[geff82]

When they are really small: yes. But most cars come with gear boxes and horse powers dimensioned so that you are almost always driving at low rpms at normal autobahn speeds (like 120/130). At least my new car with the 140HP engine rolls along at about 2500rpm at Autobahn speed.

[gambiting]

I don't know where you live, but 140bhp is a lot for a small-ish car here in UK - it would almost certainly be prohibitively expensive to insure for a young driver for instance. My sister's first car is a VW Polo with a 1.0L 65bhp engine, and that "monster" runs at nearly 4000rpm when doing the legal 70mph(~120km/h) on the motorway. At least it's not a turbo engine so I suppose it's not that bad. It was still a small fortune to insure purely because she's under 25 and had her licence for a year.

[crgwbr]

Interesting; things are a bit different in the US. I bought my first car at 18. It was small, a Honda Civic Si, but had 198bhp. That wasn’t a slow car by any means, but wasn’t considered especially fast either.

[ska]

For more perspective, that’s about what a really fast motorcycle puts out these days, e.g. H2 SX. That’s a whole different ballgame of power-to-weight. Not many are pushing 200, but there are lots in the 150 to 180 range, stock. Heck, even some of the midsize (read, small and under 450lb) are knocking on the bottom end of that range with displacements well under 1l.

[gavia1]

200HP is considerably higher than the average power output of most European cars.

Most small hatchbacks will be producing somewhere between 90HP and 170HP. Estates and wagons from 190HP to 250HP and SUVs somewhere similar.

[ska]

FWIW, I suspect it’s higher than average for North America too, for smaller cars. Higher proportion of trucks and SUVs though, and “small cars” are mostly a bit larger.