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Mexico Unveils Olinia 1: President Sheinbaum Launches First Mexican Electric Vehicle
(latinarepublic.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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Why wouldn't it be able to drive 6 people up a hill, so long as its got the battery?
This feels like it would be a problem for an ICE vehicle, but this is like, precisely where an electric vehicle is far superior to an ICE vehicle. Its very ICE brained/ ICE coded to do the mental translation from torque to HP, then back to torque. This simply isn't an issue for electric vehicles. You just go right to torque
kW is a measure of power, like HP, not torque. N.m is the SI unit for torque.
Horsepower is not measured, it is calculated from measured torque. Torque x RPM /5252.
The point: ⚽
You: 🫱 🫱
I think you're right in that an ICE vehicle with similar specs would be worse off. Also, I think there's an error regarding the stated output of the engine. Official sources are showing a much higher rated output of 13.5kw.
It still seems underpowered if it is intended to carry 6 adults uphill at 50 kph. Regardless of torque, power is the rate at which work is done. It can be expressed as the resistive force times the velocity. I can't find a weight for the vehicle, but based on vehicles with similar specs, I'll guess it's well over 700kg. Moving 700kg up a 6-degree slope, which is still a pretty reasonable grade, at 50kph would require over 13kw and that's the theoretical max, without passengers, headwinds, etc. No way is the Olinia 1 doing 50kph uphill with 6 adult passengers.
Perhaps that's not the problem it's designed to solve, though. Maybe it's okay if it slows down to 25kph, carrying 6 adults, because it's navigating an urban environment. If the point is efficiency in city commuting, this could be a viable addition to the array of solutions for displacing fossil fuels.
Your original comment just sounds like a lack of experience with electric vehicles. Simply put, EV and ICE are fundamentally different power trains. Routing a comparison through HP is exactly what someone familiar with ICE but not EV is exactly what you would do if you know traditional cars, but it doesn't map to EV's in how they work in the real life.
And honestly, at the price we could probably buy one, find six lemmings in Mexico and a decent hill and just run the experiment.
We might have a misunderstanding here.
The comment to which you're replying is my original comment.
Nothing in it is intended to be pro ICE or anti EV.
This doesn't have anything to do with something as abstract as engineered systems. It's basic physics. You can't get 15kw out of something with a max output of 14kw. That's just axiomatic.
P = Fv cosθ
https://www.tutorchase.com/notes/a-level-ocr/physics/6-3-2-mechanical-power-from-force-and-speed
Doesn't matter if it's ICE, EV, horses, flywheels powered by suspended weights, steam turbines powered by fusion, etc. It's just not possible to move a mass at an angle and velocity such that one of those variables increases without also increasing the power. These are some of the assumptions on which EVs are built. And they're constantly validated by testing and everyday EV (and ICE) driving experiences.
I sincerely hope this project succeeds for all the right reasons. I'm not advocating for the preservation of ICE vehicles and infrastructure. My concern here is STEM literacy among advocates of progressive solutions. I would very much like for us to be taken seriously, and I think that requires communicating our position and intent effectively.
We don’t have a misunderstanding. You made a reductive argument, got challenged, and now you’re acting like invoking “basic physics” makes the engineering irrelevant.
Run your own scenario honestly. Holding 50 kph up a 6-degree grade with six adults is a high sustained wheel-power demand. If a vehicle only has 14 kW of continuous usable wheel power, ICE or EV, it probably is not doing that.
But that does not make the powertrain irrelevant. That is exactly the point you keep missing.
In an ICE vehicle, the rated power depends on RPM, gearing, transmission losses, and whether the engine can stay in its power band. In an EV, usable output depends on the motor, controller, battery, thermal limits, gearing, and peak-vs-continuous power. Those are not interchangeable systems just because the same physics applies to both.
So no, reducing the question to horsepower does not make sense. Reducing it to torque does not make sense either. That is just car-brained ICE framing.
The powertrain design is the point. Treating ICE, EV, horses, and flywheels as interchangeable for a real vehicle-performance question is not STEM literacy.
The right answer here is to buy one of these, for both of us to go to mexico and make two freinds each, go to an appropriate hill, and give it a shot.
Sure, but there's still a floor defined by physics. With the right setup, it could lift 5000lbs up a cliff. But it might take a year and hundreds of recharges.
Yeah. That's the entire point. The engineering changes the experience drastically. You can't just say watts are watts and be done with it. Its a reductive approach to do so.
Yeah but the point is given a certain amount of watts, there's a maximum speed to lift no matter what the setup is. And it doesn't matter whether you measure that power in Watts, horsepower or Pferdestärke - the maximum speed to lift a given weight is the same.
Do you drive an EV?
Yes, sometimes. My wife's car is a Tesla 3. And yes the feel is very different. But the bottom line physics is still the same.
Its not "bottom line physics is the same" because the fucking aren't. The actual construction of the fucking vehicle and its power train matters. This why everyone is dismissive of your point. You just straight up wrong here.
