Whether you choose a car with a two-cylinder engine, three-cylinder engine or four-cylinder engine depends largely on what you need your car to do.
Two-cylinder engines have been popular in cars that spend most of their time in towns. They usually consist of either two pistons moving up and down in parallel, or two cylinders in a V configuration.
These engines have tended to be small and therefore not terribly powerful, although fuel economy is a plus point. Cars such as the Citroen 2CV demonstrated this configuration’s benefits perfectly.
However, these engines have declined in popularity in cars over the decades, to the extent that the Fiat TwinAir engine is one of very few two-cylinder engines being mass-produced.
Indian car maker Tata also uses a twin in its Nano microcar, and tiny British sportcar maker Morgan uses a V-twin-cylinder engine in its Three-Wheeler sports car.
These cars all have a couple of notable things in common – they are all small and they are all light (especially so in the case of the Morgan).
This means they don’t need much energy to move them around, which makes them more suited to the twin-cylinder engine.
What is a 3 cylinder engine
The three-cylinder engine has become much more popular since the end of the 1990s, with the advent of small turbochargers.
These have allowed car manufacturers to build small-capacity three-cylinder engines with the performance of bigger engines and the economy of smaller engines.
What is a 4 cylinder engine
The four-cylinder engine tends to be slightly larger in capacity, and usually has four cylinders in a line, although some manufacturers such as Porsche and Subaru, use flat-four-cylinder engines in which the pistons lie flat in two opposing pairs.
These are also nicknamed ‘boxer’ engines because of the way the pistons punch outwards like a boxer’s hands.
Four-cylinder engines are generally found in sports cars and cars that spend a greater amount of time on motorways, where their greater power outputs and smoothness make them ideal.