Who Makes The Most Powerful Car Engine?

Haven't you always felt like you knew, but deep down, you really had no idea? Join the club.

And with all due respect to tuners like John Hennessey, who perpetually redefines the limits of what a street legal Chevy V8 can do without turning into an expensive grenade, it's several rungs up the difficulty ladder to make every aspect of a car right down to the engine. We wanted to know who actually makes the most powerful engines in the world, so we eliminated companies like Pagani, who use Mercedes motors, and even Aston Martin, whose beautiful V12 is essentially two Ford V6s mated together. What's left, then, is this list of nine manufacturers, all of whom legitimately build their own really, really powerful engines. 

Hnnnnnngggggghhhhhh!

9. General Motors

Most Powerful Car: Chevrolet Corvette Z06
HP: 650
There's not much to say here: The Z06 is well under half the cost of the vast majority of cars on this list, and it's still close enough in performance that a top notch driver in a Z06 would beat an average driver in, say, a Veyron, around most tracks.

8. Ford

Most Powerful Car: Shelby Mustang GT 500
HP: 662
For the last car bearing the Shelby name to be designed while the old man was still alive, it's not too bad, is it?

7. Dodge

Most Powerful Car: Challenger SRT Hellcat
HP: 707
It's easy to think we'll one day look back on the Hellcat and think that this was how the Great Horsepower Wars of the 20-teens ended, but who are we kidding? Ford or GM (or both!) will fight back soon enough.

6. Lamborghini

Most Powerful Car: Veneno
HP: 740
For any other car maker, the engine would be the focal point on a car with a 740 hp V12 under the hood. But this is Lamborghini, and this is one of the wildest designs they've ever put on the road.

5. Porsche

Most Powerful Car: 918 Spyder
HP: 887
How crazy is this? Well, a car that can lap the Nurburgring in under seven minutes is just fifth on this list. Anyone who thinks this isn't a golden era for supercars definitely owns a Prius. 

4. McLaren

Most Powerful Car: P1
HP: 903
The simple fact is that the McLaren P1 is faster than most grocery getters even when it's putzing around town in full-electric mode. Fire up the twin-turbo V8 in addition to the electric motors, and it's almost enough to make you forget all about the F1. Almost.

3. Ferrari

Most Powerful Car: LaFerrari
HP: 950
Unlike the P1 and 918, the LaFerrari doesn't use its electric motors for anything other than making the car go faster. There are about 950 reasons why that's a good thing.

2. Bugatti

Most Powerful Car: Veyron 16.4 Super Short
HP: 1200
If you've somehow been sleeping under a particularly comfortable rock for the past few years, you may have missed that this car can hit speeds unnervingly close to 270 mph. Once it approaches 250 mph, it also happens to sound like a fighter jet.

1. Koenigsegg

Most Powerful Car:One:1
HP: 1341
The Koenigsegg One:1's power-to-weight ratio is almost exactly 1:1. That's just as impressive as the fact this relatively small engineering firm from Sweden absolutely obliterated some of the largest car manufacturers on Earth to top this list.


Aaron Miller is the Rides editor for Supercompressor. Last night, he dreamed he did a comparison test of all of these cars. For some reason, the Bugatti needed to be vacuumed, and had an electrical problem.