

Ford makes big promises for small engines








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RE: About time...
By masher2 (blog) on 1/7/2008 2:14:18 PM , Rating: 4
Because, until gas prices rose, those advantages didn't outweigh the disadvantages for the average consumer. A turbo adds cost, complexity, and a minor amount of turbo lag. If gas is $1/gallon, its easier to just mount a larger engine.

RE: About time...
By Ringold on 1/7/08, Rating: 0
RE: About time...
By Alexstarfire on 1/7/2008 5:26:47 PM , Rating: 4
Of course, they don't put out any numbers at all in these car articles. I've never seen an article that's posted anything about vehicle mileage. It's sad really. How can you tout something that's supposed to be better and you don't even give us estimates? A 20% increase sounds great, but if a 20% increase on 20MPG, that only goes to 24. It's better than nothing, but hell, you can increase your mileage by over 5% by not racing to the red light. Could be even more depending on how you drive.

They also don't tell you how much the car will cost, but tell you that it'll be 30 months to break even? How do they come up with these numbers? Do they look in a crystal ball? If they gave us a number like that then they should be able to tell us all the other numbers, since they'd have to know them to come up with the break-even period.

RE: About time...
By teldar on 1/7/2008 6:02:19 PM , Rating: 3
Actually, I think some of the links provide considerably more information than this story does.
One of them I read says that diesel takes approximately 7.5 years to pay back and hybrid 12 years, of course it's going to depend on driving styles.
My brother's an engineer for a major parts manufacturer, Magna (world wide, not just NA), and he figures this was finally a step in the right direction. He works mostly with Ford and has been really impressed at the efficiency of these engines for their cost as compared to other technologies out there.


RE: About time...


RE: About time...

RE: About time...
12 years for a hybrid? On what numbers?







RE: About time...

RE: About time...
By RyanM on 1/7/2008 5:02:55 PM , Rating: 2
Turbo lag is a nonissue these days thanks to proper turbo sizing and technologies like VNT.

RE: About time...
By Adonlude on 1/9/2008 5:38:33 PM , Rating: 2
Isnt this just a typical turbocharged engine? I don't see anything special about it unless this is the first time fuel injection was done in cylinder, which I doubt.

This is just another case of taking a "go faster" technology that was previously used to add power to an engine and adapting it to weaker engines to give you the same power for less gas. Honda did this when they first came out with VTEC to make their cars faster but then adopted it to weaker engines to make them more fuel efficient.

Whats VNT? Very Nice Turbo? Does it work better because it is Very Nice??? Ok, ill look it up...

Hey that is pretty nice:

