Turbocharger to Replace V8 as American Icon?
By Bill Visnic April 12, 2010Don't look now, but the U.S. auto market is changing - sort of just like we'd been told it would.
Call it environmental awareness, call it regulatory pressure, call it old-fashioned economics. But by and large, call it inevitable: that most American of inventions - the V8 - is quickly being supplanted by smaller, more peppery engines as the auto industry marches to the latest beat of "downsizing."
Ford announced today that it will produce three new engines using its Ecoboost concept of combining direct fuel injection with turbocharging and variable camshaft timing to boost the specific output of smaller-displacement engines. Ecoboost engines will be deployed for two vehicles that long represented the heart of the V8 market: the F-150 pickup and the 2011 Explorer.
With today's announcement - which will be further detailed Tuesday at the annual Society of Automotive Engineers World Conference in Detroit - Ford said the F-150 will be offered with an Ecoboosted 3.5-liter V6 that will "deliver best-in-class fuel economy along with the power and towing capability of a V-8."
And the Explorer, the SUV that effectively defined the segment, will be fitted with a 2-liter 4-cylinder Ecoboost that also is claimed to deliver best-in-class fuel economy, along with the power of a V6.
The third new Ecoboost engine variant is a 1.6-liter 4-cylinder for the European C-Max mini-minivan. Based on the new Focus compact-car platform, the C-Max is coming to the U.S. next year as the Grand C-Max.
Ford said the new engines have added 200,000 to its original estimate of market penetration, meaning 1.5 million global Ecoboost installations, with 90 percent of its North American nameplates offering Ecoboost power.
V8s And Crossovers Don't Mix
With the talk of the new Explorer, there is no mention of the V8, the piece of the emergent product-development puzzle that really established SUVs as the most-have transportation of the late 1990s and became a staple of the segment for more than a decade. The Explorer first offered the option of a V8 in 1996, five years after the nameplate was launched.
Oh, the company isn't coming right out and saying it, but Ford sources had conceded almost since the Explorer America concept vehicle was unveiled more than two years ago that, despite being probably the most iconic Ford nameplate to be launched in the past generation, the new-age Explorer would almost certainly not offer V8 power. At least one reason: the coming Explorer no longer is a body-on-frame SUV; it is based on a unibody architecture and is being repositioned as a crossover.
The 2-liter Ecoboost likely will be the 2011 Explorer's base engine, with the 3.5-liter Ecoboost V6 the upgrade option.
As for the F-150, the Ecoboost V6 can replicate a V8, but it's unclear when - or if - Ford envisions the engine totally supplanting V8s. It has long been believed the typical buyers for fullsize pickups would be resistant to the total unavailability of V8 power - any manufacturer daring to completely eliminate V8s from its fullsize pickup model range would be engaging in a dangerous experiment.
Ford's announcement of Ecoboost V6 power for the F-150 might be the first step towards the sporadically-rumored plan of splitting the F-150 lineup into a range of somewhat smaller, "lifestyle" pickups and a more work- or commercially oriented range with more hauling and towing capabilities. For the smaller, lighter-duty F-Series range, lack of a V8 engine presumably would be acceptable.
V8s Passe?
Makes and models recently dropping V8 power are beginning to stack up.
An Explorer without a V8 is symbolic, for sure, but the flagship of Ford's Lincoln brand, the MKS, doesn't offer a V8: its top-of-the-heap engine is the 3.5-liter Ecoboost V6.
Rival General Motors Co. two years ago shut down development of a new generation, overhead-cam V8 engine family for passenger cars. The so-called "Ultra" V8, or UV8, was earmarked as a replacement for GM's aged Northstar V8, but GM said in early 2008 regulatory and environmental trends - not to mention shifting consumer tastes - were mitigating the need for V8s. The company's Cadillac division noted at the time installation rates for V8s in Cadillac's STS sedan and SRX crossover were running just 15 percent.
Volkswagen of America Inc. last year quietly dropped the 4.2-liter V8 offered for the 2010 Touareg crossover. Replacing that muscle was a V-6 diesel that generates more torque than the V8.
