Who else is excited about EcoBoost?

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I'm reserved in my excitement. It makes me recall people like my aunt and my neighbor. Both of whom had Thunderbird Turbos with multitudes of problems. Both of whom swore off Ford for their experience with the Turbo TBird. Neither were willing to take the time to maintain the car properly.....proper idle down and OC's.

Do the new ecoboosts have a oil circulating system that runs after engine shut down? Why hasnt this become the norm for turbo equipped cars?
 
Every maufacturer had a turbo something or other in the '80's. Turbo was the be all end all of everything. Even the early PC's had a turbo switch.

They all abandoned the concept after a few years.

I had a brand spanking new '83 Thunderbird Turbo Coupe and have nothing but good memories of that car, but I have had no desire to own a turbo charged car since then.

When I bought our Solstice, I never even considered the turbo charged variant. Been there, done that, wasn't interested in doing it again.

Maybe the ecoboost will be a line of great engines if they have figured out a way to deal with all the heat and turbo lag, but I would rather have a larger engine, normally aspirated, or a supercharger if economy was not an issue.
 
Originally Posted By: Win


They all abandoned the concept after a few years.


Well, define "few." Chrysler sold turbos for around 12-15 years straight in the 80s and 90s, then brought one back for the PT in the 2000s. Subaru still sells a metric pantload of them. Turbo lag is nothing like it used to be, thanks to better engine management software and mechanisms like variable-nozzle turbos.


I would never write off the turbocharged gasoline engine as a whole based on Ford's rather poor implementation in the SVO and T-bird. Don't get me wrong, you just have to look at my .sig to know that I'm a fan of big cubes and simplicity too, but there's no fundamental reason that the Ecoboost can't live up to its billing. I'm open minded on it.
 
Poking around some found they have a few other engines in the works, including a flex-fuel 5.0 (I bet this ends up in Super Duty pickups in place of the 5.4 Triton), a high-end 5.0 for the Shelby GT500 and F150 Harley-Davidson, and a 1.6 4-cylinder which won't be offered in the US/Canada.

The 3.5 Ecoboost has the Duratec bellhousing, so it's set up for a FWD/AWD application. But the 2.2 Ecotec bellhousing adapter makes that a RWD application. So there is hope yet. When these start showing up in junkyards from wrecks, transmission failure, or whatever, it should open up all sorts of possibilities.

If the 2.0 gets the Duratec bellhousing, I can see them being swapped into Taurus/Sable cars with few adaptations (exhaust, motor mounts, electronics). With the 96-07 Taurus/Sable weighing much less than the newer one, it should be a real sleeper!
 
Well the idea of the EcoBoost sounds good to me. Makes sense to get the economy of the smaller engine and the power when you need it.

I really hope it works out...... Time will tell. But I would hope they did their homework. The companies success will probably depend on it.
 
The problem is the marketing is all hype.

There is no way you can get the fuel economy of a smaller engine with the HP of a larger one!

If you make hp you require a certain amount of fuel no matter how you choose to combust!

My father-in-law's new Lincoln SUV gets 17 mpg.
 
Originally Posted By: SteveSRT8
The problem is the marketing is all hype.

There is no way you can get the fuel economy of a smaller engine with the HP of a larger one!

If you make hp you require a certain amount of fuel no matter how you choose to combust!

My father-in-law's new Lincoln SUV gets 17 mpg.



So your saying that the 2 liter Ecoboost making 230HP will get the exact same fuel economy as the 230HP 4.6L V8 in our expedition? Sure, ok.
 
Originally Posted By: SteveSRT8
There is no way you can get the fuel economy of a smaller engine with the HP of a larger one!

If you make hp you require a certain amount of fuel no matter how you choose to combust!

All else equal, yes. The trick is, smaller engines with fewer cylinders can have less friction and reciprocating mass, which means less wasted energy.
 
