Horsepower vs Torque – A Simple Explanation

When it comes to being able to measure what your car is capable of in the real world outside of getting track times, horsepower and torque numbers come up regularly as they are the most common ways of being able to put down, on paper, what exactly your car is capable of. Now, these numbers can tend to get thrown around a lot and, while they’re easy to compare to one another, sometimes, it feels like people don’t actually know what the substance is behind these numbers and what the results actually mean. You could have all the torque in the world but if you don’t know what it is or how to change it, what good is it really doing you?

This time, thanks to the guys over Engineering Explained, we’re able to get a very real demonstration of what each of these figures actually is attributed to. Therefore, the next time that you end up getting a chart when your car comes fresh off of the dyno that shows you exactly how much power and torque your car is making, maybe you’ll be able to understand a little bit better exactly what some of those figures actually mean and how exactly you can go about applying them to the real world, figuring out where you need to improve in order to make your car perform more efficiently in whatever way it is that you want it to.

If you follow along closely in the video below, you’ll be able to get some very visual representations of what exactly is happening with your car when it creates a certain power or torque number. After watching something like this, you might be able to understand the workings under the hood a little bit better and those arbitrary numbers become something very real that you can almost reach out and touch.