I will thank you kindly to not speak about the Honda Rebel that I owned like that! She could hit 81 while going slightly downhill if you were in a tuck.

I believe from the factory the Rebel has like 15 or 16 hp, mine that was 12 years old at the time must have had one or two less, and it was exciting to ride around town.

I'll grant that 17 hp in a car would not be "exciting", but I bet from 0-30mph which is where this car would live would feel plenty zippy.

The lowest HP Honda Rebel right now the 300 goes for 4.5k and even that has 27HP new from factory. Back in 1985, the Rebel 250 started at 16.1 HP but that’s been discounted for a while.

IMO, anything that can’t maintain highway speed up a hill is anemic by modern standards. I get that HP has become a largely meaningless metric for daily driving, but that seems like a useful baseline.

17hp is reasonable for a small motorcycle. You only need more power if you are going on highways, and this vehicle doesn't. For comparison, it's about twice as much as the Honda Grom, which is certainly beyond a scooter.

It's as much power as a Honda Rebel 250, a CBF250, an MT125, a Yamaha Vixion, an ST250, etc..., and those are gas engines that will generally only provide like 50-70% of their power.

Electric golf carts generally use 3-5hp engines. That's because for small engines, the electric advantage of always delivering the same amount of power is a huge deal.

18hp was enough for many cars. It is fine for city driving. It goes up to 100km/h, it's fine.

Also, the peak power of the motor is actually 20kW, 13kW is the sustained power, which again is more than enough for city driving.

It's certainly a new way of thinking about minimum viable cars. Nowadays you sort of expect 200hp from a normal family car, most often closer to 300hp. My car has a 4L that produces 286hp, and it's guzzling fuel. Most of the time is spent in towns and cities going slowly. I could easily move to electric, but sometimes I also need range and cruising speeds of 70-90 mph.

You are arguing past each other, hp has little bearing on the performance of a vehicle in the regimes we are talking about. Torque is what should be measured for in town performance and that is relative to weight. It only takes 10-30hp to maintain a vehicle at highway speeds.

That's true. And how much hp/torque did the Model T have? Probably not much, and I am sure it could do a respectable 30 mph.

The Model T had 20 hp and did 45mph on level ground.

The driving experience of an ICE engine versus an electric motor of the same horsepower is not similar. They have much different acceleration curves and driving experiences.

Acceleration at low speed is one thing, but near top speed EV vs ICE makes minimal difference. An underpowered car is going to be slow either way.

What people notice about EV’s is really an artifact of being cars having extremely overpowered engines but ineffective transmissions to maximize the use of that power.