69,769 US versions with both a launch price and a rated horsepower figure, model years 1992–2026. Versions offered, not sales figures.

Horsepower has never been cheaper

Take the launch price of a car and divide it by its horsepower. Do it for every one of the 69,769 priced versions in this list and the median for 1992 comes out at $261, in 2026 money. The median for 2026 is $176. Horsepower is 32.6% cheaper than it was, while absolutely everything else about a car went the other way.

On every supermarket shelf there is a small, joyless number printed under the price: cost per ounce. It exists because packaging is designed to flatter and division is not. Nobody has ever put one of those labels on a windscreen, which is a shame, because the windscreen is where the flattering happens. Imagine it there in the same weary grey type, under the fuel figure. Dollars per horsepower.

So here is that label, 34 model years of it.

Median price per horsepower by model year

The dearest horsepower on this list belongs to 1995, at $264 a unit in today's money. By 2010 it was $194. In 2026 it is $176, the lowest figure anywhere in this series. The early years here are a sample of what was on sale rather than the whole showroom floor: the list runs thin at that end, the roads did not.

What is striking is not the fall but the flatness in the middle. For most of two decades the number sat where it was put, ignoring three recessions, two fuel spikes and a global enthusiasm for turbocharging, like a cat that has decided the sofa is its business now. Then in the last few years it moved again, downward, and it has not stopped.

What actually moved

The engine did the work. The median version in 1992 left the factory rated at 145 hp; the median version now is rated at 310, which is 2.1 times as much. Over the same span the median launch price rose 1.4 times in real dollars. Power ran away from price, and the gap between those two numbers is this entire page.

This ought to be uncomfortable for anyone who has spent thirty years insisting that engines were being strangled. They were not strangled. They were given turbochargers, direct injection, ten forward gears and, latterly, a motor on each axle, and the arithmetic is brutal: 98.5% of the 2026 versions in this list are rated at or above the median power of the entire 1992 list. The thing that used to be the expensive ingredient quietly became the cheap one, and nobody sent a memo.

The cheapest horsepower on sale in 2026

7 of those 10 are electric, which is the sort of fact that starts arguments in car parks. The GMC HUMMER EV 3X tops it by charging $90 for each of its 1,160 horsepower, which is a peculiar way to describe a $104,700 vehicle and exactly how the number works: buy power in enough bulk and the unit price collapses. It is the catering pack of horsepower. You are not saving money, you are saving money per ounce, and there is a great deal of ounce.

Across the whole of 2026, the median electric version in this list works out at $169 a horsepower against $175 for the median petrol one. $6 apart, over 2,157 versions. That is not a revolution, it is a rounding error. Electricity has not made horsepower cheap in general. It has made enormous horsepower cheap, which is a different and considerably more entertaining thing, and it is why the top of that table reads like a drag strip and the middle of the market does not.

The catch

Nobody buys a horsepower. They buy a car, and the median car in this list now launches at $53,170 against $37,133 in 1992's money. So both stories are true at once: the unit got cheaper and the pack got enormous. That is the supermarket trick running in reverse — the giant box genuinely is better value per ounce, and you still have to pay for the whole box, carry it home, and find somewhere to put the thing.

Which is the honest verdict. Cars did get expensive. Horsepower did not. We have simply been sold rather a lot of it, at a discount, by people who worked out some time ago that power is now the cheapest way to make a heavy car feel light.

34 model years on, the little shelf label finally has something cheerful to report. It just refuses to say it about the car.

Sources

• Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U — the annual averages behind every "in 2026 dollars" column here.
• EPA and DOE fuel-economy datasets — the federal filings the US half of this catalog is built from, beginning with model year 1984.

Find the cars

The rows behind this page are live: every priced vehicle in this search, cheapest first, filterable by engine, drivetrain and year. Related, and measured over the same priced rows: the disappearance of the cheap pickup, where the same launch prices tell a far less cheerful story, and where the V8 peaks in our record, which is what happened to the engine that used to be the only way to buy power in bulk.