Other German makers are deemphasizing V8 prestige in the U.S. market: Volkswagen's Audi AG is substituting a new, supercharged 3.2-liter V6 for the former 4.2-liter V8 in many of its new high-performance "S" models. BMW AG is taking a similar tack with its "M" performance models, which reputedly will use forced-induction downsized engines to replace the normally aspirated V8 and V10 currently used in various M models.
Cost Must Be Absorbed
Cost is another intriguing factor in the equation. A mantra often heard in powertrain engineering circles about the future of V8s - "only for pickups and ponycars" - may be coming to fruition, but ask engineers whether a downsized V6 with twin turbochargers is cheaper to produce than a normally aspirated V8 and the answer is sure to be convoluted.
Some sources say costs for Ford's current 4.6-liter SOHC V-8 and an Ecoboost V6 are similar, but some suppliers say that can't be true - the turbocharged engine has to cost considerably more. Although the inclusion of other equipment and features make direct comparisons impossible, in the four Ford or Lincoln models in which the Ecoboost V6 currently is offered, upgrading from the conventional V6 to the Ecoboost-equipped model costs several thousand dollars.
Others say comparing a conventional V6 to an Ecoboost 4-cylinder engine might yield a more more closely equivalent cost.
But cost differences are irrelevant if social and market forces are dictating cylinder counts get chopped. And with a 35.1 mile-per-gallon CAFÉ standard coming into effect in slightly more than five years, Ford's growing bet on Ecoboost technology indicates that even if the engines are more costly, it's a move the company has decided it has to make. - Bill Visnic, senior editor
Photos by Ford
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Some of us associate turbos with short life and expensive repairs (and cool down periods). Kind of like diesels; the purported advantages don't really sway us to get too excited about it. Twin turbochargers sounds like twice the problems and twice the complexity.
Insurance companies have also associated turbos with higher rates.
Forget "Who Killed the Electric Car?" The electric car is alive and well, and thriving nicely. The real story of this decade is "Who Killed the American V8?" The suspects are many, but surely include environmenal groups such as the Sierra Club, left-wing hard-liners in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress, and, last but not least, the Administration of President Barack Obama, which has imposed arbitrary and draconian fuel-economy regulations just when the automobile industry should be starting to recover. And why do we care? Well, not only do consumers face dealing in future years with the added mechanical complexity (and protential unreliability) of turbo engines, but also six-cylinder and four-cylinder engines as a group have greater issues with noise, vibration, and harshness than V8s do. Oh, sure, proponents thump their chests about "saving the planet" by jacking up fuel-economy standards, but it is a stretch to expect that these fuel-economy regulations will do what countless previous regulations have not. Sure, Ford's EcoBoost V6 is a fine engine, but there is no reason, apart from the CAFE regulations, why the EcoBoost treatment could not be applied equally well to V8 and V12 engines for increased performance. As it is, the end result of the new regulations will be higher costs, more noise, vibration, and harshness from under the hood, reduced consumer choice, and greater potential reliability problems. Forgive me for being underwhelmed by the supposed successors to the late, lamented American V8.
Turbocharged engines can be built for durability under heavy workloads; I've got 572,000 miles of service so far on my '07 Cummins Inx-powered Kenworth T660 with no turbo related problems.
Every semi truck you will see/have seen today is turbocharged.
But the challenge as I see it is how to dissipate the 900 degree waste heat from the turbo in the confined underhood area of a car or light truck. In my Kay-dubbya there is loads of open space under the hood, and 10 1/2 gallons (40 liters) of synthetic motor oil to help keep things cool; even while running all day against the wind at 28 psi (19.7 Kg/m2) boost pressure.
But I take the point made by cvanlane.
For my car, I would opt for a 2.0 liter V8 producing 175 net horsepower over a 2.0 liter Turbo 4 producing 200 net horsepower. I really believe that in a light vehicle, a normally aspirated mini V8
would have overall better service life and equal or better economy than a high output Turbo 4.
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