Originally Posted By: gofast182
I understand your points (and I always find it cool to see how old mfrs like Packard used some architecture that "went out of style" but is now commonplace today over 50 years ago)
Yes, there isn't much "cutting edge" except for computers and efforts to reduce friction at this point
Most of this stuff was done in the past, but usually only on expensive engines as you noted. This to me makes this more about technology flow down-stream and making it affordable and not about things that are viewed as groundbreaking or new, because the odds are that they aren't
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but if you look at
specific output, efficiency, and reliability they were able to maximize all of those things to a noteworthy degree.
Yes, but wasn't that their goal? Remember, we are comparing two very different approaches to making power here. The "American tradition" has been to toss cubes at the problem forever. With gas in North America generally cheaper than the rest of the world there was really not much in the way of an incentive for them to dump money into their low-margin econobox car engines to extract extra fuel economy and the larger vehicles just made do with a big old reliable V8. It isn't that they
couldn't do it, as there are many examples that indicate that they could. Even if we go back to the birth of the 32V Modular, it was a pile of great parts that simply wasn't setup to scream.
Taken another way, Honda at the time, perhaps based on their history, which revolved around small engines, decided that this was the way they were going to go. Ford, GM...etc didn't see that as necessary and just continued to make big low-stress V8's for most of their flagship products. Once fuel prices began to go higher, you started seeing those
SAME engines and engine families simply evolving into higher power density variants with some added tech slapped on like VCT and the like (Coyote and Roadrunner for example, which are just an evolution of the Modular).
Honda was ahead of the curve for targeting fuel economy (this was the case really for the Japanese marques in general). This meant that they were in a far better position to leverage and capitalize on this with their products when fuel prices did start to rise. This strikes me more as a fundamental difference between the two schools of thought in engineering more than anything. The land of everything supersized approach versus the very conservative Japanese approach. That's just my opinion though
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Further, just because others have used some of these components before doesn't mean they were used in the same advanced ways with the same manufacturing techniques, for example they took the use of moly a lot farther than just rings.
So did Ford, lol! The Modular engines had coated skirts too (if that's where you were going with that).
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But most importantly they did it for engines that you got in just about any car they produced, not just special models, you gave some examples of very solid engines but they're not the ones you used to get in a Fusion or Cruze. At this point I don't regard them quite as ahead-of-the-curve as they were in the '90's and early '00's (although the new ED engines are making great power with awesome efficiency) but my point is they pioneered a lot of the modern implementation of many existing elements that are now commonplace in current engines.
I think it would be better stated that they perhaps were ahead of the game in bringing a lot of the expensive engineering you'd usually find in the flagship products of other marques to the layman.
But even there, we definitely want to take off the rose-coloured glasses and see that even Honda wasn't super high-tech across the board with all their products. My buddy's Prelude was carbureted at a time where basically every Ford product had EFI, and many of them SEFI. Did Honda make an EFI engine at that point? Yes, but it wasn't put in everything.
Same goes for the dual-point PGM-FI system
It was the equivalent of Ford's extremely short-lived CFI and GM's TBI.
