What is displacement?

Displacement is the size of a car's engine, measured as the volume of its cylinders in litres or cubic centimetres (cc). It used to be the case that the size of a car's engine would give an indication of how powerful or fast it would be – but the introduction of turbochargers, superchargers and even hybrid systems means it's less useful as a benchmark these days, and there are plenty of powerful small engines in modern cars.