KaareKanin t1_ja6v2a5 wrote
Reply to comment by platypuswill in ELI5: Why does farming equipment require such low horsepower compared to your average car? by thetravelingsong
The only thing is, I'm fully aware of this. With his answer Fried validated the initial question, and I still maintain that for normal people using cars normally, they don't require much power at all. They may use it in short bursts because it's there, but I've had rentals with only double digit horsepower figures, and I was never a hindrance to normal flow of traffic.
A tractor probably comes close to using what their engines can output frequently, and if they were to do ploughing a lot faster, power requirements would go up. It's almost all about speed.
platypuswill t1_ja6xxfr wrote
Yes and speed translation comes down to the difference between the original answer of what's more important for each piece of equipment,. Horsepower or torque? For farm equipment it's torque, for cars horsepower. If it's heavy and you need torque for moving heavy loads slowly but with power. taking a hatchback up a hill and onto the freeway horsepower, there have been some awesome answers so far in the responses that nailed it. This was a great question to ask and I hope a lot of others got their answers as well!
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