PH Blog: Ecoboosted

When you rememeber that in the F1 turbo era, 1500cc engines were reputed to output circa 1500bhp, looks as if this engine trend is only scratching the surface.

Wringing vast power out of an engine isn't hard... doing it in a way that the engine lives long enough for you to get further than the couple of hundred miles that an F1 race lasts is a very different proposition. The real test of these is going to be how well they're still running with 50,000 miles under them... how well with 100,000... if they've actually built something with good power/weight, good fuel economy, AND it doesn't need to be rebuilt every 20k miles then we're really on to something.

Think the problem with these (and a lot of other turbo'd run of the mill motors for the masses) will be the turbos dying because of the engines being ragged and suddenly switched off when the destination is reached without time to cool down or anything.

Then the warrantly claims start and the reputation is tarnished.

Personally I think that that much power from a 1.0 with a turbo is asking for trouble, but I apprieciate its the way things are going.

Don’t you think that this potential failure mode has been analysed, researched, designed around and thoroughly tested before going in to mass production.

There has been some progress since the specialist, high performance turbo vehicles of the 80’s and 90’s.

From the last thread on these engines, but repeated here because I think it bears repeating on page 1 of any such thread:

Someone in the previous thread on this topic mentioned the old Suzuki Cappuccino as the model for a 3 pot, twin ohc, 12 v, turbo charged engine.

I had one of these and it was a joy to drive although given it was designed for 5ft Japanese drivers rather than 6ft, 14 stone Scots it was a pain (literally) to get in and out of.

So if any design team is out there thinking that a GRP shelled (the Cappos would turn to rust if the weather forecast was for rain) small sports car with a sensible hood or solid roof and with this engine might have a market then they're right. I bet it would sell like hot cakes.

The price however must be right.... That means Cappuccino and not Caterham money...

The ecoboost weighs less than 100 kg, I reckon it'd fit anywhere. You'd nearly squeeze two in to a Locaterfield chassis…

Yep.. like the Roadster as well. Your point about "unusual" is right.. Because all the badges had fallen off my Cappo if you didn't know what it was you couldn't tell. As a consequence all the local kids thought it was a baby Porsche

1l turbo 3 sounds good, 2l twin turbo 6 or 2.7l twin turbo 8 sounds better

A few years ago all the Ford powertrain durability tests were reworked inline with real world data gained from looking at 95th percentile customer usage and what they could achieve in terms of abuse. One scenario that hadn't been considered before was the case of a vehicle being piloted at wide open throttle and/or high speeds on the Autobahn (or elsewhere for that matter) and then pulled into a petrol station i.e the engine could be shut off with the turbo/engine/oil still at upper end of it's working temperature range. As such, I'm pretty sure this was incorporated into at least one of the main powertrain durability cycles to ensure it was robust against this usage.
As technology moves forward so does the testing. A good example of this would the stop/start systems I am system validation engineer for (this engine being one of them). With the advent of stop/start there are new usage scenarios that didn't occur before and, as such, were not signed off against. With your stop/start enabled car you now have the scenario where wide open throttle is engaged immediately after an engine start e.g pulling away from traffic lights. The concern from the turbo manufacturer, for example, was that you might not have sufficient oil pressure by the time the turbo was being spooled up to achieve maximum boost. As such data was correleated showing how many times the most agressive driver in worst case usage might do this maneouver and then an engine was tested at varying range of temps (cold oil worst for travelling from sump to turbo/warm oil worst for bearing film thickness) to see if this cycle showed any significan extra wear.
So, yup, your average manufacturer does try to protect against most possible scenarios within the durability sign off. And the 'Fox' 1.0 was subject to the same sign off criteria as any other current powertrain

regards
Ben