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Any car company can make a 100 hp/liter engine. They just have to have a short stroke engine with high RPM. However, high RPM is not very efficient nor as reliable as a lower RPM bigger volume engine. I think a better measure of a good engine is how efficiently it makes that power. Maybe in the future, besides just seeing HP and torque figures, we might have an "efficiency" curve that shows what % of energy is utilized for work instead of wasted heat.
Shoot, even my piddly RC car engine which is only 4.0 cc (that's .004 liter) makes about 3 horsepower. That's like 750 hp/liter! Of course, it's running at 40,000 rpm!
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