What is horsepower and torque and how do they relate to a car being fast or a truck having a towing capacity?
In: Engineering
I’m going to give this one a try… perhaps you are familiar with a torque wrench, or at least of trying to loosen a really tight nut or bolt. If you have a regular old wrench, or a torque wrench, and you still can’t loosen the bolt, you would try to contrive a longer handle. Mechanics do this by putting a pipe or cheater bar over the wrench itself, which makes the handle longer. This will increase the torque, allowing you to loosen the bolt.
You could, instead, find someone stronger (literally more powerful). They might be able to loosen the bolt without using the cheater bar.
There are a lot of considerations when trying to go fast or tow a heavier weight. Generally speaking, in each case you can do better if you have more horsepower, period. When you don’t have unlimited power you can, with gears in a transmission for instance, get more starting torque OR more eventual speed, but not both.
Hot-rodders will literally change the gears in their car, usually in the differential, to be quicker off the line, which means they will be more likely to win a short race. That modified car will have a reduced top speed in consequence, unless they make other, dramatic, modifications.
Horsepower and power are the same thing, by the way, Power is measured in Watts, and 746 Watts equals one Horsepower. Also, for those who don’t know, a torque wrench is a wrench with an included scale… you can measure exactly how tight a bolt or nut is. This is a big deal when working on engines and boilers, that sort of thing.
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