The Science Behind the Bugatti Veyron's Speed

So if you change these you change the force of the drag you have a smaller area you have less drag you have a smaller coefficient of drag you have less drag lower velocity uh less dense fluid you're traveling through less drag pretty simple so let's just look at an example um and I chose Bugatti Veyron just because it's one of the most outrageous Vehicles out there and it's fast and people know what it is uh there's also information on it so Bugatti Veyron has about 1,000 horsepower it's got a coefficient of drag when it's lowered of 36 uh frontal area is 22.3 ft and uh can travel up to 254 milph now if you plug in the data into this um and plug in a value for the density of air uh you will come out with about 900 horsepower required just to travel at 254 mph to make up for the air resistance alone the other th 100 horsepower is going to be used for uh friction Within all the components friction with the ground um and all your losses through your drivetrain if you got the AC on uh you're not going to have the AC on if you're going for a speed record but things like that so

Power Now power is equal to the force of drag multiplied by velocity um and I'm going to include uh basically the derivation of this in the video description for anyone who would like to see this uh the force of drag I just pulled off of Wikipedia as well so that's just an equation for calculating the force of drag on the vehicle so if you if you have power is being equal to force times velocity then you can see multiply these two together and you have power is now a function of velocity cubed so as velocity increases the amount of power for which uh you need uh is proportional to the cube so you're going to need quite a bit more power so let's say we wanted our Bugatti veyon to go 300 mph okay well we know that the power we want it to go divided by by the power uh or the power it we want it to have uh over the power that it currently has is going to be proportional to uh the speed at which it's going to be traveling at over uh the previous top speed so if we take our we want to find out this power we know it takes 900 horsepower uh in order to compensate for the drag uh and we want it to go up to 300 mph with 900 horsepower uh of resistance it can travel up to 254 mph so when we work this out this gives us a ratio of 1.65 so we're going to need to multiply 900 by 1.65 that's how much additional horsepower we will need in order to compensate for the drag resistance alone now there could be other things in there um at higher speeds which would increase the amount of power needed so we're just looking at the amount of power needed to compensate for the additional air resistance um you're going to have more friction with more air resistance because you're going to have more down Force that's going to be another thing that's going to give you uh you're going to need a little bit more uh Power to compensate for but we're just looking at the air resistance alone so that's going to mean 900 * 1.65 1482 we're going to add that to the other 87 horsepower we had uh which are powering everything else and that's going to give us a total of 1570 horsepower it's actually going to need to be a bit more than that like I explained but basically if you want to get the Bugatti Veyron to travel 300 M an hour you're going to need to get at least around 1,600 horsepower in order to do so

The Importance of Aerodynamics

The cool thing about this is there is not only one way of solving this problem um you can also work on the aerodynamics say you don't want to spend all of your money researching how to get an engine to 1,600 horow uh and and still have sufficient cooling uh for daily use well you can change the aerodynamics of the vehicle easier said than done yes but point is if uh the power required is proportional to the co ient of drag so if you could reduce uh the coefficient of drag by the same quantity for which you're increasing uh the velocity which is cubed so 1.65 take that. 36 drag coefficient divide it by 1.65 and you get 0.22 so if you were to change your coefficient of drag to 0.22 instead of 0.36 you can use the exact same amount of horsepower and you can travel 300 M hour

