One kilowatt equals 1.341 horsepower. Stack up battery cells, toss in some copper and magnets, and suddenly your family crossover has 400, 500, even 600+ horsepower. More than the icons of supercar history, now lurking in beige anonymity in your neighbor’s driveway. No one asked for this. Power without preparation is just liability. The market didn’t demand it, and the automakers certainly don’t care.
As with so many strange turns in modern life, Elon Musk is at least partly to blame. Tesla didn’t just make electric cars fast; they made speed mandatory. Want the longest range or all-wheel-drive traction? Here is a 384-horsepower, sub-5-second 0-60, Model Y Long Range AWD. That is because it is easier to bolt in a few big motors and brag about a 0-60 time than to do the hard work of building truly efficient cars that might offer features actually relevant to their customers. What began as a Silicon Valley party trick is now an industry reflex. The answer is always more windings, more current, and bigger numbers. The “performance” is not engineered; it is dialed up because it is easy and because it looks good on a spec sheet.
This has happened before. In the muscle car era, Detroit crammed big-block V8s making more than 400 horsepower into ordinary sedans, hardly bothering to upgrade brakes, tires, or handling. Critics warned, regulators circled, and Nader attacked. Those cars wore their intent openly and were sold as performance models to buyers who usually knew what they were getting into. Today it is much more reckless. These are family crossovers, status appliances, and all-weather wagons, now equipped with nearly twice the power of a Chevelle SS or Plymouth Road Runner, riding on low rolling resistance “efficiency” tires, softly-sprung suspensions, and brakes sized for the rental fleet.
Manufacturers know it too. As GM freely admits to the press, the Blazer EV SS with 615 horsepower was never meant for the track. Slapping an “SS” badge on the tailgate and tossing on still-insufficient larger brakes is not absolution. It is theater, especially when the tires are low rolling resistance EV rubber picked for range and not for grip or high-speed safety. The result is a landscape where straight-line numbers are inflated, but the hardware and intent have not kept pace. All the shortcomings of the 1960s classics are back: questionable handling, underdone braking, unmanageable power. But now they are disguised as family cars and sold without even a disclaimer of their danger.
The real difference is this: for all the critique rightly leveled at the old muscle cars and classic supercars, nobody ended up with one by mistake. The price and exclusivity, or the sheer effort needed to build a 600 horsepower monster kept them rare and deliberate. Today all one has to do is ask for longer range, or the plushest interior, or more USB ports, and performance numbers that used to require a decade of tinkering in the garage, or a trust fund are just part of the package. What used to be very intentional is now a side effect of convenience or comfort.
If this were about real innovation, about making powerful cars genuinely safe and capable, it would be a different conversation. But instead of pouring R&D into batteries that last more than four hours at highway speeds, manufacturers just add more motor windings and turn up the dial. This is engineering by marketing, not by need. The industry spends on bigger numbers, not on the work that would give those numbers meaning.
To be clear, the point is not to romanticize the days of supercars with no ABS or stability control. Those cars were and still are extremely demanding of their drivers and carry an inherent risk due to the combination of high power and lack of safety protections. In that way, modern EVs resemble the supercars they are now being contrasted with: too much power, insufficient engineering as to other aspects.
But no one argued those cars should be everywhere, or that every family should have a 600 horsepower machine in the garage. Their danger was mitigated by cost, rarity, and the will required to buy, build, or drive one. Modern supercars like the Porsche 911 Turbo S match their power with the right tires, brakes, stability controls, and honesty. The family crossover does not, and that is the difference.
So EV crossovers are the new muscle cars, but this is not a compliment. If history is repeating, it is not even rhyming; it is a copy-paste, scaled up and stripped of self-awareness. Manufacturers are handing out insane power by default, in cars never engineered or marketed for it, and calling it progress. It is not. It is abdication, it is cowardice in the guise of marketing.
Nobody is happier, nobody is safer, and the only thing getting cheaper is the meaning of horsepower itself. EVs, the horsepower market has crashed and your line of credit is closed. From here on out, express your figures in kilowatts and leave horsepower to those who still understand what it cost, what it meant, and why it mattered.