If you should get a chance to visit the wonderful Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart, it really is a great experience. Having queued for a while outside and paid your 10 Euros,  you’ll first take an elegant glass lift to the top floor. As you emerge from the lift, you’re immediately confronted by a lifesize model of a horse! The caption underneath says something like ‘In the beginning’ and so your journey through the ages of automobiles commences.

As soon as steam engines replaced the horse, a reason was needed to compare the output of the horses with the engines that replaced them. If you were interested enough in how it happened, take a look at the fascinating article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower

Still, this is thegarageblog and so it shall surely be about cars or motoring. The humble ‘Horsepower’ has defined how car engine power output have been measured for years afterwards. In the early days of motoring, your car was simply named after its power output and/or number of cylinders. For cars in Britain, the RAC then devised a simple formula for categorising cars based on the engine power. This ‘fiscal rating’ gave manufacturers the opportunity to order their range in terms of size and power, thus creating the first ‘pecking order’ of cars and prices. The tax you paid on a car was based on its power output, so the lucky owner of a Vauxhall 10-4 (10hp 4 cylinders) knew that if he worked hard and his business prospered, he might one day be able to afford the much posher Vauxhall 14-6.  Having that extra power and cylinders identified the owner out as one of life’s great achievers - perhaps a boss of some sort, maybe the owner of a factory or shop.

By offering better and more powerful models in their range, the vehicle manufacturers gave motorists something to aspire to, and a way of easily identifying their position in society. Of course, they’d also have to wear the right clothes and attend the finest establishments to complete their image, but at least their choice of car said a lot about who they were.

Throughout the 40’s and 50’s, some manufacturers still based their model designations on the size or power outputs. An Austin A30 might be driven by the lowliest clerk, whilst his boss would more likely have a huge A95 parked outside.  Ford however chose to use simple names. Although obvious from seeing one in the flesh, a Zephyr was  far more powerful and expensive than an Anglia, Popular or Prefect. A nice mid-range option was the Consul. All lovely names, but no real reference to engine size or power . The old fiscal rating of horsepower was becoming obsolete as cars became more powerful and much faster. An Austin ‘3 litre’ had a badge proudly proclaiming its prowess on the back, and although it just looked like an enlarged Austin 1100, 1300, 1800 or 2200 model, the extra chrome and twin headlights made it quite obvious to anybody that it was an expensive and powerful machine.

tdi

Before the modern-day practise of ‘chipping’ or ECU remaps, the way to make a car more powerful was to fit a bigger engine, stuff an extra carburettor or two on it and perhaps a 4-2-1 exhaust manifold. A simple TC badge and a pair of SU carburettors meant a slightly faster and more desirable car than the standard model. One thing was for certain – if you could afford the faster model of a standard ‘bread and butter’ car, you’d want your fellow motorists to know about it. Twin carburettors were great until fuel injection arrived in the 1970’s. Who cared if your Triumph 2500 PI (pertol injection) drank like a fish and broke down every 2 miles – that ‘PI’ badge on the back showed that (on the rare occassion it worked) your car could show a clean pair of heels to a normal 2500 TC model. Fuel injection became widespread in the 80’s, with most marques having a range-topping GTi, GTE or XR3i to tempt the new breed of ‘Yuppies’.

As if that wasn’t enough, Vauxhall had to also show that not only were their cars fuel injected, but also how many BHP (Brake Horsepower) they had. A Cavalier SRi without the vital 130 emblazoned down both sides was obviously driven by a pauper who couldn’t stump-up the extra above the cost of the 115 BHP version!

As Diesel engines became acceptable to power things other than combine harvesters, tractors and HGVs, they too began to adopt an identification system of their own. Volkswag

en’s innovative Golf Mk.1 offered a Diesel version with a 1.5 litre 48 BHP engine that made do with a simple ‘D’ badge on the back. You either had a Diesel, or you didn’t. Somewhere in the depths of Wolfsburg, an idea was hatched to cunningly identify the power output of a Golf to other Golf owners. By the late 1990’s, the VW range of Diesels had grown in popularity so much that they’d overtaken sales of petrol models. Of course, they needed better and faster models to satisfy all the eager buyers. With power outputs of between 60 BHP and 150 BHP, there had to be some way of letting the VW Golf TDi owner behind know that the VW Golf TDi in front of them was a fast or a slow model. Is your eye red? No, silly, I meant your ‘i’. You see, a 90 BHP Golf has a TDi badge with all the letters in silver. A 110 BHP version will have a ‘red i’, a 130 BHP GT TDi will have a red D and i whilst the range-topping 150 BHP will have a badge all in red!

Those three red letters show that performance matters, and you wouldn’t be seen dead driving a lower model. Of course, if you’re not in the least bit interested, it means nothing at all. To us petrolheads though, the difference between having those red letters or the ‘poverty spec’ silver badge on the back is no different to a teenager going to school with the latest Nike or Adidas trainers instead of a pair of £12 Sunday Market specials. Apart from the fact that you’re less likely to get beaten-up for driving  a 90 BHP Golf (well, in Surrey anyway!)

Still, the Germans are masters in wanting you to want more from your car. Why did I buy a VW Transporter TDi with the 174 BHP engine? Simply because I could and I freely admit to taking pleasure in overtaking the 130 BHP version and checking my rear view mirror afterwards to see if they’d checked my badge. As for the 84 BHP version – well, that was just for people that drove vans for the gas board. In fact, Volkswagen didn’t stop at simply colouring the badge in red – they even added a tiny ‘174PS’ label at the bottom, just in case you weren’t sure of the significance of the colour code.

Merecedes have always been a bit more discreet about the power output of their cars. I haven’t got a clue what a C220 CDi offers in the horsepower department, but my latest Vito 120 CDi has a bright red ’Sport 204′ badge on the back to signify its V6 204PS TurboDiesel. I know from the £70 of Diesel it uses to seemingly go nowhere that it’s the most powerful one they do!

Finally, the award for the most boastful display of not only power output, but general performance goes to Mitsubishi. The rallye-car-on -the-road Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X FQ-400 not only tells you it has 400 BHP but that it is also ‘F***ing Quick. I can’t help but  feel that this badging is rather wasted as the only time I’ve ever seen one, it’s been accelerating so rapidly you’d never see it anyway. Surely Mitsubishi have missed a trick by not simply painting a giant phallus across the bootlid, and added progressively larger testicles to indicate whether it was the 300, 330, 360 or 400 BHP model! Perhaps all manufacturers should follow Rolls Royce’s example by simply not publishing something as vulgar as power output. Choosing to describe the power of their 6.75 litre V8 as ‘adequate’, the wealthy buyer of a Silver Seraph is pretty unlikely to get involved in a traffic light drag race with the driver of a Mitsubishi Lancer FQ400!

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