Are you a true car buff... nay, a true car expert? Do you live and breathe cars? Is your idea of a great weekend tinkering with your classic car in your own home-based garage? Do you go to car shows just to look at the engines (who cares about the body)? If these sentences describe you, then you just might have enough car smarts to ace this quiz. Are you ready to find out how much you really know about car engines?

Today's car engines are typically internal combustion engines. But here's what you may not know. Although it is certainly possible to use an external combustion engine to power a vehicle (think locomotive), the fuel used in an external combustion engine is inefficient and you'd need too much of it to make your car's engine go vroom. Today's internal combustion engine is so efficient, it takes a relatively small amount of fuel to make the engine ignite immediately. Wouldn't it be frustrating to not only have to carry around a trunk full of wood or coal but to also have to wait until that fuel source heated up enough to result in enough power to move the vehicle? Not to mention the pollution. We know that fossil fuels such as gasoline produce more in the way of emissions than we'd like, but can you imagine puffing down the road like a locomotive? Whew! That doesn't sound like fun at all.

But what does sound like fun is this quiz. Click on begin if you're ready to prove how much you know about car engines.