Why is a cars power discribed as HORSEPOWER?

Question

Why is a cars power discribed as HORSEPOWER and how do they work out how much horsepower each car has does it actually have anything to do with real horses

Answer 1

haha i always wondered the same thing, look at this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower

Answer 2

just a guess, the firts cars where compared to how much faster they could go than a horse and thats how it was worked out. i dunno?

Answer 3

It's just the measurement, it's got nothing to do with horses at all. It's just what they use to measure universally. Although the common HP measurement has nothing to do with horses. It was originally used with measuring power with trains. In theory 200Horses would be like 200HP but we all know that some horses can go long distance or some can carry lots or some can sprint very fast etc so it doesn't actually work like that

Answer 4

Horses were the standard of power for so long that they became the defacto reference point.  Horsepower was used to rate steam engines power output before autos were invented.  The measurement was carried on by auto manufacturers.

Answer 5

not only is it archaic, it's off.  a draft horse, like the budweiser clysedales actually produces 13-16 hp.

oh, and both of the answers of 22,000 and 33,000 are right.  actually 22,000 was a pony and 33,000 was for horses, but was actually just an estimate b/c only the pony was actually tested.

and actually the horse was much more of an environmental catastrophe than the car...

read

http://www.planetizen.com/node/27721

Answer 6

horsepower is an expression of work done over time,,just like watts in a lightbulb for example.it's the engine thats rated not the car.

it is called horsepower because the famour railway engineer James Watt ( the term 'watts' in a lightbulb is named after him) devised it as expression to rate the work done by horse and pit ponies

Answer 7

Coz cat power sounds silly

Answer 8

Aj H is almost exactly right...  

A steam engineer figured out it takes a (ON AVERAGE) pony exactly one minute to pull 22,000 lbs of coal out of a coal mine shaft with a rope and a pulley system.

But he increased that number by %50 to make it an easier number to work with.,, which gives us 33,000 lbs per minute.

So one horsepower - 33,000 lbs per minute... OR.. 745 point something something WATTS...

using WATTS is more complicated but also more acurate.

It's kind of an archaic system these days.

Answer 9

It has everything to do with Horses.  

If a car claims its got 500bhp its got the power of 500 stallions.  

Answer 10

I believe it dates back to the early 1900s and they rated it as how much weight a car could carry compared to a real horse.

Nowadays they rate by "brake horsepower", the "brake" being a band used to measure the level of horsepower.

It's basically a marketing term from the 1900s that's survived since then as far as I can tell.

Answer 11

i don't know and i don't care, cars are polluting

Answer 12

Horsepower was originally measured as how much coal a horse could pull out of a mining shaft which equals to 33,000 foot/pounds of work per minute so that means 330 pounds of coal 100 feet in a minute or 33 pounds of coal 1000 feet in a minute you can work it out any way as long as it equals to 33,000, horsepower is usually measured by a dynamometre what is does is place a load on the engine and measures how much the engine can resist at different levels of throttle.

Answer 13

because horses pulled carts before the automobile was invented, so to describe the power of the first cars was to compare it to the power of a horse pulling a cart, if a car had 2 horse power it was twice as fast as a horse pulling a cart. cars back then had very few horses, unlike now as some have over 500 horses.

now its changed to break horse power which is measured differently

you get what im saying right