Go load up your wife's Tesla 3 with 1k lbs of cinder blocks, and then find an equivalent stated HP ICE vehicle and do the same. Drive both of them up the same hill and tell me its the same thing. And if you TRULY want to experience the difference, find a manual transmission ICE equivalent.
It's the same in terms of your maximum optimized speed. Power is power. An ice engine needs to rev high to get high power and an electric motor doesn't (depending on how it's wired). But if you optimize the drive train perfectly in either case, there is a maximum speed you can lift a given weight based on the power output of the engine system. v=P/(mg) this is irrelevant of whether your power is coming out of an electric, ice or other type of motor. A typical electric setup would probably get closer to that ideal than a typical ice in terms of achieving their maximum quoted power output. But the electric set up will never exceed it. That's just physics no matter how much you might like EV cars.
Stop talking and load the car.
My wife would get mad at me for messing up her car. And while theories should sometimes be empirically verified even when already a standard assumption, in this case the physics is trivial high school level and so fundamental that it's stupid to bother. And just driving cars doesn't test it at all anyway - the fact that you think it does, demonstrates that you don't actually understand the point at all. But you don't seem to be capable of comprehending what I'm saying, and that fine; it takes all types. Have a good day.
You'll just do anything it takes other than verify you claim in reality where you will very quick recognize it breaks down.
Where what breaks down? You don't seem to even understand the point you're arguing.
Then take the time to go back to your original claim and you'll soon recognize that you've just been talking out your ass this whole time about a trivial and irrelevant claim that isn't supported in the real world.
You routed a comparison of an EV to an ICE power-train through HP, which is basically invalidated the comparison from the start, because as a basic comparison it doesn't make sense. And the reason why isn't just physics. But I'm not going to tell you more then that. You need to be curious enough to develop an understanding of why its a false equivalency to do so. You not understanding why that is the case is the entire point. Like you genuinely aren't worth arguing about this because your lack of understanding is so clear.
And if you can't take the time to be introspective enough to recognize that, you genuinely aren't worth the time.
Haha. Horse power is just another measurement of power like Watts. Just different units. Like km vs miles. You've realized that you're wrong and have nothing but insults left. Sad.
Jesus fuck you are still here? The guy who still doesn't know what horsepower is? That its not actually "just another measurement of power". That the term doesn't actually mean what they think it means?
Maybe do some research before embarrassing yourself further? Or not. Whatever!
Ahh yes. The peewee herman defense. From the guy who isn't willing to even dare testing their theory in reality.
What theory would you think I should test, whether 1hp=0.746kW ? That's not even something to test, it's based on definitions.
Nobody but you said anything about ICE, you are making a straw man argument.
And saying converting from kW to hp has anything to do with torque is as moronic as claiming that km/h and mp/h are measuring different things, when they are obviously not, they are both accurate measurements of speed. In the exact same way kW and hp are both measurements of power. They are merely different scales, and I only made the conversion to make it easier to understand the power in relation to a vehicle.
For instance many EV's have 150 kW engines, (including mine), But in many car pages they are stated as 204 hp.
150 kW and 204 hp is EXACTLY the same, just like 3.5 kW is exactly the same as 4.7 hp, or almost 5 as I wrote.
As it turns out the article is wrong about the kW only being 3.5 kW, the true number is 13.5 kW, which makes the claimed performance figures way more plausible.
Just because an electric engine can output it's max performance faster, and doesn't have to rev up first, doesn't mean it has more than the stated power. Yes with an ICE car it would be worse in acceleration, but when it is revved up, they would have similar performance. Going 50 km/h which is the top speed of the car, it is obviously revved up to the max.
But for some reason you got upvotes? Sad to see that people are so easy to mislead with nonsense.
As I stated before, the performance claimed for the car is simply impossible with only a 3.5 kW engine, and as it turns out it is 13.5 kW.
So your "why not" question is based on ignorance, and your whole comment is an argument from ignorance.
So you are very clearly new to the ev space.
ICE: Internal combustion engine.
You aren't worth the bother. You simply don't have a clue.
Of course I know what an ICE car is, what the fuck makes you think I don't?
You are the one that constantly get the terms wrong, and claim they mean something they don't.
Bruh you bouncing all over this thread and getting it wrong in literally every fucking place you can.
THATS why I think you don't know what ICE means.
Do you own an EV? Have you ever driven one fully loaded with fat boys versus an ICE shitbox with allegedly the same horse power? I have. I do weekly. I have many fat friends and we drive up hills.
You started this conversation on horsepower then moved the goal posts when it was inconvenient for you to stick with that framing. And moving it to Kw doesn't change that, and its because there is a lot of "stuff" that happens between a watt being consumed (either via burning fuel or drawing from a battery) and an thing being propelled forwards, either on a flat surface or up a hill. And all that "stuff" make huge differences in terms of performance. Engineering actually matters for real world performance.