Eli5: How come cars With more than 10x the horsepower of a normal car only has a top speed that is about 2-3x higher than one of a normal car.

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Fx: The Bugatti Chiron has just under 1500hp and a top speed of MAX 500kmh, while a Volkswagen Golf has 150hp and a top speed of around 200kmh.

In: Physics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Helping you (hopefully), Intuit the square cube law.

Imagine walking through a sparsely populated field, every so often you need to move left or right to dodge a rock, tree or have to push a branch out of the way. While you’re walking you perform these actions 10 times a minute.

You decide you need some extra exercise so you’re going to run – now every minute you’re covering more ground and you’re dodging more, swatting more and paying more attention, thinking faster.

This higher pace allows you to cover more ground faster but because of the extra cognitive load and increased rate at which you’re dodging or pushing things out of your way you’re using more energy every minute and you’re no longer getting a break it’s relentless, one thing after another.

This feeling of many things getting harder at once as you go a bit faster is the square cube law – as you go faster you’re not just linearly expending energy overcoming inertia you’re also fighting air resistance moving through a given amount of air particles takes at least a given amout of energy and if you want to do it in less time you need more energy per second in addition to more energy per second to continue overcoming interia.

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