I understand that CC’s = mL’s, but CC’s is something that I have always associated with the medical field.. so how did motorcycles get roped into that? Is it just easier to say “I have a 250cc dirt bike” rather than saying “250mL?”
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Volume is volume, doesn’t matter if you say cubic centimeter or milliliter, it’s the same thing. There is no association with this or that field or industry, this is not imperial system where a farmers volume is different from a barman’s volume, volume is volume, an abstract concept separate from a practical use case.
Back when America was the leading automobile manufacturer they used cubic inches for all their engines. When Japan entered the market they used cc because of the metric system. The two systems slowly combined and one of the most popular uses of liters was Mustang 5.0.
Motorcycles on the other hand kept with the CC because it was what people were used to in motorcycles and quite frankly a .5 liter engine does not sound very impressive and can be confusing when someone has to buy a motorcycle and is trying to compare the familiar CC with liters, especially when CI was still in use by Harley. This was before the internet and ease of research.
The convention is still around, but slowly changing. Harley is still defining 114 ci engines, but their Sportster 1200 is defined in cc. Harley needed to put out the 114 engine in cubic inches just so people can immediately see that it is bigger than their 103 and 88 cubic inch engines. Same with metric motorcycles, if one is not familiar with metric, they can immediately see that a 1200cc engine is bigger than the 1200cc engine and might not grasp the 1.2 liter or 1200ml is the same thing.
So the answer is a bit of familiarity by buyers and marketing by companies.
CC refers to two things, Cubic Capacity and Cubic Centimeters, in regards to engines it usually describes the total volume of air and fuel being pushed through the engine by the cylinders `pi/4*bore^2*stroke*number of cylinders = total volume of chambers`
However, in the US they use cu which is cubic inches, however the rest of the world used metric, so yeah they used CC because that is a standard of measurement everyone used.
tl;dr it describes diplacement of volume by engine in a standard metric system of measurement to make the volume globally the same.
Meter is the Standart unit name. you can have kilometers (1000), you can have dezimeters (0,1), you can have micrometers (0,000001)
Litre is only used for fluid things, but it is just a word. 1 Litre is 1 qubric dezimeters but qubric dezimeter is a long word… Litre is more easy to say.
but back to motorcycles… three-dimensional place is always called qubic meters, if it is not connected to fluids.
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