Horsepower Wars: are 1000bhp supercars repeating a fatal 1990s music mistake?
The Horsepower Wars are getting worse, says Porter, but EVs make them tolerable
During the 1990s, the music industry got stuck in a one-upmanship battle to make CD releases increasingly speaker-rattling in a battle known as the Loudness Wars. It was, ultimately, a stupid endeavour that forced carefully constructed music to become more and more compressed in order to permit an artless wall of sound and the perception of enormous volume. Thankfully, musicians and record companies began to realise listeners might prefer something a bit more subtle and by 2013 respected mastering guru Bob Katz was able to confidently tell the Audio Engineering Society conference that the Loudness Wars were over.
If only the same were possible for the Horsepower Wars. For decades, car makers have been trying to outdo each other with outputs, and the escalation has been enabled by the progress of technology, from fuel injection and turbos to less sexy stuff like more accurate casting of major engine parts and manufacture of the bits that hold them together. Imagine telling the people signing off the 1.6-litre, 96bhp engine in the original Escort XR3 that one day a hot hatch of the same capacity would make 276bhp. They’d drop their cigarettes in shock. But a GR Yaris manages exactly that.
It’s impressive what can be wrung from an internal combustion engine but also, sometimes, as idiotic as losing any sense of what quieter musical parts are doing because you just want to liquidise a listener’s brain. In the real world you don’t actually need 1001bhp in a supercar, or even almost 400 horsepower in a small Audi hatchback. But here we are, all because a car maker can’t release a new model that doesn’t match strides with its rivals. And, perhaps more tellingly, a new model without some quantifiable improvement over its predecessor. So car makers are locked not just in a war with each other, but with themselves.
The Loudness Wars could end with quiet dignity because no one in pre-streaming times was printing a loudness number on their album sleeve. But it would take a plucky car maker to say, look everyone, this one has a weaker engine than the last one. So power keeps rising. And it’s only getting worse in the EV age.
A few years ago, a friend in the US was the first person I knew to try Tesla’s newly announced Ludicrous Mode, and his verdict on the acceleration it delivered was summed up in one word: ‘unpleasant’. At the time I wondered who would want such a thing, but now everyone’s at it. Remember when the Bugatti Veyron was a circus freak for its headline-grabbing 1001 PS, or 987bhp in old money? Now 1000 horsepower is the target output of the upcoming four-door Jaguar Type 01 and, if you’re impatient, you can already order a Porsche Taycan Turbo GT with 1020bhp available under launch control.
I’ve despaired about the Horsepower Wars because we all know that underpowered cars are some of the most fun cars. I say this as the owner of a 64bhp Honda Beat that sounds like a newborn NSX cub at well below the speed limit. But I’ve also had a brief go in a prototype of that new Jag and recently spent some time in a mildly less nutty Taycan Turbo S with 939bhp available if you want to launch it. On paper, both seem daft ideas, like embracing the Loudness Wars by sticking your head directly into an amp. But the saving grace of the super-powered but moderately practical EV is the palette of calibration possibilities. Mega-output internal combustion is very exciting, but also comes with certain characteristics like torque curves and noise. Both are very appealing, even if they also draw the sort of tiresome ringpiece you find on Instagram crashing a Lamborghini into a bus shelter. Whereas EVs don’t deliver the noise, and the torque is there from the off, so that raw hit of oomph can be tuned differently.
The not-really-a-turbo Taycan is tremendous. I reckon the Jag will be pretty special too. But what’s remarkable about both is that they don’t smack you around the chops with their power largesse. I’ve only tried the Jag in normal mode, which makes it feel gentle, almost languid, until you clog it, at which point the bonnet rises slightly like a speedboat and it surges decisively but not unpleasantly towards the near distance. The Porsche too has a relaxed character – until you mat it and encounter a sensation that does weird things to your inner ear and fringes that feeling my mate described in a fast Tesla. Being aware that you have this capacity becomes quite pleasant, however. You know you’ve got it, you just don’t feel inclined to use it all, except perhaps on quiet dual carriageways when you want to amuse your children.
The Horsepower War isn’t going anywhere. But thanks to the calibration possibilities of EVs, it’s entering a new age of speaking softly but carrying a sodding big stick.
This story was first featured in evo issue 347.
