Maya Modeling :: Hiding Inner Geometry?

Say I have a car engine that I created. to make it easier on myself I made it out of a bunch of separate pieces. then at the end I combined them into one. somewhere down the line I'll want to animate the pieces separately, but until then I dont want all that inner geometry rendering because it takes up unnecessary render time. is there a function in maya where I can delete all invisible mesh geometry? so then any faces inside the outermost shell will be deleted.