Turbocharging increases efficiency by adding a second stage of expansion ( the exhaust snail) and a second stage of compression (the intake snail). In the 80's , un-cooled center sections and non-synthetic oils made life hard on turbo bearings. Legacy designs and fuel management systems limited boost and lowered power limits due to the limits on mixture consistency. Finally, direct injection and water cooled center sections have removed those limitations to power and reliability. We may finally have gotten turbo engines to live up to their ad hype after 25 years!
(This message brought to you by Garrett AiResearch) LOL Not really, but I do enjoy the thrust and thrift of turbo cars. Do you get the snarl and snap of an 11:1 289 with a healthy cam ? Of course not! The progressive thrust of a turbo car is fun,too but a different creature entirely.
That was a long one !
my 2c jorge
 
I owned a Turbo 1987 Chrysler New Yorker in high school. That thing pulled like any 4-barrel 318/360 I had ever owned. It also got reasonable economy. I remember calculating 23-25mpg in mixed sometime aggressive driving with it. I had a high of 28 on a 360 mile trip. You can't get that out of a 360. But you know, that turbo sure liked its clean oil. 3000 mile changes it was pretty happy. Stretch that to 5000 and it did NOT like it. Fuel mileage would drop, it wouldn't fly when you stood on it, and other Very Bad things would happen like bubbling coolant in the overflow tank.
 
I agree. Maybe Ford is going to use a large oil sump capacity, good oil coolers and cooling system. I think as long as they can keep oil temperatures down, it may be workable. We'll see.
 
Originally Posted By: 440Magnum


Turbo lag is nothing like it used to be, thanks to better engine management software and mechanisms like variable-nozzle turbos.

.....

I would never write off the turbocharged gasoline engine as a whole based on Ford's rather poor implementation in the SVO and T-bird.



Well, at the time (1983) it didn't seem that poorly implemented. Compared to what I had just sent to the scrap yard, a Honda with its junky carbureted cvcc stratified charge engine and miles of leaky vacuum hose, that fuel injected Ford engine and EEC-IV management system was a technological tour de force.

These ecoboost engines look to only deliver 50 - 60 hp beyond what a normally aspirated direct injection variant would do at similar displacements. I think I would just rather have a high compression engine 30 or 40 cubic inches larger than have to deal with a turbo engine. I'm not even sold on DI, yet.

I'm winding my fleet down from V12's and V8's to V6's and I4's, so I do have an open, but doubting, mind on it.
 
Originally Posted By: rudolphna


So your saying that the 2 liter Ecoboost making 230HP will get the exact same fuel economy as the 230HP 4.6L V8 in our expedition? Sure, ok.



There may be some small efficiency differences engine to engine but if you want 230 Hp (171 kilowatts), you have to burn the fuel to produce it.

Worse, you have to dissipate heat that would normally be spread over a larger engine and have much higher cylinder pressures. Everything else has to deal with this extra heat.

As heavy as today's cars are, these little engines will likely be on boost a lot of the time.
 
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Originally Posted By: Win
Originally Posted By: rudolphna


So your saying that the 2 liter Ecoboost making 230HP will get the exact same fuel economy as the 230HP 4.6L V8 in our expedition? Sure, ok.



There may be some small efficiency differences engine to engine but if you want 230 Hp (171 kilowatts), you have to burn the fuel to produce it.

Worse, you have to dissipate heat that would normally be spread over a larger engine and have much higher cylinder pressures. Everything else has to deal with this extra heat.

As heavy as today's cars are, these little engines will likely be on boost a lot of the time.


Burn the fuel, yes. But you are forgetting something. What efficiency means. Most N/A internal combustion engines struggle to reach 25% efficiency. What the ecoboost, and indeed diesel engines do, is increase the efficiency. More of the fuel energy is converted into movement of the car, versus heat. Therefor the ecoboost could theoretically, and does in practice, make significantly more horsepower at the same fuel consumption. The Ford Flex is a perfect example. The 3.5L Duratec makes 265HP and gets 24MPG. The Ecoboost makes ~360HP and still gets 24MPG.
 
Thought I had explained that! The exhaust still has energy in it (it's hot) ,so using it to spin a turbine extracts work that would otherwise go out the tailpipe. Rather than the intake valve drawing from vacuum , there's a greater pressure differential stuffing the combustion chamber.
 
we have a Lincoln SUV in the family.

It has ecoboost.

It gets 17 mpg with a 74 year old driving it!

There is no free lunch. And you simply cannot get something for nothing.
 
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