A few years ago Tata made this commercial for their pick up vehicle ACE. In the TVC it is implied that Tata ace is equivalent to a small elephant.
Or is it ?
* Roll Vsauce intro music*
A few days ago when I started thinking about the question, I immediately thought that even a regular size elephant should be more powerful than a puny 600cc engine . Lets do some simple calculations and figure out if this is in fact true?
The Tata ace is rated for 750Kg of load. And elephants are known to have carried weight of 4 tonne. So that’s it. Elephants are the winner, right?
Of course not, Elephants are incredibly slow. While tata ace being a motor vehicle is relatively very fast upto 55km/hr(15m/s). A elephant can carry load only at around 4–5km/hr(1.4m/s). And according the formulae of power output,
Power = Force x velocity.
Hence approximate power output of a elephant = 5000kg x 1.4m/s =7000 Watts which is equal to 9.4hp. While as for tata ace, power= 750 x 15= 11250 watts which is equal to 15 hp. Thus a tata ace is much more powerful.
There you go, now you finally know the most unimportant fact of your life. The Chota Hathi is actually more powerful than actual elephant.