What does exactly means when an engine is 1.6L, or 2.0L? I mean, what is 1.6L? A receptacle? A bottle of coke inside the engine?
In: Engineering
It’s used as a selling point, though since they also go over the actual performance numbers (horsepower, torque, fuel economy) it seems rather moot. But it’s just the total volume of displacement; let’s say you have two cups that are big enough to hold .25 liters of liquid and can stack in each other. You take one cup and hold it like 10% of the way in the other cup so now the bottom cup has enough remaining room for say .22 liters, then you push the top cup as far into the bottom cup as it’ll go and the bottom cup barely has any leftover room in it Now, say .05 liters. So your cup experiment has a displacement of .17 liters, .22-.05. The same in cars, the total of how much air all the pistons can move.
But the engine size just appeals to the “monkey brain” part of us, thinking simplistic thoughts like “bigger/more is better.” I have a 4.2L engine that makes 275 HP, but there are engines these days with better technology that are able to make the same 275HP while also being much smaller.
Also see cubic inches, which is just the same measurement but with a different standard. When someone says they “have a 302 under the hood,” they’re referring to a motor with 302 cubic inches (or around 5L) of displacement. In America, the cubic-inch measurement of an engine is often used to identify the exact engine not only in size, but in design and even manufacturer, as our “Big Three” each came up with designs of slightly different sizes, like how Ford made a 351 while Chevy made a 350 and Dodge made a 360.
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