| Until
the Automotive Sector opened-up in India around mid-90’s,
Maruti’s had no competition and for that matter –
so did the Amby’s and Fiat’s. Each one held their
Buyers to ransom on their own terms and prices – till
it all started to change thereafter.
With more and more options becoming available in each segment
every other day, the ‘game’ perhaps is at its
peak now-a-days, to the extent that even the ubiquitous M800
has a choice of 3-Engines – ranging from ~ 35 to 45
Bhp! Each Manufacturer is bombarding the hapless prospective
Buyer with all kinds of ‘Performance’ figures
– mostly led by ‘Peak Torque’ and ‘Max
Bhp’ of their Cars’ Engines.
So – where does all this leave an average Buyer –
who’s perhaps not even a Science Graduate and unable
to spell/pronounce words such as ‘Torque’. I am
not exaggerating this since only the other day, I came across
an ‘affluent’ SSI ‘acquaintance’ driving
around Honda City-Vtech. I couldn’t help asking him
what made him buy that one and he very sheepishly said that
being the most expensive H-C around, it has the highest ‘tor-ku’
in its class!
That said and done, let’s try and get the ‘Bull’
of it by all its horns. We’ll do it in two parts for
ease of Readers’ assimilation. Part-I that follows deals
with the basics and Part-II will deal with their real life
implications.
Elementary
Definitions
1) Work
Is
the ‘physical effort’ required to do some thing,
such as pulling a Bucket of Water out of a Well. Its measure
or ‘Unit’ is ‘foot-pounds’ or ‘kg-meters’.
As an example, consider pulling a bucketful of water weighing
15 Kgs from a depth of, say, 10 Meters. So the ‘work’
done is 15 x 10 = 150 ‘kg-meters’.
2)
Power
It’s the ‘Rate’ of doing ‘Work’,
such as pulling 10 buckets as above in one hour or a part
of it.
The most popular unit of Power is the ‘Horse Power’,
which from ancient times was the rate of work an ‘average
horse’ could do. In scientific parlance today, it
translates into 4,500 kg-m/min or 33,000 ft-pounds/min.
In Metric System of Measurement, therefore, one ‘horsepower’
= 746 Watts.
In post-war Germany, ‘PS’ was and is still used
– which was/is a functional equivalent of the ‘British’
Horse Power. In reality, it equates as 1.0 HP = 1.07 PS.
Today, it seems the Car/Advertisers use ‘PS’
atleast in India to mislead the gullible public - as the
same HP/BHP ‘sounds’ a little higher when expressed
in PS! |
