As a general rule, one knows what the power of his car is. It’s obvious, especially when it comes to a new car. However, if you buy a second-hand one, there is the possibility of not being clear about it or of not trusting what the seller has said. For this reason, wondering “how to know how many horsepower my car has” is something more common than you think.
The solution to the issue is much simpler than it seems: just go to the vehicle’s technical data sheet.
This is where all the key data of the car appears and between the power is not lacking. It is expressed in two quantities. On the one hand there is the fiscal power and on the other the real power.
The first is measured in Fiscal Horses (CVF), which are those used to measure how much that vehicle has to be taxed in the municipal circulation tax (also known as ‘little number’), so we are not interested in this case.
The second yes. In the data sheet, a unit of measurement with which many people are not familiar is indicated in kilowatts (kW), something that will soon change due to the arrival of electric cars, since their performance is usually indicated both in kW and in horsepower (CV), which have always been used to measure the power of cars.
The only thing that needs to be done, therefore, is to go from kilowatts to horsepower, something as simple as carrying out a multiplication: 1 kW equals 1.3596 CV. So, you have to take the figure from the technical sheet and multiply it in that relationship.
A car that has 100 kW will have 136 CV of power, a 150 kW car will have 204 CV (this figure is usually common among zero emission models), a 200 kW car will have 272 CV, etc.
The Internet is full of converters, enough to type in a search engine ‘kW to CV’ and the results will appear instantly. If not, with a traditional calculator and knowing the relationship between the two units (1 kW = 1.36 CV), it’s done.
If the car is not your property and/or you do not have access to the technical data sheet, it is also possible to go to the newspaper library and search the internet, since the specialized press will have the engines with which that vehicle was sold and, checking the version, it will be possible to come up with it.
One last aspect to take into account is that, with the passage of time and kilometers, the engines lose performance, so it is normal for the power to be lower than that officially announced.
