Hunting For Horsepower

by Marko Peric

I remember when I first got interested in cars. It was a little more than a decade ago, a few years before I was old enough to get my driver's licence. Back then, I was into sports cars. Not the good old American muscle cars like the Mustang and the Camaro so typically the desire of high school students, but the more avante-garde vehicles like the Ford Probe or the Eagle Talon. Cars that looked sporty and boasted nearly 200 horsepower. Back then, the Dodge Stealth R/T was the holy grail of sports cars, with its 222 horsepower. No one my age dared to imagine driving the Stealth R/T Turbo, which had an obscene 300 horsepower. I remember when I was working at a gas station and a customer came in with a Stealth R/T Turbo, and I asked him how fast it could go. He said he had it up to around 220 kph.

All this is just background information to establish that when I was growing up cars with 200 horsepower were performance sports cars, and cars with 300 were rare and nearly mystical. Things certainly have changed in a decade. Today, the Honda Accord base model has 160 horsepower, while the V6 version boasts 240. The Nissan Maxima has 265 horsepower. Even the mundane Toyota Camry sedan comes in three engine flavours, ranging from 157 to 225 horsepower.

On the topic of Toyota, have you seen the new Sienna minivan? According to the advertising, the latest version of this van has 230 horsepower and can go from zero to 60 mph in 8.3 seconds. This is a van. This is a vehicle designed for taking six year olds on field trips. It is built for carpooling and soccer moms. No one is ever going to have a need to get this up to 60 mph in 8.3 seconds. Not ever. Of course, if you let your 17 year old son borrow it, he just might try. It's not the ideal choice to take out to the avenue and drag race against the neighbour kid's pimped-out Civic, but hey, you have to use what's available.

Yes, I'm going to be getting to a point shortly. That point is that we all have quite possibly gone insane. We all complain about the ever rising price of gasoline, but we seem to be content to buy larger and less fuel-efficient vehicles, and then complain even more. We all know that there's only so much oil underneath Saudi Arabia, but we try not to worry about that. At least, that's the best theory I can come up with to explain how Hummer sold 34,000 H2s last year. How many of those will ever be used to go off-roading? Drop the three zeroes and you're probably close.

Of course, Hummer is hardly the only offender here, just the handiest target. That's all about to change, however. Are you familiar with Navistar? No? That's not surprising. They own International Truck and Engine Corporation, best known for the International brand of heavy trucks. We're talking dump trucks, school buses, and long haul trucks. They now manufacture a pickup truck. It's called the CXT, and it's a pickup truck based on a dump truck chassis. They don't expect to sell of lot of them, but they are promoting it as having, and this is right off their brochure, "all the attributes of a commercial truck — but you don't need a commercial driver's license." Of course, the brochure also features the trademarked slogan "The Brilliance of Common Sense," so you can take it with as many grains of salt as you require.

This is all really a digression, though. This article is not about trucks and SUVs and vehicles of that ilk. I mean, people kvetch all the time about how SUVs are consuming all our oil and polluting the planet. I'm certainly not saying that the SUV is a wonderful thing or we should have more of them, but how is a 240 horsepower Honda Pilot any worse than a 240 horsepower Honda Accord? Granted, the Pilot weighs more, but still, that's an awful lot of horsepower for a family sedan. An awful lot of unnecessary horsepower. It might be nice to be able to pass other cars at will on the highway, but let's face it, if you're driving anything more lively than a 1991 Escort hatchback, you probably have enough horses to overtake vehicles when you actually need to.

So when the time comes, and it will, to choose your next vehicle, remember to think about the children. You are consuming the fuel reserves of their future, and they might have an opinion on that. Just keep in mind that if you ask them what they think, they'll probably advise you to get something really fast, or something really cool. Or maybe a convertible. Probably all three would be best. So while it might be good to think about the children, it might not be as wise to listen to them.