💀 Maybe that’s why there are so many tragic accidents, because people don’t feel the speed and the fact that energy is proportional to the square of the speed.
😎 In a car, it’s easy because you’re pressed into the seat, there’s a steering wheel and brakes, while on a horse, you have to balance to stay on. Now I know and feel how much power a horse can generate because I’ve experienced it with my own body.
🏇 Interestingly, the best horse can produce a maximum power of 15 horsepower [hp], while a human can only produce a maximum of 1.5 [hp].
🦉 Knowing the conversion factor and having my own experience, I can confidently say that a car with 150 [hp] is actually equivalent to the power of 10 athletic horses, and this really makes sense and is consistent from a physical point of view.
💡Horsepower [hp] is a unit invented by Watt. It was used to define the power of steam engines. One of the goals of the steam engine creator and the new unit may have been to compare it to horses, which were the basis of transportation at that time. From a mechanical point of view, at the dawn of the automotive industry and the industrial revolution in the 18th century, this comparison made sense… Horse vs. steam engine…
💲I wonder if the creator of the new unit of power, horsepower [hp], deliberately didn’t refer to reality and embellished (inflated) the conversion factor for the benefit of marketing the emerging steam engines. On paper, they had more power than in reality, because 1 [hp] is actually 1/15th of the power generated by the most efficient horses.
🐴In this text, I deliberately do not use the Polish version of horsepower, which is ‘koń mechaniczny’ (mechanical horse), because I consider it pointless. A live horse is not mechanical. The world moving towards vehicle electrification is ceasing to use horsepower in favor of [kW]. Electric cars are compared using [kW], not [hp].
👉 I propose creating a new, true unit of power: the sport horse – 1 [ks], with the actual measured power of the strongest horse of all time, i.e., 1 [ks] = 15 * 745.699 [W] = 11,185.485 [W] = 111.85 [kW] (for the uninitiated, the power of 1 [hp] = 745.699 [W]).”
