Car engines are a marvel of engineering, they're designed to operate at practically arbitrary workloads under practically arbitrary conditions in varying states

Car engines are a marvel of engineering, they're designed to operate at practically arbitrary workloads under practically arbitrary conditions in varying states of disrepair and perform reasonably well in all of them. This is in stark contrast to something like the engines on an airplane, which are designed to operate optimally at cruising speed and altitude and just be "eh, good enough" everywhere else.