Here you go threxx:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque#...rque_and_power

 

Wow, only the truely biased would actually be so unashamed so to sit there and say torque doesn't count when it comes to the power output of a car. Like I said, you go talk to those diesel truck drivers and those Civic Si drivers and tell them that the 200 horsepower both their vehicles puts out is no different despite the diesels putting out 5 times the torque the Civics do.

Yep - certainly no difference in power there.

Geeze you have to be amazingly and persistantly biased to get down to a war of wikipedia definitions just so that you can justify that horsepower is all that technically is defined as power when torque is defined as force.

Good job - you've sufficiently proven you can speak for the rice crowd when you want to. You should take this as a pep speach to the S2000 boards make them feel better that their cars are very powerful even if they're missing a ton of torque... ah... that doesn't matter. Just argue power and then pull out wikipedia when people argue so you can point out power vs force. Even though we all know they're related - only one is technically 'power'.

Wow....

I think you might be the one Pacer wants to talk to about understanding power "under" the curve and how torque has a very near and dear relationship to that. The only place you can assume they're the same is 5252 rpm.

 

OK, so instead of making me read all of this, can someone just reply with what we know about the engine choices and thier numbers as of now?

 

I like GM cars

Kyle makes me..

 

Teal98 is much more correct in his statement then you apparently seem to believe he is. A 200hp/200lb-ft engine is going to do as much work as a 200hp/600lb-ft engine. The 600lb-ft car is likely to have more area under the curve, but that curve isn't going to be very long, because that engine isn't going to rev up very much at all. Any torque the 200lb-ft car gives up at the crankshaft can be made back up at the wheels with the lower gearing that engine will be able to take advantage of due to it's very likely much higher rev capability. After all, it is wheel torque that moves the car, not engine torque. That is not the "ricer" in me talking. That is reality.

Tell me how many racing bodies seperate divisions based on torque/pound? You would be hard pressed to find one. Everything is done in horsepower, and for good reason. Horsepower is what accurately describes how fast a car will get from one point to another.

 

[QUOTE=Threxx]Torque and horsepower are both measures of power. They work hand in hand. One cannot exist without the other. [QUOTE]

I had to respond to this as well. You are very wrong. Torque can exist without horsepower. Put force on a bolt, but not enough to move it. You have just applied torque to the bolt, but since it did not move at all, no work was being done. Torque is a measurement of force, not power. Horsepower is not a measurement at all. It is a calculation. You do not feel horsepower. You feel torque. However, horsepower is a calculation that describes how much work is being done with the available force.

 

Replying to PacerX:

Pacerx, I owe you an apology. I was wrong there.

 

The difference between what one calls a 'torquey' engine and a 'peaky' engine is really down to how much power is available at common cruise RPM. For example, if a certain engine typically cruises at 2000RPM, and you can get 200hp at that RPM (which would be 525 lb ft of torque), and the engine is in a typical car, you'll feel lots of acceleration when you mash the gas pedal. If you have an engine that gives 200hp at 8000RPM (131 lb ft of torque at that RPM), and it has the same torque at 2000RPM, then when you mash the gas pedal at 2000RPM, you only have 32hp to move you, so you have to downshift.

Power under the curve refers to the horsepower available at the RPM operated at which you're measuring acceleration. I.e. if you're accelerating through the gears between 3500 and 6000RPM, then it's the area under the power curve that determines how fast you accelerate, not the peak point in the power curve.

Assume that the two engines above produce maximum horsepower at the quoted RPMs. If you had a CVT and could keep the engines at their respective power peaks (2000 RPM and 8000 RPM respectively), then acceleration would be the same if weight is the same. This, in spite of the fact that one engine is making 525lbft of torque and the other is making 131lb ft of torque.

 

It has nothing to do with bias. It has to do with very basic Newtonian physics. And there's no war of wikipedia. I thought you might like to see a simple explanation from a 3rd party.

They're not powerful at 2000rpm. Some people like to feel acceleration without downshifting. Others like to downshift and spin their engines up to 9000rpm. It's not like it's some religion.

No assumptions necessary. At 5252 rpm lb ft of torque equals horsepower. At 2626rpm, horsepower is 1/2 the torque number. At 10504, horsepower is double torque. And no, threxx, I think Pacer would still want to talk to you, especially based on your recent blather.

