Carule

threethan@reddthat.com to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 278 points –
46

Fun fact, they short changed the horse:

Over a short period of time, they calculate, a horse can exert up to 14.9 horsepower.

Wasn't horse power intended to represent the average energy output of a horse over a working day, rather than a brief maximum?

OK, just to sanity check, because it's not clear from the comments below.

We all realize that metric areas do use hp for car engines as well, right?

And a lot of them also do inches for TVs, which is weird and forces you to go digging into the specs for the cm measurements whenever you want to see if a TV will fit in a space.

EDIT: Oh, I'm wondering now, do people use liters/cc for engine volumes in the US? I don't know, but I also haven't ever heard of a different way to refer to engine volume ever, so they must. What would they use instead?

EDIT 2: For my money the most annoying unit conversion in car measurements is the US going for miles per gallon, keeping the volume of fuel constant and giving you the distance while metric uses liters per 100km, keeping the distance and giving you the volume of fuel. It may as well be impossible to convert between the two.

In the UK we use metric and imperial so you can buy things in kilos but also measure your efficiency in MPG. Welcome to the island of the future/past.

Engine displacement is measured in liters or cc as standard. Harley Davidson demands in using cubic inches though.

Its just the old air cooled dinosaur old-man Harleys that show their engines in cubic inches. Here's a 975cc Harley. Here is a 750cc Harley. The sportsters have been listed in cc's for decades.

Suzuki does it too, on their cruisers. Like the M109.

I didn't know that and it is hilarious.

Its also incorrect for about half the bikes harley makes...

And don't look too closely at cruisers from Suzuki.

we have to dig to the specs for tv size cuz the size of tvs is the diagonal screen area not the actual size

we use cubic centimeter for small displacement engines where the whole displacement is measured (is car) and cubic inches for the large ones where the displacement is measured per cylinder (ie trains)

yup, reciprocal area measurements are a pain

How much do you weigh? As much as 11 stones and 2 pebbles.

How far is that? 2 feet and 5 thumbs.

How fast are we going? About 6 knots in a rope that's hanging overboard.

It does make me laugh sometimes sorry. But the real problem is not the base units.. It's the multiplication factor.

I agree that most of the imperial system sucks, but knots (and by extention nautical miles) have a good reason for being used everywhere when navigating long distances around the globe because both are based on the way coordinates work.

My electric vehicle, when set to imperial, will display charging speed in horsepower.

Apparently a wall outlet can provide 3.2 horsepower.

What πŸ˜‚

Giving me horsepower for the motor output instead of kilowatts kind of makes sense, but it changes everywhere.

The battery just displays as a percentage, otherwise it might tell me the energy remaining in horsepower hours.

That's 149KW (200hp) on that tiny car? That sounds like a hoot to drive

The Fortwo never got anywhere near that much power, not even the Brabus versions. Toyota did make a one-off version of the similarly-sized Aygo called the Aygo Crazy which really did have 200hp and RWD though, so the idea did actually come into being at least once

Man I wanna drive one of those on the autobahn. Probably would take on a Porsche or something with that weight to power ratio.

Ok, i'm gonna be that guy.

Newton meters (Nm) is a measure of torque.

While horse power (HP) is a measure of engine power.

You obviously cannot convert one into the other because they mean different things.

Also, when EVs eventually become the mayority, the kilowatt (kW) is gonna take over as the new standard for measuring engine power.

Joules actually are Newton-metres, in a sense. A joule is (genuinely) defined as the work done when a 1 Newton force displaces a mass by one metre. So as long as you're willing to risk the Bureau international des poids et mesures assassinating you for your physics crimes, you can totally pretend that Newton-metres are for measuring energy and Nm/s is a reasonable way to measure power. While you're at it, you should measure torque in Coulomb-volts for the same reason

I think that's the joke: Americans don't care about efficency, only power.

It's a waste to make a 500hp truck when you could make two 250hp trucks instead

Op truck because one horse is up to 15hp. That truck would be 7500hp πŸ’€

I made this as a total shitpost but I'm loving the informative comments. Godwin's law at its finest.