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome in this video I'm going to be explaining aerodynamic drag now aerodynamic drag is basically a resistive force uh on an applied to an object that is moving through a fluid so here we have a car and it's driving along the road and the fluid is the air uh so as it drives at a certain speed this air uh has a force drag force that it applies to this vehicle um as it's traveling through it the faster you go through this fluid the more resistance you're going to encounter so vehicles cars have something that we call a drag coefficient or a coefficient of drag and basically this is a uh dimensionless uh number that we use to quantify uh the resistance of an object through a fluid so um if you take a look at some different shapes I just pulled these off of Wikipedia um if you've got like a dome here or a hemisphere uh it's going to have a coefficient of drag of 042 a cone 0.5 a cube 1.05 um and something like a raindrop is going to be about 05 so you want to design design things to be streamlined kind of like a raindrop um so you can have a very low coefficient of drag and you can move through the air very easily so just some cars here uh to take a look at kind of get a feel for what a coefficient of drag for a typical car might be uh Cadillac Escalade 36 Nissan 350Z 3 Toyota Prius .25 and a uh Tesla Model s24 so a Prius and a Model S these are some of the most aerodynamic vehicles that you will see on the road um and that's a great thing because it means they use less power at higher speed so this is actually the biggest one of the biggest reasons why Prius gets good Highway uh miles per gallon it's not necessarily because has this Hybrid drivetrain it's because it's very aerodynamic so it doesn't take that much power to get it to go through uh the air unlike the Escalade which has this higher coefficient of drag so it's going to take a lot more power plus the frontal area we'll get into that so uh the force of drag is a function of uh the density of the air the speed at which your car is traveling squared or the speed of the wind um so basically it's all relative if you got 10 m an hour wind coming at you and you're traveling UH 60 M hour then you've got 70 M an hour uh speed here coefficient of drag uh that's what we're talking about here so that's basically a measured quantity on a vehicle um and then a here is the area so that area is going to be the front area of the vehicle so if you change these you change the force of the drag you have a smaller area you have less drag you have a smaller coefficient of drag you have less drag lower velocity uh less dense fluid you're traveling through less drag pretty simple so let's just look at an example um and I chose Bugatti Veyron just because it's one of the most outrageous Vehicles out there and it's fast and people know what it is uh there's also information on it so Bugatti Veyron has about 1,000 horsepower it's got a coefficient of drag when it's lowered of 36 uh frontal area is 22.3 ft and uh can travel up to 254 milph now if you plug in the data into this um and plug in a value for the density of air uh you will come out with about 900 horsepower required just to travel at 254 mph to make up for the air resistance alone the other th 100 horsepower is going to be used for uh friction Within all the components friction with the ground um and all your losses through your drivetrain if you got the AC on uh you're not going to have the AC on if you're going for a speed record but things like that so uh next we're going to look at Power Now power is equal to the force of drag multiplied by velocity um and I'm going to include uh basically the derivation of this in the video description for anyone who would like to see this uh the force of drag I just pulled off of Wikipedia as well so that's just an equation for calculating the force of drag on the vehicle so if you if you have power is being equal to force times velocity then you can see multiply these two together and you have power is now a function of velocity cubed so as velocity increases the amount of power for which uh you need uh is proportional to the cube so you're going to need quite a bit more power so let's say we wanted our Bugatti veyon to go 300 mph okay well we know that the power we want it to go divided by by the power uh or the power it we want it to have uh over the power that it currently has is going to be proportional to uh the speed at which it's going to be traveling at over uh the previous top speed so if we take our we want to find out this power we know it takes 900 horsepower uh in order to compensate for the drag uh and we want it to go up to 300 mph with 900 horsepower uh of resistance it can travel up to 254 mph so when we work this out this gives us a ratio of 1.65 so we're going to need to multiply 900 by 1.65 that's how much additional horsepower we will need in order to compensate for the drag resistance alone now there could be other things in there um at higher speeds which would increase the amount of power needed so we're just looking at the amount of power needed to compensate for the additional air resistance um you're going to have more friction with more air resistance because you're going to have more down Force that's going to be another thing that's going to give you uh you're going to need a little bit more uh Power to compensate for but we're just looking at the air resistance alone so that's going to mean 900 * 1.65 1482 we're going to add that to the other 87 horsepower we had uh which are powering everything else and that's going to give us a total of 1570 horsepower it's actually going to need to be a bit more than that like I explained but basically if you want to get the Bugatti Veyron to travel 300 M an hour you're going to need to get at least around 1,600 horsepower in order to do so now the cool thing about that is there is not only one way of solving this problem um you can also work on the aerodynamics say you don't want to spend all of your money researching how to get an engine to 1,600 horow uh and and still have sufficient cooling uh for daily use well you can change the aerodynamics of the vehicle easier said than done yes but point is if uh the power required is proportional to the co ient of drag so if you could reduce uh the coefficient of drag by the same quantity for which you're increasing uh the velocity which is cubed so 1.65 take that. 36 drag coefficient divide it by 1.65 and you get 0.22 so if you were to change your coefficient of drag to 0.22 instead of 0.36 you can use the exact same amount of horsepower and you can travel 300 M hour so if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watchinghello