this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Lol:
I feel like we'd need peak horsepower output of a small dog to truly understand this.
A dog's power output comes from its muscle mass, which for a healthy dog is about 45% of its total body weight. This gives our 28-pound dog roughly 12.57 lbs (or 5.7 kg) of muscle.
Studies of animal muscle show that the peak power output of vertebrate muscle tissue during a short, explosive burst (like a jump or the start of a sprint) is around 100 to 200 watts per kilogram of muscle.
Now we can estimate the dog's peak power:
Converting these figures to horsepower (1 horsepower = 746 watts):
So, a small 28-pound dog might be able to generate a peak power of around 0.75 to 1.5 horsepower for a very brief moment.
So this YASA motor is somewhere between 670 and 1,340 times more powerful than the dog it's being compared to in weight. That's some jaw-dropping power output.
I tried to sanity-test the math here running the same calculations on a 700 kg horse, of which around 50% mass is muscle.
700 kg x 50% = 350 kg
Low:
350 kg x 100 W/kg = 35,000 W
35,000 W / 746 ≈ 47 hp
High:
350 kg x 200 W/kg = 70,000 W
70,000 W / 746 ≈ 94 hp
Despite what the term "horsepower" would seem to suggest, a horse can actually output more than one horsepower. Estimates put peak output of a horse around 12-15 hp. By those numbers, even the low end estimate above is around 3-4x too high. We're gonna need more dogs.
Horsepower was originally used to describe the work that a horse could do over the course of an hour. Specifically, the number of times an hour a horse could turn a mill wheel at a brewery. These are estimates of peak power, not sustained power, so I would say that it's accurate that horses can produce significantly more than one horsepower in short bursts.