Like why does it take mine like 15 seconds to get up to 60mph and other cars they do it in 5 or 8 seconds? They’re faster away from the traffic lights too.
Their engines work fundamentally the same like the same combustion process so what makes slow cars and what makes faster ones?
In: Engineering
Imagine your car’s engine is a smaller four cylinder engine, and the other car’s engine has six cylinders and they are also larger.
Now imagine that each in cylinder is a human arm that is responsible for pushing on a hand crank to turn the engine shaft to the wheels. (The arms would be an analogy for the piston.) In your car you’ve got four skinny arms, and in the other car there are six muscular arms. (The difference in strength is due to a larger cylinder bejng able to accept more fuel and make a bigger, more powerful explosion, which we are representing by bigger muscles in our imagination.)
Let’s assume that the two cars weigh the same and have the same gears. Now, both engines are being asked to get the cars moving by pushing on those hand cranks. Your foot pushes on the gas pedal all the way which causes these arms to push as hard as they can. The four arms in your car work together but there’s a limit to how hard they can push the cranks. So your car speeds up slowly. In the other car, six muscular arms can get the car moving much more easily.
There are other variables too, and you can improve the power of four cylinders considerably, but cylinder volume matters a lot.
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