Nissan Middle East announced the formulation of a new scientific unit called Desert Camel Power or DCP will be used to measure vehicles in the desert.
Nissan says that the conventional horsepower (shortened to bhp or hp) has limitation and cannot measure the off-road capabilities of SUVs. Keeping this in mind, Nissan engineers developed “Desert Camel Power” which uses a scientifically proven formula to determine, in an accurately measurable and reproducible way, how a given vehicle will perform in typical desert off-road conditions.
Engineer Joseph Rachid El Hachem stated, “Over the past two years we have been researching what elements make a vehicle such as the Nissan Patrol so well-suited to desert driving,”. He added by saying “Basically, we found that it comes down to the interplay between the vehicle’s weight, its velocity and its trajectory. Other factors including manoeuvrability, engine torque and of course the skill of the driver do come into play and cannot be discounted. However, if we standardise a vehicle’s approach speed and trajectory in a given environment we can time how quickly it travels a set distance and subsequently factor in its weight to work out its Desert Camel Power.”
It’s a simple concept and one that can be applied with relative ease to test vehicles in the conditions typically found in the Arabian peninsula.
Like any unit of measurement, this too requires a clear definition and a scientific mathematical formula. Nissan engineers collaborated with scientists involved in the field of metrology (the scientific study of measurement) – people who basically east, sleep and gossip dimensions and units – to both define and find a universally acceptable and reproducible measure for Desert Camel Power. And they came up with this formula:
CP = velocity x weight x sin (trajectory).
The “500” page scientific thesis presented to ESMA (Emirates Authority for Standardization and Metrology) have welcomed the idea and thought process behind it and now ESMA is fully on board to undertake the requisite testing which will help to standardize the new unit, first for the regional and then globally.
Hence forth, Desert Camel Power will be used in all Nissan Middle East showrooms and marketing literature to define the desert capabilities Nissan’s SUV line-up.
While some car enthusiasts and motoring journalist (most of whom don’t have any engineering background and probably can’t grasp the this idea or those on a larger scale) think of this as a cock-and-bull story, we think its a great initiative by Nissan, one that will push the industry forward. Only because, if we don’t we’d still be living on a square and flat Earth.
