Horsepower is the currency of the car world. Like us, you probably see and hear the term used every day, and are able to instantly understand where a supercar or city car fits in the performance scale based on the number of horses it cranks out.
The term horsepower dates back more than two centuries to the late 1700s when British inventor James Watt came up with the idea of comparing the power of his new steam engine with the power of a draft horse used to turn the mill at a brewery. Watt calculated that one horsepower could lift 550 lbs (250 kg) of weight by 1 ft (300 mm) in 1 second.
But how much “horsepower” does a horse really make. Insane as it sounds, Donut Media hooked one up to a dyno to find out once and for all. Hooves and rollers tend not to match up that well, so the Donut team joined forces with LA-based engineering firm Motivo to modify a Honda Civic whose wheels would turn the rollers on a portable dyno using real horse power.
Related: This Is What Happens When You Put A 3,300 HP Dodge Viper On The Dyno
The horse would turn the wheels by pulling on a cable spooled in the engine bay and hooked up to the car’s transmission, and the brains at Motivo would then calculate the drivetrain losses to come up with a true power figure for the pony.
This is yet another original and entertaining video from Donut, who put a ton of effort into answering a question most of us have wondered about at some time, so we’ll not spoil the team’s thunder by revealing the final equine output. But given that host Jeremiah cranked out 1.16 horsepower (that’s 1.18 PS and 0.87 kW for you metric folk) on the dyno, you can probably guess that a horse – or at least the handsome horse Donut borrowed for the challenge – makes more than 1 horsepower.
