Who's faster? Explained and Simulated - Horsepower vs Torque

Sadly (but understandably) there is zero consideration on the actual form of the power curve. And this can change things a lot.

Motor torque doesn't mean much, by itself it's kind of pointless. Torque is force, you can apply a lot of force without moving anything. Horsepower is power, the amount of work that can be performed per unit of time. Whatever the power the motor can deliver at any given circumstance that the transmission can transfer to a useful speed determines how fast a car can accelerate.

Many seems to confuse motor torque with motor power at low rpm, that's just not how it is. It's a bit like with electricity, watts matters, if you just have a good transformer you can change amps and voltage, and have any amperage or voltage you want, exactly as you can gear up or down the motor output to get any wheel torque or any wheel rpm you want, assuming the power is enough to overcome resistance in the case of wheel rpm.

Assuming a specific gear ratio, wheel torque is a function of motor torque and that gear ratio, but motor torque still a function of available of the power at the motor rpm. But assuming adequate gear ratio motor torque is actually irrelevant.

Put it another way, to accelerate a car you need to give it kinetic energy, power is the amount of energy per unit of time. Force, as torque is, is just a part of the equation, without time or distance, and if you think even time or distance is irrelevant for fast acceleration, you're by definition wrong.

All i know is we need both with well designed transmission and tyres

Good asmr

The torque is lb*ft, finally! One day british people (and that's so funny thinking at relationships between USA and UK during thoose years) will use the napoleonic ISMU, but is not this that day

Great video! Great voice too!

Your punches analogy only works if you hit the target, you just showed examples of both power and torque not being delivered. Who cares how fast or hard you punch if you cant actually hit the target.

I lost it when the gears came in 💀

Horsepower is how fast you hit the wall, torque is how far you will pull it

It's like comparing VW Passat 1.9TDI on county road VS company Škoda Fabia 1.0 TFSI on highway :P

Do some maths on the CT6-V blackwing

A lot of people in the comments keep talking about how torque isnt important because of gears but moat of us builders arent going to hand pick all gears between 1-5(6) usually it being mostly viable to change final drive and maybe an end gear withour dishing out a lot of money. Then comes the real world stuff like wind resistance, going up hills and not being in an optimum gear when exicuting a corner. Making torque mote important in a way. Tho not a straight up example, k24 outdo k20 despite the k24 not being made for track use in a HP sense because, on track especially wheel to wheel u might find yourself in 4k rpm around another car and the 1-5 gearset that would have been optimal cost $1700

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loudest whisper ive ever heard

The high rpm engine would have shorter gear ratios, increasing torque. For rhis test to be a good demonstration of which is realistically faster, the top speed of each gear would be the same. If the rpm of one is 2500 and first gear goes 25 km/h, and both had the same gear ratios, 10000 rpm would mean first gear goes to 100 km/h. If the gear ratio was lowered it would be like this:
Horsepower biased with high rpm of 1000:
Final drive: 1
1st: 2
The top speed of first would be half of what it would if it were 1 to 1. And it would make 2x torque because of the reduction.

Torque biased with high rpm of 2500:
Final drive: 2
1st: 1
Would have same top speed, but the torque would be lowered to 500 since it would need a higher gear ratio to reach the same speed, but since the other's torque doubled it would have more torque at 1000.
More horsepower is better if you have the gear ratios. Theoretically.

thanks man, this really cleared it out for me

Do you have to whisper and use the weird fucking asmr mic settings? Shit’s annoying bro just be normal

Without watching im guessing the higher horsepower car because horsepower is torque X RPMs

So thats explains why a Rotary Engine Sucks for Torque.
Who cares if it has 350HP if its only 150ft/lb Torque.
Much prefer my 225HP but 300ft/lb + Torque

Car ASMR

You should have thrown in a 10 speed sequential and all the grip in the world to show how much faster 1000hp is over 500hp when both play to their maximum strengths.

I discovered this channel at 3am, its now 10am and I'm still watching lmao. Love this

Horse power and torque . . . . . imagine torque analogy of an old ships canon shooting a 100 pound ball every 30 seconds = the high torque engine and low torque imagine a 5.56mm machine gun spraying lead @ 100 pounds in 30 seconds - that is delivering the same "horsepower" just rpm need to be different to get the same 100 pounds across in 30 seconds

Its about power to weight ration, i will go with lower torque and high horse🐴🐎 power

Stop whispering all I can hear is noise in your voice its very hard to indoor

I had no idea it was this simple all along, i wish someone explained this to me earlier

I was always told that torque is how much you can lift and hp is how fast you can do it

Everytime I try to watch some video where metrics are explained and it's in imperial, I leave a dislike and go. Get a unit system

Making both use the same gear ratio makes absolutely zero sense and makes this video totally thrash.

I think this kind of misses the entire point of why people like torque-heavy engines.
the entire point of say, a HEMI or an LS is that they achieve higher amounts of torque at lower RPM range, so they have access to that power for a much larger portion of the RPM band, where a high reeving engine has very little power in low rpm. of course, the downside of those big torquey engines is weight (both in the car, and its own rotating mass).

Given the fact that gearboxes exist then obviously, according to physics, if energy is 1/2 mass times velocity squared and that horsepower is energy divided by time, then for the same amount of energy (speed) the car with higher HP will reach that value faster. And when it comes to steady state speed, high horsepower car also wins because power is force times speed.

the red car would acclerate faster assuming they both drive the same but the yellow should start performing better from a certain velocity

Not completely true , my GTR has 940 hp and only 605tq , you can limit torque digitally with tuning

Liter motorcycles are the plus 10.000 rpm example of very high power and modest torque at very high rpm
i.e. Kawasaki ZX-10 214 hp @ 14.000 rpm and 100Nm of torque @ 11.500 rpm

On a race engine and race situation horsepower/power is better, but for all normal traffic application torque are more important because that give us a engine that need less throttle to start, less RPM to get the power we want and also for example a less noisy and more fuel efficient car. This is also why so many people really like the AC electric engine. Because of this instant torque.

Best explanation Ever!

I've struggled with understanding this my entire life. My brain is no longer broken.

bros making this video at 3:00 AM and doesn't want to wake up his parents

Very nicely explained ……… amazing……. Thank you so much

Most drivers will benefit from a higher torque at lower RPM. Typically with high HP curves you have a narrow power band, texhnically making it more complex to stay in that peak range. Most high torque vehicles will have a large power band. That is why muscle cars are fun and easier to drive.

Great video

I'd vote for the curve. Because it's not about torque or power at some certain rpm, but instead about how much in general do you have across your convenient range, in total

HorsePower=Torque*Rpm, so
T=HP/Rpm.
By this equation, we note that, as long as you have Enouth hp, all you have to do it to increase the RPM to get as much torque as you want!
How you can do this? -Simple: Switching gears!
As long as you have a good gearbox, torque simply does´t matter! bigger horsepower will always win.

Bro what software is it ?

In real life, though it comes down to gear ratio ,weight of car and driver ability..you can see some of my videos where Ive outrun /won races against cars with way more power and torque ...

These formulas don't work very well on rotary engines.

It's pretty simple, really. Torque is just force applied. Power is the capacity of said force to actually do work over a period of time. No amount of torque can overcome a power deficit... but with enough gear/leverage, any amount of power can overcome a torque deficit, provided you have enough time to apply it.

1,000 ft pounds doesn't necessarily mean you have one (1) horsepower... but you can turn 1 horsepower into 10,000 lb/ft if need be.