If you’ve been searching for a new car’s power output online or in a brochure you may have noticed different manufacturers have different ways of measuring this. This is something that can create confusion for car buyers if they are unfamiliar with the measurements and their differences.
The most popular measurements include bhp, PS, hp and kW. What do they mean and how do you make sense of them? In this guide we summarise what each power output measurement is and explain how you can easily convert one type to another.
Bhp
The term bhp stands for brake horsepower and in Britain it is the most commonly used measure of engine power.
Brake horsepower takes into account the various parts in a car which require power from the engine and therefore partly consume some of its true total power output. Therefore, bhp measures how much power the driver actually has access to when they put their foot on the pedal.
PS/HP
PS is short for the German word ‘Pferdestarke’ which translates to horsepower. It is also sometimes referred to as metric horsepower. PS used to be the European Union’s official legal measurement for engine power, but it was replaced back in 1992.
Despite that change, certain manufacturers selling new cars in Britain continue to use PS for measuring power output.
Alternatively, certain manufacturers may disclose the output of their cars as hp – short for horsepower – but the figure will be identical to the PS measurement.
Compared to bhp, the key difference with PS is the power output measurement does not subtract the power used for the various parts like the gearbox etc. Which means the figure turns out larger compared to the bhp equivalent.
One PS works out to about 98.6 per cent of a single brake horsepower.
kW
Some manufacturers may offer a power output reading for its cars in kW, short for kilowatts, alongside bhp or PS. In fact, kW is commonly used by car companies to measure the power output of fully-electric vehicles or the electric motor in a hybrid vehicle. This leaves it up to motoring websites or car buyers to convert the kW figure into the equivalent bhp or PS number.
A single kilowatt equates to around 1.34bhp.