That time Mercedes almost built an 18-cylinder engine

Doing more with less has become an art form. Turbochargers and direct fuel-injection systems have helped squeeze more power from smaller engines, but it wasn’t always that way. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, well before the term “downsizing” entered industry jargon, automakers sought ways of doing more with more. Mercedes notably considered one-upping rival BMW’s experimental V16 by building an 18-cylinder engine for a line of flagship cars that would have jettiso