The average horsepower of a new American car has more than doubled since 1980. You probably haven’t noticed, and most of this additional horsepower goes to waste. In fact, our cars represent a vast reservoir of untapped energy producing potential — more than 38,000 gigawatts in total. That’s 35 times the combined output of every coal, nuclear, wind, solar, and hydroelectric power plant in the country. Alexis Madrigal does the math. What are we doing with all this extra muscle under the hood? Couldn’t it be put to better use? [%comments]
Why Do Our Cars Have So Much Wasted Muscle?
TAGS: cars
and 
. You can also watch it on 
It’s not that there’s so much wasted “muscle”, it’s that curb weights (and passenger weights, ha-ha) have shot way way up due to all of the mandatory safety equipment, crumple zones, reinforcement, not to mention consumer’s tastes for features once found only on “luxury” cars. ABS, AC, power windows/steering, monster stereo systems, you name it.
“My kingdom for a clean 89-91 CRX si”
We’re doing nothing with most of that horsepower. That’s because the HP doesn’t really come from the engine … it comes from the gasoline. And gasoline is an fairly expensive way to produce energy. If it weren’t, hybrids wouldn’t be cost-effective.
BTW, if a human can produce 1/35 HP, and there is one car per person, then the population as a whole produces exactly the output of “every coal, nuclear, wind, solar and hydroelectric power plant in the country.” But so what? The fuel for humans is even more expensive than for cars.
Nuclear, wind, and solar use cheap fuel but expensive means of turning the fuel into energy. Horses, humans and cars use expensive fuel but cheaper means of turning the fuel into energy.
If the fuel is expensive, it doesn’t matter how much output the plant can produce, does it?
Cars are also a lot heavier, a lot safer, and a lot more comfortable than they used to be, so that’s where most of that extra power is going.
I think this confuses the flow of energy with the amount of energy available.
Just about all of our cars are limited in how much work they can do by how much gas we put in them (plug-ins and solar powered being the exception), plus they’re all very inefficient, so the amount of power we put to the wheels is much less then the potential in the gasoline we put in (the rest going to heat). Plus the more horsepower we choose to use (the faster we want to go or accelerate) the less efficient the system becomes.
So, what we have isn’t a lot of energy that we’re not using, instead what we have is the option to increase the rate that we use energy in exchange for a decrease in efficiency.
Most cars driving on the highway are only using a small fraction of their potential horsepower, but they have the option to use much more in some cases (merging on to the highway, running from the cops, NASCAR) when we need it.
It’s a fair point to argue if we’re spending too much money/resources to create engines with this amount of flexibility, that we’ll probably rarely, if ever, use; but that’s a much more complicated calculation.
Ultimately the amount of power we produce from fossil fuels isn’t limited by the potential to produce it, but the supply of the fuel.
Solar, on the other hand, isn’t limited by supply, but by the means to produce it efficiently. If we were all driving solar cars capable of sustaining 300 hp we would indeed be sitting on a huge, unexploited source of energy.
Faster acceleration probably alleviates some of the increase in traffic jams.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I have doomsday fantasies where the extra horsepower is put into good use. Just imagine outrunning morloks, zombies, or mercenaries in one of those moped-powered hondas from the seventies.
“Couldn’t it be put to better use?” –> Let’s better not use it. Most power plants can generate more energy while polluting less.
One suspects that today’s larger vehicles driving at higher speeds (65+ vs. 55) compared with the tail end of the gas crunch makes for the most disparate comparison available…
Aside:
Did anybody else see “Agricultural prime mover” in those 30′s statistics and wonder about the theological implications of John Deere as some sort of deity?