Photo credit: Andrew Collins/Jalopnik

There have been a ton of numbers flying around the 2017 Honda Civic Type R lately—its specs and power ratings compared to other sport compacts in the market, its crazy-high dealership prices doubling MSRP and the like. But if you want some real numbers, here’s the power the Type R makes on the dyno.


The Dyno Center in Puerto Rico tested out a Type R recently, and the numbers are more than impressive: The company said in a Facebook post that the car made 295 wheel horsepower, which, compared to its advertised engine HP, is incredibly high. Here’s a six-second clip of the car on the dyno before we break down what that number means:

And here’s the less fun graphical representation of the dyno test:


The wild thing is how close that wheel-HP number is to the advertised 306 HP, which can be rare.

Wheel HP differs from engine HP—which is often the number you see listed by manufacturers when you buy a car—in that engine HP is higher. That’s because engine HP doesn’t take into account all of the other features of a car that need power to run, or the power losses that occur from the engine to the wheels.

The measurement for wheel HP takes into account the things that reduce energy from the quoted engine HP as power travels from a car’s engine to the wheels, making it a much more accurate measurement of how much power the car is laying down on the road.

Two-wheel drive cars, like the front-wheel-drive Type R, tend to lose 10 to 15 percent of engine HP on the way to the wheels, whereas the loss is often 20 to 25 percent in all-wheel-drive cars. If that all sounded like gibberish, here’s a handy YouTube explainer from Engineering Explained.


Make your own conclusions about the two Type R numbers, but either way, the car’s advertised HP is super close to the wheel HP measured in this dyno test. No matter how the numbers got there, that’s something to appreciate.

