cars and kilowatts

As an avid car enthusiast, I have always associated a cars power by the hp, or otherwise known as horsepower.  I am what you consider a "horsepower guy".  I grew up with "horsepower" for most of my life, as I come from a family of muscle car owners.  When I would talk about how fast or powerful a car was, horsepower is what came into the discussion. During my personal metric conversion I knew I had to start using the metric equivelant for horsepower, the watt, or the kilowatt.  As you know, a kilowatt is 1000 watts.  This is where I had trouble as I normally associated kilowatts with either electric cars, or lightbulbs, which in this case would be watts.  One of the first things i knew would help me was to stop converting kW to bhp.  I began to look at car specs displayed in kW, and began to associate with output in kW.  For example, I now know a small sporty hatchback will usually make 150-160 kW while my mustang gt makes 224 kW.  Australia and New Zealand are two of the most metric English speaking nations, and is where I would read about cars, through Australia and New Zealand based websites.  Kilowatts arnt just for lightbulbs or electric car batteries as I learned.  As watts and kilowatts are units of power, they can be applied to more mechanical things like car engines.  I am still learning as I go but my metrication process has become smoother over time.