What is more important horsepower or torque?

Question

What is more important horsepower or torque?

Answer 1

horsepower. torque is just how much power the engine can output and how fast it can turn. if you have a low horsepower but a high torque, your car will still be slow. but generally the lower torque you have, the faster your car can go because torque can make you fishtail and skid out

Answer 2

It  depends on the application.  Quick start off the line and pulling up a hill demands torque.  High top speed demands HP.  

Answer 3

Nothing in this world is more important then horsepower and torque

Answer 4

Depends on what your doing.

Going up hill fast torque

going on flat out surface HP

Really both are just as good.

One of the "laws" of engines is

When HP goes up torque goes down.  gearing turbo's superchargers and other things can help getting more of one or the other (HP  and torque)  at certain times.  

Most all sports cars with real performance have more HP than torque.

While almost all trucks up to semi's have WAYY more torque than HP.

To a guy looking to p**p his friend's pants in the passenger seat HP is most important.

To a guy looking to haul a ton or rocks torque is most important.

Answer 5

What do you value more, burnouts (torque) or going fast (hp)?

Answer 6

Torque is more important. Torque is the amount of twisting force that the motor can produce. The more torque you have, the more power you get to the ground.

Horsepower is a unit of measurement for how much work can be done compared to the output of a horse. So the more horsepower you have, the more work can be done on the same task for the same amount of time allowed.

Take a 600hp sports car and try to pull a semi trailer with it. Not gonna work too well. The car has a low torque output. Take a 400hp semi truck and pull the same trailer. The semi has 4-5 times the torque output, so it can pull the trailer.

Now take those two motors, and lets mount them to the lightest frame and axles that will hold the weight, and make each combination weigh the same. Now race your MadMax contraptions, the 600hp is gonna whoop all over that 400hp semi motor.

Hope that kinda makes sence.  

Answer 7

As the other answerers have alluded to but not quite said, the two are completely different concepts having to do with different things, but work together when a car operates.  Torque is pulling power, and it’s best demonstrated as the grunt that gets you moving, while horsepower is what keeps you going.

The horsepower of an engine is how much work the ENGINE can do over time.  The exact definition of one horsepower is 33,000 lb.ft./minute. Put another way, if you were to lift 33,000 pounds one foot over a period of one minute, you would have been working at the rate of one horsepower. In this case, you'd have expended one horsepower-minute of energy.

Torque, on the other hand, is a measure of how much a force acting on an object causes that object to rotate.  It's the pulling power of the engine translated through the transmission.

So both are important.  Generally speaking though, if you want more pulling capacity, torque is going to be important.  But you aren't going to have much torque without much horsepower.  And again, this will all depend on the type of transmission that you have.  Hopefully this shed a bit of light on the situation for you.

Answer 8

Horsepower generally leads to faster top speeds, but the part of your powerband that you actually feel is the torque- that's to say when you get thrown back in your seat, you're feeling torque. Torque is the force from the engine that actually makes the change in speed happen. However, in petrol powered engines, more horsepower means more torque. Diesel engines generally have more torque than petrol engine per liter by design.