If you want to know the horsepower rating of your engine, you can hook the engine up to a dynamometer. A dynamometer places a load on the engine and measures the amount of power that the engine can produce against the load. This is what car manufacturers commonly use in car testing. Car horsepower is not a constant thing. It varies from time to time depending on engine speed.

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