I was looking to buy a car and found two similar car models, one with a 2.4-L engine, and the other with 3. What does that mean, and is it a noticeable difference?
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Different sized engines. Not a car guy but when I bought my lexus, I did a lot of looking around at various sized/cylinder engines and what kind of faults were common/when.
The 2.4 vs 3 L is the amount of space in the pistons. The idea is that the more space (volume), the more air that can be drawn in, which leads to a larger explosion, which means more power. Same with 4 vs 6 vs 8 cylinder. That’s just the measure of how many pistons you have. More pistons = more power, generally.
As for is the difference noticeable…honestly it depends. For the average commuter, no, not really. At least not in a good way. Sure, you can accelerate quicker, but who cares if you just make it to the next stop light in 50 seconds instead of 60. Technically it could actually be worse, as the large engines tend to be less fuel efficient, so you’re going to be paying more in gas.
Now for a performance vehicle, like you’re taking it to the track or hauling large loads or something, yeah there’s a difference. If you need more power, you want a larger engine.
The “L” is liters of displacement, which is basically the total volume of air that would be moved if all pistons made a full trip from their lowest to highest point. More displacement generally means more room for air and fuel which generally means more power. These numbers aren’t always exact, and are sometimes rounded or tweaked a bit if there’s another popular engine with the same numbers.
The “V” describes the layout of the cylinders. V means there are 2 banks of cylinders roughly arranged in a V shape. They could also be Inline like and “I4”. The cylinder layout can effect certain things like making an engine better at making lots of power at a very high revving red line like you might want in a boat or light sports car, or making lots of torque at lower rpms like you might want with a truck that will tow trailers. There are other odd layouts and names like “Y” and “W” or even layouts that don’t use a letter like “Boxer” engines, parallel twins or even rotary ones.
The “8” or “6” describe how many pistons there are. Generally, the more pistons, the more power and engine can make. The power can be applied a little bit smoother because you have power cycles happening much closer to each other. In the pre-CAD era, more cylinders generally meant a better balanced, smoother running engine. With modern design and manufacturing processes, though, even a 2 cylinder engine can be designed to run quite smooth.
In your example, you probably wouldn’t notice much of a difference unless one of the options is significantly heavier than the other and/or one is turbo or supercharged and the other isn’t.
The 2.4l refers to the combined volume of the cylinders. A 4 cylinder would have 4 chambers that the ignited gas can expand in. These figures are not always correlated with horse power or fuel efficiency. A 2.4l motor could produce more power than the 3.0l engine and same with the cylinders, there 4 cylinder motors that produce more power than the 8 cylinders. Some 8 cylinders get better mileage than some 4 cylinder.
The L numbers are the size of the engine, in liters. The 4 thru 8 cylinders are the number of pistons/cylinders in the engine. The overall horsepower is the main effect of these numbers; larger numbers generally mean more horsepower. But outside of the horsepower, those numbers don’t have much of an effect for a daily commuter car. They’re mostly for car geeks.
Here is the simplest answer. Drive both cars if they both have enough power for you buy the one with the best mileage.
Another thing that you’ll have to take into consideration is whether the engine is petrol (gasoline) or diesel. Diesel cars used to be quite popular in Europe (don’t know about America so much) and they tend to be a little bit larger in capacity than petrol engines. Often a manufactuer would offer a 1.4L petrol engine and a 1.7L diesel engine, for example.
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