When it comes to buying a car, having a car with a lot of horsepower is something many people look for. However, have you ever wondered why the unit of horsepower is used and what importance it has? If you have, there's an interesting story behind it.
During the 18th century, inventor James Watt wanted to sell his steam engines but didn't have any unit of measurement to describe the amount of strength his engines could produce. To come up with a unit of measure, he watched horses, because horses were slowly being replaced by engines, to see how much weight they could pull per minute. By a rough estimate, a horse would pull up to 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute. With those estimates in mind, he had a unit for his engines to compare to, which meant the more horsepower a car has, the more power a car has overall.
If you have further questions about horsepower, visit us at Dolan Mazda and see which amount of horsepower in a vehicle could work for you!