everyone and welcome in this video I'm going to be explaining aerodynamic drag now aerodynamic drag is basically a resistive force uh on an applied to an object that is moving through a fluid so here we have a car and it's driving along the road and the fluid is the air uh so as it drives at a certain speed this air uh has a force drag force that it applies to this vehicle um as it's traveling through it the faster you go through this fluid the more resistance you're going to encounter so vehicles cars have something that we call a drag coefficient or a coefficient of drag and basically this is a uh dimensionless uh number that we use to quantify uh the resistance of an object through a fluid so um if you take a look at some different shapes I just pulled these off of Wikipedia um if you've got like a dome here or a hemisphere uh it's going to have a coefficient of drag of 042 a cone 0.5 a cube 1.05 um and something like a raindrop is going to be about 05 so you want to design design things to be streamlined kind of like a raindrop um so you can have a very low coefficient of drag and you can move through the air very easily so just some cars here uh to take a look at kind of get a feel for what a coefficient of drag for a typical car might be uh Cadillac Escalade 36 Nissan 350Z 3 Toyota Prius .25 and a uh Tesla Model s24 so a Prius and a Model S these are some of the most aerodynamic vehicles that you will see on the road um and that's a great thing because it means they use less power at higher speed so this is actually the biggest one of the biggest reasons why Prius gets good Highway uh miles per gallon it's not necessarily because has this Hybrid drivetrain it's because it's very aerodynamic so it doesn't take that much power to get it to go through uh the air unlike the Escalade which has this higher coefficient of drag so it's going to take a lot more power plus the frontal area we'll get into that so uh the force of drag is a function of uh the density of the air the speed at which your car is traveling squared or the speed of the wind um so basically it's all relative if you got 10 m an hour wind coming at you and you're traveling UH 60 M hour then you've got 70 M an hour uh speed here coefficient of drag uh that's what we're talking about here so that's basically a measured quantity on a vehicle um and then a here is the area so that area is going to be the front area of the vehicle so if you change these you change the force of the drag you have a smaller area you have less drag you have a smaller coefficient of drag you have less drag lower velocity uh less dense fluid you're traveling through less drag pretty simple so let's just look at an example um and I chose Bugatti Veyron just because it's one of the most outrageous Vehicles out there and it's fast and people know what it is uh there's also information on it so Bugatti Veyron has about 1,000 horsepower it's got a coefficient of drag when it's lowered of 36 uh frontal area is 22.3 ft and uh can travel up to 254 milph now if you plug in the data into this um and plug in a value for the density of air uh you will come out with about 900 horsepower required just to travel at 254 mph to make up for the air resistance alone the other th 100 horsepower is going to be used for uh friction Within all the components friction with the ground um and all your losses through your drivetrain if you got the AC on uh you're not going to have the AC on if you're going for a speed record but things like that so uh next we're going to look at Power Now power is equal to the force of drag multiplied by velocity um and I'm going to include uh basically the derivation of this in the video description for anyone who would like to see this uh the force of drag I just pulled off of Wikipedia as well so that's just an equation for calculating the force of drag on the vehicle so if you if you have power is being equal to force times velocity then you can see multiply these two together and you have power is now a function of velocity cubed so as velocity increases the amount of power for which uh you need uh is proportional to the cube so you're going to need quite a bit more power so let's say we wanted our Bugatti veyon to go 300 mph okay well we know that the power we want it to go divided by by the power uh or the power it we want it to have uh over the power that it currently has is going to be proportional to uh the speed at which it's going to be traveling at over uh the previous top speed so if we take our we want to find out this power we know it takes 900 horsepower uh in order to compensate for the drag uh and we want it to go up to 300 mph with 900 horsepower uh of resistance it can travel up to 254 mph so when we work this out this gives us a ratio of 1.65 so we're going to need to multiply 900 by 1.65 that's how much additional horsepower we will need in order to compensate for the drag resistance alone now there could be other things in there um at higher speeds which would increase the amount of power needed so we're just looking at the amount of power needed to compensate for the additional air resistance um you're going to have more friction with more air resistance because you're going to have more down Force that's going to be another thing that's going to give you uh you're going to need a little bit more uh Power to compensate for but we're just looking at the air resistance alone so that's going to mean 900 * 1.65 1482 we're going to add that to the other 87 horsepower we had uh which are powering everything else and that's going to give us a total of 1570 horsepower it's actually going to need to be a bit more than that like I explained but basically if you want to get the Bugatti Veyron to travel 300 M an hour you're going to need to get at least around 1,600 horsepower in order to do so now the cool thing about that is there is not only one way of solving this problem um you can also work on the aerodynamics say you don't want to spend all of your money researching how to get an engine to 1,600 horow uh and and still have sufficient cooling uh for daily use well you can change the aerodynamics of the vehicle easier said than done yes but point is if uh the power required is proportional to the co ient of drag so if you could reduce uh the coefficient of drag by the same quantity for which you're increasing uh the velocity which is cubed so 1.65 take that. 36 drag coefficient divide it by 1.65 and you get 0.22 so if you were to change your coefficient of drag to 0.22 instead of 0.36 you can use the exact same amount of horsepower and you can travel 300 M hour so if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watching\n"