That said, the recent trend of downsizing means it’s almost certainly true that every manufacturer has already created an engine larger than any it will produce in future.

Here we take a look at examples from 40 automotive brands, listed in ascending order of capacity. To clarify, we’re concentrating on engines used in vehicles available to the general public (even if only in very small numbers), so competition cars, record breakers, dump trucks and so on don’t count. Let’s take a look: