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I'm spinning this off from this thread here, where the issue of inline five and V-10 engines came up. My understanding is that such engines, or at least an inline five, would require a carburetor for each cylinder to avoid uneven fuel flow, and thus only became feasible with the development of fuel injection. However, there's some suggestion that it might be possible to compensate for the uneven fuel flow in a carbureted engine by varying bore spacing. Wikipedia claims that an inline five engine was used as early as the 1930s by Lancia for a series of trucks, and was under development for Ford for use in a passenger car, but they didn't start being commonly used for diesel and gasoline cars until the 1970s and 1980s. V-10 engines seem to be even more recent.

I'm wondering how early inline five and V-10 engines might have been technically feasible (and perhaps commercially feasible) for general use, especially for gasoline engines. If fuel injection is a major development required for the configuration this is an important distinction, as diesel engines began using fuel injection decades before gasoline engines.
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