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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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.
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