Good point. When I was new car shopping many years ago I immediately dismissed the auto-trans version of the early-90’s Corolla b/c of that on a test drive. That sale is not going to happen. . Fortunately the manual trans version of the same car was perky enough. Purchase decision made.
Yes. They notice if a car is underpowered. They don’t care about numbers, only that they can’t merge into traffic easily or have a hard time keeping up with traffic when pulling away from a stoplight. If they have a choice between cars that do those things well and ones that don’t, they will chose the former.
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+1
In 1976, I bought a 1960 Ford Falcon, with 17k miles on the odometer. It had been owned by the Grandmother of an acquaintance. I bought it as a back-up car because my '74 Volvo was so incredibly unreliable and was in the repair shop so often.
I soon found that, while the 16 year old Falcon was much more reliable than my 2 year old Volvo, the Falcon was dangerously slow, and as a result I avoided expressways with it. It gave me dependable transportation on secondary highways and local streets, but it just wasn’t designed for safe travel on expressways.
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+1 As expected, most car buyers wouldn’t care about the engine’s HP rating.