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Most cars have 4-cylinder engines. If that is the best design solution, why do some cars have 3, 5, 6, 8 or 12-cylinder engines? If any of those are technically superior, why aren’t they more common?
None of these options – including the predominant 4-cylinder in-line or transverse engine – is the best answer. Designers have yet to configure a ‘perfect’ solution that best ticks all the boxes of cost, weight, shape, space, rigidity, balance, capacity, power, performance, economy, durability, etc. etc.
Every car owner has individual preferences and priorities, and every design option has different attributes and drawbacks. The 4-cylinder option clearly best meets the needs-mix of most people – on balance of all the idiosyncratic technical, business and consumer factors.
In the quest to find the best balance there have been (and will continue to be) all sorts of efforts to retain and enhance the positives of each option and to counteract the negatives, including rotary, in-line, transverse, horizontally opposed, V and even W lay-outs.
What we can all celebrate is the range of choice, while – in the face of climate change – we seem to be heading for something called NOTA (none of the above).
I’m waiting for a cartoon of a person’s head bobbing just above the waves, standing on the roof of a car labelled EV, with a speech balloon saying “Aw, shucks, too late”. Perhaps next to a sketch of a guy in a MAGA cap building a wall…in a desert.
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