Diesel vs petrol engine

1. A gas engine compresses a fuel-air mixture and then

ignites it with a spark. A diesel engine compresses just air, to
such a high pressure and temperature that when fuel is then
injected, it ignites automatically with no need for a spark. This
is the fundamental difference between the two engines.
2....so, a diesel engine has to do more compression than a gas
engine does, to get the fuel to ignite. Conversely, a gas engine
cannot do as much compression as the diesel engine does,
because the fuel-air mixture it is compressing would ignite too
early, at the wrong moment. Remember the diesel engine just
compresses air, so it doesn’t have that problem.
3....so, the piston in the diesel engine has to travel further, in
order to compress the air more. So the piston stroke is longer
in a diesel engine.
4....and, a longer piston stroke means a larger diameter
crankshaft. Assuming the force coming from the gas piston
and the diesel piston is equal, then the diesel piston has a
longer lever arm and is turning its crankshaft with greater
torque (but, necessarily, at fewer revolutions per minute). The
gas piston may be delivering the same power, but it is
delivering it by turning a crankshaft at more revolutions per
minute, with less torque.
In fact, the diesel engine burns up the fuel a bit more
efficiently, and diesel fuel has a bit higher energy content than
gasoline, so a diesel piston should actually deliver more
power from burning the same volume of fuel. But this is less
important than the above argument in explaining the torque
difference.
If and when you do want less torque and more speed, or more
torque and less speed, than your engine is naturally inclined to
give you, you can get it by gearing the engine up or down.
That’s why cars have gears, and why big trucks have lots of
gears. But of course, transmissions don’t come free, in any of
various senses of the word “free.”