Horsepower’s Relentless March: 2000-Now
This story first appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.
This is the final installment in a multi-part series exploring the developmental timeline of horsepower in the automotive industry. We kicked things off with the engine’s early development, from 1776 to 1900, here. Time marched on, and so did our coverage—through the early 20th century, the eventful decades of the ’20s–40s, as things heated up in the ’50s, adjusted to a changing world in the ’60-80s, and, through the 2000s, explored new horizons. When you’ve read through this article, we invite you to scroll back to the top and catch up on the other evolutionary milestones in horsepower covered in previous installments. Enjoy! –Ed.
How much horsepower does it make? The question is, in many practical respects, pointless. Pretty much every vehicle on the road has enough power to do what it needs to do, and then some. Yet for enthusiasts, it’s critical, part of a secret handshake that tells us not only what someone’s driving, but whether they know and appreciate what they’re driving.
The horsepower your car produces is the product of some 250 years of continuous improvement, serendipitous discoveries, and daring feats—most of it revolving around a type of air pump we call the internal combustion engine.
As we write this, the future of the engine, the beating heart of the automobile, is somewhat in doubt. There’s no question, though, that our horsepower quest will continue. We will keep tweaking, and the numbers will keep growing. But it’s worth pausing, if only for a moment, to reflect on just how far we’ve come.
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2003: The first dual-clutch automatic transmission arrives in VW’s Golf R32. It’s able to shift quicker than conventional automatics (not to mention human beings) and thus better able to keep an engine (in this case, a 237-hp V-6) at its ideal operating speed.
2005: The Bugatti W-16 Veyron. Roughly 450 of these bolides are built and sold with prices well north of $1 million. The Veyron’s quad-turbo 8.0-liter, 16-cylinder powerplant is essentially two overhead-cam V-8s creatively joined together. The initial 987-hp output is eventually raised to 1825 horsepower.
2006: Ford fires the first shot in a new horsepower war with the Shelby GT500, whose 5.4-liter V-8 is supercharged to the tune of 500 horsepower. General Motors and Chrysler soon develop their own supercharged V-8s, resulting in everything from 638-hp Corvettes to 710-hp Dodge Durangos.
2021: Tesla shattered the 1000-hp barrier with its Model S Plaid edition, rated at 1020 horsepower. Since then, more than 20 builders have offered cars with four-figure output ratings, ranging from the $100,361 Dodge Demon 170 to the aptly named 3000-hp, 310-mph, $14.4 million Spyros Panopoulos Chaos. Both Chrysler and GM began offering 1000-hp V-8s over the counter as crate engines.
2024: We are unquestionably living in a golden age of horsepower: 1234-hp sedans (the Lucid Air Sapphire); 315-hp compacts (the Honda Civic Type R); 720-hp pickups (the Ford F-150 Raptor R).
Beyond: Climate regulations will begin to weigh on high-horsepower gas engines—2025 will see the final phaseout of Chrysler’s Hellcat V-8—but the party ain’t over yet. Jump to our feature on the 2025 Corvette ZR1 to read all about what may be the ultimate American expression of horsepower.
All of these numbers would have exploded my teenage brain. I remember the Porsche 911 Turbo being the insane acceleration king back in the ’80s with horsepower that would elicit a yawn today. Four point something seconds for a 0-60 in a factory car seemed insane. Now I have a car in my garage that does it in well under 3.
This is the era where in the case of too many cars the tech, particularly the interior tech just went too far for me. Touchscreens for everything, overly complicated for no good reason, reliability that is becoming spotty. The older the car the in the 2000’s the more likely it is to be near my ideal. Some cars do sneak through but as time marches on the fun seems to be sliding away.
There’s a point of diminishing returns to everything, and horsepower is no exception. I remember this when comparing the 1999 Miata I owned to a Camaro Supersport convertible I purchased to be the family minivan when our daughter came along, the Miata having failed at my most valiant attempts to make it a family car. The Camaro was awesome and still one of my favorite cars ever, but I honestly got more smiles per mile in the much less potent Miata. Truth was, the Camaro’s power was getting close to scary and had the potential to turn my daughter into a fatherless child. Yet by the standards of today it was tame. I’ve been in Dodge Demons and the occasional Shelby Mustang, and honestly the look on the driver’s face is not carefree even though the true depths of the cars power are still leagues away. They’re trying to impress me but all I can see is that you can’t use the power and the power you can use strikes fear into your heart, rather than the ultimate driver’s reward: joy. In the real world, less can be more, and more can be less.
Exactly! Extra horsepower comes in handy when you have a need to brag about how much horsepower you have. Other than that, it’s more fuel, more insurance, more heat, more weight and really not all that useful.