In the wake of the Depression, FDR created a succession of government groups that were to look into and plan for the future. Tasked with understanding the American economy and its social impacts, the National Resources Committee wrote a report in 1937 that was “the first major attempt to show the kinds of new inventions which may affect living and working conditions in America in the next 10 to 25 years.”

The Technological Trends and National Policy serves as a kind of technological State of the Nation address. I could probably pull out a million interesting factoids, but I was particularly struck by the commonsense way they thought about power. The “power available” to someone wasn’t just what came out of the wall, it was all the systems that used power, particularly cars, planes, etc.

“Transportation systems, which include motor vehicles, railroads, marine propulsion, and airplanes usually carry their own power generating equipment,” they wrote.

In other words, they recognized a car for what it is: a gasoline fueled power plant attached to wheels. Thinking of a car this way, the committee included vehicle engines’ horsepower in a table of other power sources. That doesn’t seem particularly interesting, but take a look at the numbers; they’re eye-popping.

Cars were a horsepower reservoir almost 15 times larger than the combined output of the country’s central and industrial power plants.

I decided to run the numbers for today’s overpowered vehicle fleet. (The math is below.) Turns out we have something on the order of 51 billion peak horsepower sitting in our driveways. That’s an incredible 38,276 gigawatts of power available. That absolutely dwarfs the nameplate capacity of our electrical power plants, which total up to a mere 1,087 gigawatts. In fact, each week of 2008, a horrible year for car sales, almost 38 gigawatts of capacity rolled into the streets of America.

Just to be clear, every week, cars with a total 52 million horsepower are sold. That’s 80% of the horsepower available to American industry in 1935. And that economy defeated Hitler. It’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, but it should make us think.

There are three things that I take away from this. One, the current size and power of our cars and trucks is just stupid. The Tata Nano, with its 33 horsepower engine, is the way to go. (If all of the world’s cars looked like that, going electric would also be a lot easier.) Let’s merely note here that the average American passenger car has 7.5 times as much horsepower as the Nano and yet both vehicles will get you to the grocery store or to Nevada or wherever.

Second, the people of just one hundred years ago would be awed by the amount of horsepower every American has access to. The funny thing — the irony, perhaps — is that we no longer need that amount of horsepower to do anything useful. The people of the prairie were scratching and clawing for every kilowatt hour of useful work they could wring out of some oil or the wind. The people of Omaha these days don’t need anything like the direct energy services of their forerunners. Regular folks produce little of their own food or goods or housing and yet they energy falling out of their pockets.

Third, and here’s the hopeful part — no sane country would encourage its consumers to get on the technical and performance treadmill that led us to this point. Who would want this piece of the American technological infrastructure and set of consumer expectations? It’s resource inefficient and expensive. I wouldn’t expect the Chinese to follow our path to the American car anytime soon.

Calculations: It’s hard to figure average horsepower of all American cars because it changes from year to year and the vehicle fleet is a mix of ages. So, let’s just make some simple assumptions based on Christopher Knittel’s data from an Institute of Transportation Studies report.

Let’s simplify a bit and say that cars are 55% of the fleet and light trucks 45%. The average new car has 247 horsepower now and had 110 hp back in 1980. Let’s just say the average car has about 200 horsepower. The average light truck’s got 236 horsepower now, up from 138 in 1980. Let’s call that an average of 210. Do the math. 51 billion horsepower sitting in our driveways.