David Finlay

Engines can be good, bad, or somewhere in between. But others are hard to put in a set box, for a variety of reasons…

Others may have been generally excellent, but flawed in some way, or used in the wrong car, or introduced when the world wasn’t yet ready for them. On the petrol available to ordinary motorists in the late 1950s, it was exceptionally fragile, and threatened to do so much damage to the car’s otherwise splendid reputation that MG abandoned it after building just over 2000 cars, from a total MGA production run of more than 100,000. “Fascinated by its own successes and in unbridled euphoria about performance, BMW had built a car that contradicted the spirit of the times like no other automobile had ever done before.”

As the 2011 horsepower Lotus Evija demonstrates, the most powerful cars of the near future will be EVs, but remarkable outputs have nevertheless been achieved with engines fuelled by petrol or diesel.

If Bugatti's quad-turbocharged W16 is unique but memorable, here are those engines that are forgotten and distinctive

Within five years, it had hit the jackpot, creating the most important, and for a long time the best-selling, car in history. The definition of ‘great’ is fluid – we’re using it here to describe cars which might not have excelled in all areas, but which at least pushed Ford forward in one way or another. The main requirement of any manufacturer’s first car is that it should be successful enough to allow the company to create a second.

With a live recording of the Jobber Tears Podcast and a Halloween costume contest for a 100 dollar Amazon gift card

A very small number have exceeded a million miles, some of them by a substantial margin, and within that group here are 19 that have done so on their original engines. This BMW 325i bought by Mobil Oil in 1990 had what was probably the easiest million-mile run in history.

The Gremlin was handsomely outsold by the rival Ford Pinto, but it was produced by a far smaller company than any of the Big Three, all of which had much greater resources. The British Leyland conglomerate was, and remains, an easy target for jokes about poor design, reliability and industrial relations.

Ranked: the longest-living car engines Tried and trusted engines can survive in production for decades – often far longer than the cars in which they're fitted. These are the longest survivors

This makes it less likely that models built in North America will do well in Europe, or vice versa, but that hasn’t stopped manufacturers from trying. The second-generation Audi 5000 (America’s equivalent of the third-generation Audi 100 as it was named elsewhere) should have sold well, but it became famous for cases of a phenomenon called sudden unintended acceleration.