What is torque in cars/vehicles? And why do pickups have such low hp but alot of torque?

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What is torque in cars/vehicles? And why do pickups have such low hp but alot of torque?

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10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

trucks have so much torque because they need to pull things, and some trucks are HEAVY. I can’t explain low horsepower.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Torque is a measure of rotational force. Horsepower is a measure of power to the wheels.

Torque helps your car get started from being stopped – i.e it’s job is initial acceleration. Horsepower helps your car to reach and maintain the speed you want.

For towing, torque is the most important. With low torque you’ll never get the vehicle moving if it’s towing too much. For speed, horsepower is more important because the higher horsepower vs weight a car has the faster it can go. So sports cars will generally have high horsepower for their weight.

Torque is the wrestler or weight lifter that can push your car from stopped, but once it’s moving isn’t really good at getting it to go fast. Horsepower is the sprinter or runner that’s able to push the moving car to go really fast, but isn’t strong / heavy enough to actually get it going from stopped.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Torque represents how easily a force can change the rotational moment of a given body. Pushing on a wrench at the base produces low torque, but push down at the handle and you’re producing more rotation for the same amount of force. That’s torque, and the same principle applies with car engines.

Pickup engines are tuned for torque because they’re used to pull heavy loads. Horsepower is a measure of the power an engine can supply, and is linked to both torque and RPM (how fast the engine works).

Anonymous 0 Comments

“Torque,” in general, is a measure of force applied to a rotating object. In the case of a car, the rotating object is the drive shaft, what comes out of the engine and transfers force to the wheels.

High torque means you can overcome a lot of resistance to motion; in the case of a pickup truck, that resistance is what you have piled in the flatbed or what you’re towing behind you. A vehicle that doesn’t have enough torque won’t be able to move if it’s loaded too heavily.

*Horsepower,* as the name implies, is a measure of power — work over time. In cars, it’s measured by multiplying engine torque by RPM — revolutions per minute, or how fast the drive shaft is spinning. If you have high torque, but your engine isn’t spinning very fast, you’ll end up with lower horsepower.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Other answers are great.

The transmission & drive train can convert the engine’s power: either for speed (as in a race car), or torque (as in a truck hauling a heavy load).

Anonymous 0 Comments

Torque is how much you can move.

Horse power is how fast you can go.

Pick up trucks can’t go fast, but can move a lot of weight.

Cars can go fast, but can’t move much weight.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Basically: torque is how much force makes something spin, or makes it stop spinning. If you multiply speed (rpm) by torque you get power (horsepowers).

Cars have a transmission (gears) between the engine and the wheels, witch can change high speed low torque into low speed but high torque. What it can’t change is the power. 200 hp is going to be 200 hp regardless of how you try to change it’s speed and torque (ignoring losses).

The real reason pickups have high torque, because big engines (especially diesels) can’t rev as high as small engines, so they need more torque to make the same power.

Anonymous 0 Comments

An answer I haven’t see is that horsepower is the torque times the rpm of the engine. Trucks are tuned to have torque at lower rpm’s so they can tow heavy objects at a lower engine speed. A Lamborghini can also tow a heavy trailer, but they would have to do it at a higher RPM than a truck would, which would put more stress on an engine.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You know how some jars are hard to open? Like a jar of olives, maybe? Torque is like the strength it takes to open a jar. The more stuck the lid is, the more torque it takes takes to open it.

Horsepower is like how many olive jars you can open in an hour. Maybe you get tired, maybe it takes you a long time to open each jar. The reason doesn’t matter, it’s just how many jars can you open in an hour.
So, at the end of the hour, how many olives are free of their jars? It depends both on how strong you are and how quickly you can open those jars.

Now imagine that instead of opening jars, your torque is turning a wheel. The olives become distance.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are lots of good answers already.
I will just add that, what really matters is torque at low engine speed.

Diesel engines and gasoline engines can have the same maximum torque, but on diesel engines the torque will be available on rpm twice as low.
This is what matters when you need to pull.
Similarly,