Not much, it turns out.

60 horsepower – about what a circa 1984 Aries K car’s engine produced – is sufficient for A to B getting there and back. More is certainly nice – and definitely fun – but hardly necessary.

Not in the USSA, anyway.

Land of “defensive driving” and checkpoints and safety abounding. Eighty is on the cusp of statutory “reckless” driving in several states. Possible jail time. Certain loss of license and guaranteed “SR-22″ (pay three times as much as you used to) insurance. For the next five years. Anything close to 100 is well across the line and if you get caught doing it, you’re doomed. Which is why almost no one ever does it – and those few who do, do so furtively, rarely and very briefly.

Bleak facts, but facts nonetheless.

So, what is it with all these high-powered cars? It’s kind of like giving Liberace a stack of Playboys. What is he supposed to do with them?

The other day, I was out driving around in a new BMW 7. This is a big sedan. Heavy, too. Almost 5,000 pounds. And yet, it required no more than 100 hp to get it up to 80 – and much less to keep it going.

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Engineers know all about this. Inertia is the enemy as well as the friend of motion. If you’ve ever tried pushing a wheelbarrow, you will know about this, too.

That first push – to get ‘er rolling – that’s a bitch. But once you’re rolling, it really doesn’t take much effort at all to keep the thing rolling. It’s the same with cars. Overcoming inertia – getting those 5,000 pounds of steel and glass off its proverbial ass – is what burns the fuel.

Not maintaining 60 (or even 80) MPH.

The BMW lets you confirm all this in real time by dialing up a pair of gauges that shows you exactly how much horsepower and torque the engine is making at any given moment, making it possible to see just how much power you’re actually using – as well as how much power you actually need.

I did a little experiment. Though the 7’s engine (a turbo-diesel; read the review here if interested) is capable of producing 255 horsepower, I wanted to see whether I could drive the car normally – i.e., with the slow-motion flow of modern American traffic – without using more than 100 of them. So I used the gauges to modulate the pressure I applied to the accelerator with my right foot. It wasn’t tough at all to get the BMW up to 60 MPH with less than half the available/potential horsepower.

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