AUTO MARKETERS NOW HAVE THEIR OWN `ALTERNATIVE FACTS'
Horsepower on the hood ain't what it used to be
Man, I was excited. Performing my standard walk around of Cadillac's new XT6 in the dealership parking lot, I came across the 400 badging now affixed to its rear flank. Could it be? Did Caddy really slip the CT6'S old 400-horsepower, twin-turbo V6 under the hood of the revised XT6 without my noticing? Normally I'm right on top of new product developments. But I'd be more than happy to be wrong.
Except, of course, I wasn't. There is no twin-turbo version of the XT6, a fact made obvious on the way home. Instead of 400 horses, I got 310, and the mountain of torque I was expecting turned out to merely be the 271 pound-feet of GM'S near-ubiquitous, normally aspirated V6. Where were the turbos and, more importantly, what the h-edouble-hockey-sticks did that 400 badge represent?
Fake news, as it turns out. Actually, “alternative facts” might be a better description.
Automakers have become very — let's call it “generous” — with the numeric designations over the past few years. The digits displayed on rear trunk lids, like the 400 I'm raving about, used to mean something. By tradition, they indicated the displacement of the engines. A BMW 530i, for
instance, was a 5 Series sedan with a 3.0-L straight six. Ditto the Mercedes E320, a similarly sized four-door sedan with 3.2-L engine.
Then along came turbocharging with its downsized engines. What was once “30” or “320” would now have to be labelled “20” or “200.” So the major marques invented something called “displacement equivalency.”
Said equivalence is completely arbitrary. It's what the manufacturer feels is an appropriate descriptor of its car's performance.
Thus, did BMW'S 3.0-L turbocharged 3 Series become a 340, because its 382 hp would be the performance one might expect from a 4.0-L naturally aspirated V8? The 2.0-L turbo-four in the Mercedes-benz E350 pumps out 255 hp, which, I guess, the company estimates is equivalent to 3.5 L of normally aspirated V6.
To Audi's credit, it has — unlike any of its competitors — quantified its nomenclature with the specifics of its equivalencies.
The important thing to note in all this rigmarole is that the numerical designations are based on something we know. Or at least, think we know. Most people might not understand that horsepower is an artificial unit of measure representing the “rate at which work is done,” or that James Watt invented the term in 1776 as part of a marketing campaign to help him sell his newly minted steam engine. Even fewer will know that a single horsepower is deemed equivalent to the 33,000 pound-feet per minute the very strongest of 18th-century draught horses could draw from a well or coal mine.
But they do understand that 100 horsepower ain't much at all, 200 horses is starting to get on with it, and anything over 300 is going to move along quite smartly.
Ditto displacement. As I said, most of us might not know the displacement of an engine is the equivalent of the swept area of its pistons multiplied by the “stroke” in which they travel.
We might not have understood the engineering, but at least the numbers had context. And that is what makes Cadillac's latest numerical designations so completely cynical. They're based on torque, and while most of us have heard the term bandied about, we don't know what it means.
Officially, torque is defined as the “measure of how much a force causes that object to rotate.” Few understand the concept and almost none of us have any context for how many “torques” — actually pound-feet — is good or bad, sufficient or exemplary.
But the XT6 has 271 pound-feet of torque, not 400. Obviously,
271 wasn't enough for General Motors' marketing mavens. That's when they hatched the plan to convert those 271 poundfeet to the metric Newton-metres, by which measure their 3.6-L V6 has 400 (actually 367, but, hey, the rounding error is the least of their crimes).
That's all a long way of saying that Cadillac is using a reference no one cares about in a measurement system no one uses, just so it can artificially inflate the size of its badges.
And you thought Trump was the only one using “alternative facts.”