Something worth knowing about the term “horsepower” is that it was always a marketing gimmick. Over 200 years ago, Scottish inventor James Watt coined the term to sell his steam engines, bragging that they promised more power than a team of draft horses. The name has stuck ever since.
This isn’t to say that horsepower is not a useful unit of measurement, only that its purpose has always been, first and foremost, to sell engines. So it’s not that surprising that Porsche and the German government aren’t seeing eye to eye on the Porsche Taycan.
Porsche Says 1,093 Horsepower, Germany Says 220 Horsepower
Porsche Taycan Turbo GT with Weissach Package (Sidney Drag Strip)Porsche
The long and short of it is that Porsche is advertising the Taycan Turbo GT at up to 1,093 hp. The German government rates the car at just 220 hp.
Germany and Porsche are not measuring the number differently. Rather, Germany is looking at continuous power. Porsche is advertising based on peak output. The 1,093 hp is what you’re getting in launch control mode with Overboost for starting-line takeoffs. That 1,093-hp rating is what secures the Taycan its incredible 2.1-second 0–60 mph takeoff, but it’s obviously not sustainable for a 100-mile trip on the Autobahn.
The lower number is dictated by UN Regulation 85, which measures 30-minute sustained power. This is the number Germany uses for registration documents. And yes, it’s applied fairly. They don’t just pick on their own European cars. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, for instance, is advertised at 641 hp, but it’s registered at just 213 hp in Germany.
Porsche claims 1,019 hp in Launch Control, 1,093 with Overboost, and 778 horses on tap for normal driving. But the German government says that 220 hp is where the car settles for routine performance.
Ignoring launch control power-ups and focusing on actual consistent hp ratings makes sense if you think about it. Germany’s not telling Porsche that it’s not allowed to claim the 1,093 number in marketing material. The German government is only putting it on the record that the car is not producing four-figure hp every mile of the way.
Electric Cars Simply Can’t Produce That Kind Of Power Forever
Porsche Taycan Turbo GT with Weissach Package (Sidney Drag Strip)Porsche
You know what can produce 1,000 hp until its fuel runs out? A rocket ship. An electric car has to contend with battery temperature, limited energy resources, overheating motors, and overworked cooling systems. It would be possible to build an electric car that can keep cranking out 1,000 horses for more than a few seconds at a time, but the whole thing is probably going to melt long before 30 minutes have passed.
Think of it like going to the gym: your best single rep isn’t what you’re doing for 30 or 40 reps of bicep curls. Whether it’s combustion engines, electric motors, battery packs, or the human body, your peak output and your sustained output are two very different numbers.Which raises a question worth sitting with: if sustained output is the honest number, and even 220 hp is overkill for normal driving, how much horsepower does any car actually need?
Why Usain Bolt At Full Sprint Produces Less Power Than A Golf Cart
2025 Porsche Taycan Turbo GT with Weissach Package, rear anglePorsche
A single unit of horsepower has never really equaled a horse. A single horse can actually produce around 15 hp at peak output. Throughout a day’s labor, a healthy adult horse typically sustains a little over a single point of consistent horsepower. James Watt inflated his numbers to make the steam engine seem more impressive. Like we said, horsepower was always a marketing term.
A typical car sustains maybe around 25 hp throughout a routine highway trip, or as little as 10 hp at slower city speeds, with those numbers being higher or lower depending on weight, but chances are slim that the number would break 100 hp in any passenger vehicle. Routine driving is unlikely to tap into more than 20% of a car’s total hp rating, and that applies to combustion engines as well as electric motors.
It’s good to have that extra power when taking off from a dead start or accelerating in traffic or going uphill, but 99% of the time, you don’t need it.
To get an idea of what a single point of horsepower really amounts to, we decided to look up how that relates to human activity. Here’s how that turned out.
- A typical human can sustain an output of around 0.1 hp indefinitely.
- Most of us have a peak output of around 1.2 hp.
- Trained athletes can manage a peak output of 2.5 hp.
- Trained athletes can manage sustained output of around 0.35 hp for hours at a time.
- Usain Bolt was clocked at a peak output of 3.5 hp for the first second of his record-setting 9.58-second 100-meter sprint in 2009.
If we’ve proven anything today, it’s that a Flintstone-mobile would not be practical. We can be very generous and assume that Fred’s big caveman feet could produce as much as 1 hp for an hour at a time. The stone rollers alone would likely weigh a minimum of 3,000 lbs, so this would be similar to pushing a compact car. We would need at least a dozen Fred Flintstones in the car just to keep it rolling at city speeds, and that would be after a push-start, because there’s no way we’re getting it moving from a standstill through the courtesy of Fred’s two feet.
We Might Put Too Much Stock Into Horsepower
The Porsche Taycan Turbo GT is engineered to take the fight to the likes of Tesla’s Model S Plaid. And 1,100 hp certainly helps to get the job done.Porsche
We love big numbers. We like talking about the new Ram Rumble Bee with its 395-hp Hemi. We like pointing to the Mustang GTD’s 815-hp supercharged V8 power plant. At the end of the day, though, hp is just a number. It’s nice to have a high power ceiling, and it’s fun being pushed back into your seat when you hit the accelerator, but it’s not an objective measure of the driving experience.
If you look at our first ride-along in the Taycan Turbo GT, courtesy of driver Jorg Bergmeister, the power output gets a mention, but what truly impressed us was the car’s incredible cornering ability and the absence of detectable body roll at extreme speeds. You can get similar power output out of a Tesla Model X Plaid, but a Tesla Model X Plaid doesn’t handle like a Porsche Taycan Turbo GT.
From One Car In 1927 To 11 In 2025 – 1,000 hp Is Losing Its Meaning
The Porsche Taycan Turbo GT is engineered to take the fight to the likes of Tesla’s Model S Plaid. And 1,100 hp certainly helps to get the job done.Porsche
The first 1,000-hp car was the 1927 Sunbeam 1000 hp, aka The Slug. This was a one-off, running on a couple of V12 aircraft engines. In 2016, you could count on both hands the production models producing 1,000 or more horses, and they were all expensive supercars like the 1,479-hp Bugatti Chiron.
2025 alone saw the debut of no fewer than 11 cars boasting 1,000 hp. The Porsche Taycan Turbo GT stands out among many 1,000-hp cars not because it has the highest hp (it’s not even the most powerful Porsche), but because it is beautifully engineered to handle extreme scenarios with grace.
There may come a day, not that far from now, when mainstream cars are producing peak power in the four-digit range. Batteries are only getting smaller, motors are only getting more powerful, and the technology will generally get cheaper over time (chip shortages and supply chain disruptions aside).
Today we’ve got dozens of supercars, performance models, and rare hypercars producing 1,000 hp. Someday we may have hundreds to choose from. Give it another five or 10 years, and building a chassis that can handle all that power may prove tougher than creating the powertrain.
Moving forward, these numbers may ultimately prove, if not trivial, then at least less important. If you’ve got Chinese supercars producing 3,000 hp, street trucks doing 1,000 hp, and performance cars in the sub-$100,000 range nearing four digits, 1,000 hp will no longer be the selling point that it once was. But, a Porsche will always be a Porsche.
Sources: Porsche, UNECE.
