Horsepower is NOT how fast you hit the wall. Torque is NOT how far you take the wall with you

Last Sunday I published a video where I tried to make a very down to earth and visual explanation of Horsepower and Torque to help anyone confused by the two concepts wrap their head around them. And apparently it worked for a lot of people as I received a lot of positive comments and feedback. This made me extremely happy and I am very grateful for all the comments and feedback. But I also received a very high number of comments containing this phrase: "Horsepower is how fast you hit the wall. Torque is how far you take the wall with you". I decided to make this follow up video in hopes of clearing away the misconceptions around this and similar explanations of horsepower and torque that are very frequently used in the car community. I believe that reinforcing these explanations as facts isn't a very good idea as they are ultimately misleading and will serve as a poor knowledge foundation for someone who doesn't understand the concepts.

NOTE: In the video I said that we will come back to the first part of the definition "horsepower is how fast you hit the wall" but I didn't actually come back to it. I apologize for that. This video was completely unscripted and made ad-hoc as I was getting overwhelmed with the sea of identical comments. What I wanted to say was this: If our two cars from the same example have everything identical except the amount of horsepower, then yes, the one with more horsepower will be capable of hitting the wall faster. But if everything else is identical (max rpm) than the car with more horsepower also must have more torque. This means that you could just as well say that Torque is how fast you hit the wall.

The gist of the video is that horsepower is not how fast you hit the wall. That's speed. And horsepower is only one factor influencing speed. There are also aerodynamics, gear ratios and much more. Torque is definitely not how far you take the wall. That's momentum. If we imagine two cars, one with 1000 Nm of Torque and the other with 100 Nm of Torque, with everything else on the cars being absolutely the same, these two cars will carry the wall the absolutely same distance if they both have the same mass and hit the wall at the same velocity. This is because momentum is only influenced by mass and velocity.

Basically the main problem with all the quasi definitions of horsepower and torque are that they're trying to correlate horsepower and torque to acceleration and speed. This doesn't work because acceleration and speed are complex concepts influenced by multiple factors so these "definitions" need like 5 disclaimers to have an even remove chance of working, and a definition that needs disclaimers isn't very good at doing it's job. The only definition that really doesn't need a disclaimer is that torque is a rotational force and horsepower is the rate of that force. This definition underlines another key problem of the other "definitions" and that's their separation of torque and horsepower. Trying to draw distinction between the two concepts only creates confusion because horsepower and torque are in fact inherently connected. Horsepower is torque times rpm. Horsepower is very much dependent on torque. The more torque you have the higher the chances that you'll also have more horsepower.

If you must have a car and a wall here's a better use of a car and a wall. Torque determines whether you can move the wall from a standstill. Horsepower determines how fast you can keep pushing the wall. This is still far from perfect and refutable but it's a better definition as it isolates torque and horsepower a bit better and takes acceleration and velocity and vehicle mass out of the equation.

Original artwork characters in the thumbnail are from POWeeeeeRRRRRRRRRRrrrrRRRRRRRR by Sadyna
https://www.deviantart.com/sadyna/art/POWeeeeeRRRRRRRRRRrrrrRRRRRRRR-202444167

A special thank you to my patrons:
Daniel
Peter Della Flora
Daniel Morgan
William
Richard Caldwell
Pepe
Brian Durning
Andrew Ruud
Brian Alvarez
Holset90

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