so let's cut this down to the convention for wikipedia we already discussed the issue at wikipedia wikiproject automobiles conventions and decided to use hp presumably sae net or gross depending on time period or kw depending on market for this unit i am opposed to using ps or metric horsepower it's just plain confusing one exception is if the metric hp number is significant as in the bugatti veyron with it's hp metric engine i will propose an ammendment over there to always specify hp sae rather than just hp and see what people think or we could just link the first occurrence of hp to horsepower hp sae and let people use their intiution that all remaining references to hp are for sae numbers i like this better we do have to be precise and i don't want to go around using random units everywhere so let's decide here and now i propose never using metric horsepower as a primary unit unless it's a special case like the bugatti and then we should be very specific in including the sae number we've already decided to always include both hp and kw and that's all well and good as for notation if we are to specify sae i would do it without parentheses since we are using the parens for kw already so we say hp sae kw i'd rather not include the sae at all but this is a reasonable alternative may utc