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  • The first gas-powered car sped through the streets of Mannheim, Germany at a blistering

  • 10 mph. Today, we can go a LOT fasterso what's changed?

  • Hey motorheads, Trace here for DNews. Over the last 130ish years, car speed has come

  • a long way. As of February 2016, the fastest car you can buy is the Bugatti Chiron, which

  • is limited to 261 miles per hour. (420 km/h). But why is that car faster than yours? How

  • did we figure out how to make cars go faster?

  • First of all, and it's probably obvious, but the major reason cars today can move so fast,

  • is because engines have gotten a lot more powerful in the last 130 years. The 1908 Ford

  • Model T had only 22 horsepower and a top speed of 45 miles per hour (70 km/h). But today,

  • a base Honda Accord can easily clear 100 mph (160kp/h) with almost 200 horsepower!

  • Modern cars can pull more power from highly refined petroleum. Today's more powerful cars,

  • can push more mass, more easily. But it's not that car engines have gotten more efficient,

  • the Model T only got 3 miles per gallon less than the average car today! Only 14 to 30

  • percent of the power from gasoline combustion is used to pull the car forward; most of the

  • energy is lost to heat and friction. So, to give cars more horsepower engineers have either

  • added more engine, or reduced weightor BOTH. It all comes down to the Power to Weight

  • ratio.

  • That super-fast Bugatti Chiron has 1,500 horsepower, but needs TWO V8 engines to get that -- that's

  • a lot of weight. So, to make the car go fast, they needed to make it lighter. The power

  • to weight ratio, is a simple formuladivide Weight by Power.

  • Lemme give you an example or three… A 1200 pound Model T, has 22 horsepower. It's weight

  • to power ratio is 54.5 pounds for every horsepower. That's not great. A 3000 pound 2016 Prius

  • has 121 horsepower so has a better ratio of 24.8 pounds for every 1 horsepower! While

  • the new car does have more power in a heavier vehicle it is a balance. By comparison, the

  • Chiron weighs in at 4,400 pounds with 1500 hp: for a ratio of 2.9. 2.9 pounds per horsepower.

  • That. Is. Crazy. Obviously, it's way fast.

  • If engineers can get a low weight-to-power ratio, they'll have a faster car. But to MAKE

  • a car with a heavy engine have less weight ain't easy. Ford mixed the steel on Model

  • Ts with the element Vanadium to try and make it lighter; engineers still do stuff like

  • that today. The Prius uses aluminum, plastics, and special high-tensile, high-strength steels.

  • The Chiron, however, was built with ultra-lightweight materials like titanium and carbon fiber,

  • keeping the weight down even further and making for an even lower ratio! Of course, the Chiron

  • is 100 times more expensive than a Prius, partly due to that lightweight material, so

  • there's that.

  • Tweaks like these are the reason horsepower has increased 80 percent from 1980 to 2004…

  • but even then, we can only do so much. If you have a big engine, and a light car, you

  • can still only make it go so fast. And the faster you go, the more air friction will

  • start to affect top speed. For this reason, the car that holds the fastest land speed

  • record in the world -- 763.035 mph (1227.985 km/h) -- looks NOTHING like a Chiron, or even

  • a car. It looks like a jet, because jets are perfect for minimizing drag from air.

  • But basically, for every pound added either more power has to be coaxed from the engine,

  • or a bigger engine has to be built. The power-to-weight ratio is a delicate balance even for the muscliest

  • of cars. Without understanding it, we'd never have made cars go fast.

  • Sponsor? It also takes a lot of effort to keep your

  • car clean. Techron by Chevron’s patented Precision Clean Technology targets and removes

  • deposits left by lower tier gasolines. It bonds with and breaks apart carbon deposits,

  • more effectively than other additive technologies. Techron gets into the deepest parts of the

  • engine, where the most destructive deposits built up, and sweeps them away.

  • No matter how fast we can make cars go, though, there will always be speed limits holding

  • us back. How we decide speed limits isn't arbitrary to get me pulled over every other

  • week... in fact, there's a ton of research on it! I checked! Take a pitstop and watch

  • here.

  • What's your favorite speedy car? I always loved the Lotus, any of them. They're so curvy!

  • Tell me the car you had on the poster hanging in your childhood bedroom...and subscribe

  • for more dnews, tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day

The first gas-powered car sped through the streets of Mannheim, Germany at a blistering

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