Ford EcoBoost: Small to mighty

"People think environmentally friendly cars are boring," says Ford Americas President Mark Fields. "Watch this."

He punches the accelerator on a Lincoln MKS sedan equipped with a prototype of Ford's new EcoBoost engine. The vineyards of the Old Mission Peninsula become a blur.

"This will put a smile on your face," Fields says. "But you get 20 percent better fuel economy with 15 percent less CO2. I call it the great taste, less filling school of powertrain technology."

Ford Motor Co.'s EcoBoost system combines turbocharging and direct injection to provide better performance and higher gas mileage. The new engines will debut on the MKS next year and spread rapidly to the rest of Ford's lineup. The company plans to make EcoBoost available on 90 percent of its models by 2013 and expects to be selling 500,000 EcoBoost-equipped cars and trucks in North America alone within five years.

General Motors Corp. already has similar engines in limited production, and recently announced plans to expand its offerings. The automaker, which refers to its technology simply as "downsize boosting," plans a more limited roll-out than Ford.

For both companies, it comes down to eking out a few more miles per gallon from gasoline engines while waiting for the cost to drop of other technologies, such as hybrids.

Ford has not announced pricing for EcoBoost, but it is not expected to add more than about $1,000 to the price of a car or truck, significantly less than the premium commanded by hybrids. Perhaps more importantly for the two struggling automakers, these engines do not eat into their profits the way hybrids do.

"The bottom line is that, if you want to be environmentally friendly, you won't have to spend an arm and a leg to do it," Fields told The Detroit News.

A light goes on

Ford began working on EcoBoost more than seven years ago.

The company's engineers had long been intrigued by the promise of direct injection, but thought its benefits were insufficient to justify the expense it added. At the same time, Ford was making big strides with turbo-charging diesels in Europe. Ford had watched German automakers combine these technologies to boost the performance of their high-end powertrains.

"It hit us that the real answer was downsizing," recalled Derrick Kuzack, Ford's global head of product development. "It was sort of a light bulb coming on for us."

Instead of using the technologies to make an already powerful engine more powerful, Ford realized it could use them to make a small engine powerful enough.

"I wasn't convinced until I actually drove the vehicles," Kuzak said. "The EcoBoost engines not only provided comparable performance to the bigger engines they were designed to replace, they were actually more fun to drive because of their abundant low-end torque."

In late 2005, Kuzack began lobbying for EcoBoost in a big way, but it was not an easy sell.

"The first question I got was, 'Do you really think you can convince customers to accept a V-6 instead of a V-8?'" he recalled.

But Kuzack and his team had done the math: hybrid powertrains add thousands of dollars more to the price of a vehicle. EcoBoost's fuel savings are more modest, but so is the initial investment.

By early 2006, Ford had committed to his EcoBoost strategy as part of a broader effort to reinvent itself as a fuel economy leader and champion of sustainability.

"I suspect everybody's looking at it," said analyst Jim Hall of 2953 Analytics LLP in Birmingham. "The question is where they are in deployment. Ford has outlined the most aggressive strategy. But it will be operating costs and reliability that make one better ."

Hall is one of the few people outside Ford who has driven an EcoBoost-equipped vehicle. He was impressed with it, but said it is important to continue to develop hybrids, too.

"The only viable strategy is deploying both strategies where they are needed," Hall said. "The only way you can build a 40-mile-per-gallon mid-sized sedan is with hybrid technology. The only way you can get real performance without sacrificing fuel economy is with something like EcoBoost."

Article from: http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008808220329