German car customers are still looking for particularly powerful new cars. Last year, the new cars had an engine of an average 159 PS on board, as an evaluation by the Duisburg CAR Institute has shown. That was 7 PS more than 2019, an above-average increase of 4 percent.

The trend towards ever more powerful and faster cars thus remains unbroken: In the past 30 years, the average performance of new cars only decreased in the year 2009 when small cars were particularly popular because of the state scrapping premium. Currently, there is a greater demand for heavy urban SUVs with higher performance. According to the CAR evaluation, the average maximum speed of all new cars was 202 kilometers per hour.

Technical limitation of the maximum speed The current main reason for the increase in horsepower, study leader Ferdinand Dudenhöffer sees the market trend towards electric vehicles and hybrid models, which is also driven by subsidies. The latter have an electric motor on board in addition to the combustion engine, which increases the overall output to 190 PS on average. Even the average battery car with 169 HP is ahead of the overall average of all new cars registered in Germany.

Because of tax advantages, hybrids and e-models are particularly popular as company cars, which then turn out to be significantly stronger with 177 PS than the cars used by authorities (159 PS) or private individuals (157 PS) were purchased. Even with the introduction of a speed limit, Dudenhöffer expects the performance of new cars to continue to rise. From his point of view, the technical limitation of the maximum speed would make sense, as the manufacturer Volvo has demonstrated at 180 km / h.

(bme)