 

If someone knows, they haven't told yet.

 

Again - we're talking about trucks here. Diesel trucks are considered powerful despite often times dismal horsepower ratings because they have gobs of torque.

The S2000 or Honda Civic Si, for example, despite having nice looking horsepower ratings, are often critisized for exactly the opposite.

Thus saying torque is meaningless in terms of engine output and which one is considering more "powerful" is such a stretched form of twisting words and convenience of seeing only what you want to see, I'm almost at a loss for words.

Again - go through all of the legal definition of words you want to but you go and tell anyone that a 200hp 525tq motor and a 200hp 121tq motor are equally "powerful" and honestly act like you believe that's all there is to it... they'll laugh you out of the f*cking room.

End of story.

-Horsepower is a measurement. It can be measured in watts as well. In fact it should be since the metric system whoops the english measurement system's *** in most all respects.

-I'm very well aware of applied force vs acceleration, momentum, and action accomplished. Again - we're talking about the real world here. You walk up to somebody who just hit somebody head on who tells you they pretty much just hit a brick wall at 120 mph and start telling them that actually the rate of deceleration over the time of deceleration due to both cars giving in instead of just one car and then a mostly unmoved brick wall made his impact, despite his car having a velocity of 60 mph and the other car having a 60mph velocity and hitting head on for a total change in mass velocity of 120mph... tell him that it was actually only like hitting a brick wall at 60 since the rate of deceleration was likely twice as long with two cars involved, and tell him his car has a greater mass so it actually decelerated less quickly than the other car.

Tell him all that and he'll smack you upside the head.

And lastly, in what real world automotive circumstances is torque applied by a motor without actual work accomplished?

Right.

 

And as my final comment to this thread.

The GR-FE 4.0 makes more torque and more horsepower at almost every point along the power curve up until somewhere after 4000 rpm where the GM motor it makes a few horsepower more.

Again - you tell me which matters more in a truck. Power before 4000 rpm - (whether you measure it in torque or horsepower, or both, or sit there and argue legalities of physics definitions and their relationship ) or after.

For somebody to sit there and say +6hp peak = more powerful motor, yet preach to me about the math of power under the curve, when in the end the GR is more powerful 'under the curve' due to its torque output and torque curve... well, it's kinda silly.

 

Your post is full of straw men. I've never said any of these things.
I never said torque was meaningless. When talking about pistion engines, it has a precise mathematical relationship to power.
Current diesel pickups actually have 300+hp. I did not and would not call that dismal.
And you have to know more than just peak numbers for the full story on horsepower output. Plus, there can be many different qualitative meanings to the word "powerful". Sometimes, it means "torquey", meaning lots of excess power at normal cruising RPM. But that's because most people don't understand physics that well.

 

Once again, backed into a corner, counter something I didn't say.

What I originally said is that it had more power (meaning more peak power), despite one less cylinder and .3l fewer in displacement. While it would be nice to know power under the curve (and you really need to specify which RPM range, or it's rather meaningless), manufacturers generally don't give that out.

Peak horsepower of the I5 = 242, Peak horsepower of Toyota = 236. I still think it's an impressive accomplishment of the GM engine, even if the Toyota ends up accelerating a bit faster due to having more power under the curve over the RPM range that we are (or are not ) considering. 'Cause at the end of the day, it did it with one less cylinder and .3 fewer liters displacement.

 

Same reason people bow over ricerlicious small displacement 4-cylinders that put out 80hp liter that still couldn't push a 2800 pound car faster than a 7 second 0-60 time.

I've always been annoyed by those who focused on that at all.

My Lexus GS400 made 300hp/325tq (old SAE ratings of course) with only 4 liters of displacement. I could sit there all day and talk about how impressive that was compared to the 'crappy' LS1 that took nearly 50% greater displacement to create less than 20% greater power. But the truth is the GS' engine also had twice as many valves per cylinder, twice as many cams, variable valve timing, and many other features to its benefit that the LS1 didn't have.

So what we have here is two motors - in the end I only care about four things:
The actual power curve
Noise, vibration, and harshness from the motor
Reliability
Fuel efficiency
(and maybe a fifth that indirectly affects the price paid for the car which is the cost of development and production)

The rest of it is for engineers to learn from and ricers to quibble over.