I agree and say this all the time. As someone who grew up driving in an ancient 60's Volkswagen with well less than 100 HP, I can tell you that we can make small cars with much lower horsepower that also get far better fuel economy.

People then tell me that they think that is stupid and like having the acceleration when getting on the interstate. In all those years, I never found acceleration to be a problem. We've been pitched cars that have way more power than we need and that use way more fuel than we need. Magazines like Car and Driver will write negative editorials if a car isn't "zippy". What should matter is safety, cost, and fuel economy.

In the US' South region, nearly everyone feels the need for a giant truck. It has been engrained as a lifestyle choice. You get your truck to help you haul your four-wheeler for deer hunting and your boat for fishing. However, 90% of these trucks are used by single individuals as daily drivers to office jobs which is extremely wasteful. They even live in suburbs which have to get bigger garages to compensate. Each man's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather drove one too, so it is deeply tied to one's masculinity. The south also has some of the nation's poorest citizens and Mississippi/Alabama/Louisiana/Arkansas have some of the worst elementary and highschools in the nation. It isn't uncommon for folks to get extremely in debt on a $50k lifted 4x4 deisel pickup truck.

The big issue with the small displacement turbo-charged engines is that, at normal autobahn speed, the engine is almost always on boost and therefore burning a lot of fuel to:

1. Reduce intake temperatures/prevent pre-ignition

2. Produce enough power to sustain a constant speed of 120KPH or whatever

This means that they are far less efficient than they should be, and in some cases get more or less the same efficiency as larger displacement high capacity engines.

When they are really small: yes. But most cars come with gear boxes and horse powers dimensioned so that you are almost always driving at low rpms at normal autobahn speeds (like 120/130). At least my new car with the 140HP engine rolls along at about 2500rpm at Autobahn speed.

I don't know where you live, but 140bhp is a lot for a small-ish car here in UK - it would almost certainly be prohibitively expensive to insure for a young driver for instance. My sister's first car is a VW Polo with a 1.0L 65bhp engine, and that "monster" runs at nearly 4000rpm when doing the legal 70mph(~120km/h) on the motorway. At least it's not a turbo engine so I suppose it's not that bad. It was still a small fortune to insure purely because she's under 25 and had her licence for a year.

Interesting; things are a bit different in the US. I bought my first car at 18. It was small, a Honda Civic Si, but had 198bhp. That wasn’t a slow car by any means, but wasn’t considered especially fast either.

For more perspective, that’s about what a really fast motorcycle puts out these days, e.g. H2 SX. That’s a whole different ballgame of power-to-weight. Not many are pushing 200, but there are lots in the 150 to 180 range, stock. Heck, even some of the midsize (read, small and under 450lb) are knocking on the bottom end of that range with displacements well under 1l.

200HP is considerably higher than the average power output of most European cars.

Most small hatchbacks will be producing somewhere between 90HP and 170HP. Estates and wagons from 190HP to 250HP and SUVs somewhere similar.

FWIW, I suspect it’s higher than average for North America too, for smaller cars. Higher proportion of trucks and SUVs though, and “small cars” are mostly a bit larger.