Wow is that the turbo for the 2010 mustang?

I drove from Denver to the SF Bay area and back over a three day span in a Dodge 3500 with the Cummins. Lots of hills and pulling a fully loaded trailer meant the turbo spooled up often. 72 hours later, I drove my Frontier from Denver to West Texas and on every hill, I heard a turbo spool up. It was a little bit sad to have to tell myself every time, "No, it's not true. You don't have a turbo. This truck is still slow."

If you hold your ear up to it, you can hear an ocean of ineptitude.

If GM doesn't take it upon themselves to also resurrect the trend of covering every square inch of the car in TURBO!!!1!11! stickers, someone's in serious trouble.

As long as they don't use diesel, I'd hate for a GM product have its engine outlast it's glovebox hinge...

@Duffman: Yep. They expect the lag to be measured in hours.

"is reporting GM will be following a strategy similar to Ford with it's EcoBoost engine"... or VW who's been doing it for years and years and years. What do they know though, who want's a 2.0T that manages 220-272hp anyways?

Pity GM doesn't innovate anymore, rather they react to the half decades old (FSI) or many decades old (lots of forced induction smaller displacement engines in an automakers lineup) or many many decades old news (IE Lutz indicating yesterday the future of american cars was E85 not that crappy gimmicky diesel stuff.

@Duffman: I was hoping it's a cooling fan for my MacBook Pro...

Someone dusted off an old WWII Army Air Corps tech manual or something.
But just like Opels sold as Saturns/Chevies, they'll sell this like it's some sort of epiphany and major technological breakthrough.

Naw, those look like centrifugal compressors for commericial compressed gas, e.g., compressed air for an auto factory, compressed argon for a commercial welding operation, air for a blast furnace/smelting operation, etc.

I was offered a job designing & making these things but the offer was what I made 10 years ago...not worth changing jobs at the time...

Those'r sum big sand castings, tho.

I'm sure turbocharging is the easiest way to achieve the target mileage in a lab while maintaining high HP numbers on a spec sheet. I don't know how well the mileage gains will translate to real world though.. still, turbo-4 > V6, sure there's more plumbing but less moving parts.

I can't get the idea of a big engine in an everyday car, why? In heavy duty machines and high performance cars yes, but in a sedan or wagon. Don't get it. It is a waste of technology.

Wait a minute...this is old news. SAAB, err, now Saab, a GM division, has been making turbo cars for 30 years now, THE longest consistant turbo line in the industry. They are now the technical excellence center for GM's turbo engines since the mid-90s with their EcoPower engines.

Anyone recall Per Eklund's Pikes Peak hillclimb car, The EcoPower 9-3 in '99, IIRC? I'd link a pic but, despite have the code inked on my Palm, it never works...

Why is this effin' news? Why are we slagging GM for re-publishing what they've been doing for years?

@JanTheMan: ...and a waste of fuel, metal, mass, and no one actually drives that fast every day.

Then again, most people are idiots.

I will keep repeating until I completely lose my mind, that 8 seconds to 60 is not slow. It's at least 50% faster than almost everyone accelerates in real driving.

@JanTheMan: Er, so you can have a big everyday grin??

Some blog about autos claimed that GM is going to be putting a turbo 1.4 liter in their domestic compacts within a year or two.

Can I have this breakthrough in technology in my G8 wagon?

Oh... yeah... never mind.

@SeanKHotay:

How unfortunate. IMO large V8 power has no equal.

Theres nothing wrong with adding a few turbos here and there, but seriously, some applications are redundant.

Anyone remember the Trans Am turbo?

Malaise II indeed!

@SeanKHotay: The truth is that GM hasn't been doing it, SAAB has and GM would have stopped them years ago if they actually had remembereed that they owned them. So now they are like hey turbos, great idea.

@TurboBrick: In general, you can get the same HP at a lower weight with a smaller displacement blown engine, that's where the improvement is. Total vehicle redesign is required to put out NA efficiency like that. So they can rehab existing platforms, while looking at long term total vehicle redesign to improve the next generation. We don't know for sure which fuel will dominate that group of vehicles though. So the interim approach leaves the company flexible enough to deal with that uncertainty.

@ruggels: Or who wants the GM Ecotec 2.0L turbo DI 4-cyl in the Pontiac Solstice GXP that does 260 hp/260 ft-lbs?

As for VW, let's examine the historical record, as told by Wikipedia:
"The first production turbocharged automobile engines came from General Motors in 1962. The A-body Oldsmobile Cutlass Jetfire and Chevrolet Corvair Monza Spyder were both fitted with turbochargers. "

Sorry to be a bit cranky today, I think I need caffeine.

@saabophile2:
GM needs to revive the name 'monza spyder' for some car.

Yeah what does GM know about fuel economy and performance....oh, wait; ZO6 no gas guzzler tax. Every other competitor....big gas guzzler tax. Never mind !!!

Love the screen on the big scroller in the picture. I think it's to keep the wheel from sucking in passing vultures.

Could it be GM is actually trailing Ford on this? FoMoCo has already stated, bluntly, that they are leaning heavily toward turbos for big power and decent MPG numbers.

It bothers me when people hold up the vette as an example of how you can acheive efficiency in a car with a big motor. The vette gets ok highway mileage on the EPA test because it is light, has good aerodynamics, and most importantly, 6th gear is a joke 0.5:1 ratio that exists only to pad the mileage numbers. It has very little to do with the inate efficiency of that motor, OHV or not.

@saabophile2: I think you'll agree, though, the first turbocharged car that was both reliable and affordable came from Saab. Volvo was close on their heels, though. The basic 2.0-liter turbo is still a great balance of power, longevity and fuel efficiency.

Turbos cost more, plain and simple. It's going to cost more for Ford, and it's going to cost more for GM. It's cheaper to build a high displacement conventional engine. That's why they've not been generally available. No big conspiracy or incompetency there. VW's been doing it you say, but a comparable VW costs more than a typical GM/Ford/Honda/Toyota (and aren't nearly as reliable). As their volume indicates, VW's are still niche vehicles in the United States.

Didn't we go through this in the mid-eighties? Isuzu I-Mark turbo, Chrysler TC by Maserati turbo, Mustang SVO, etc...

@balthisar: True, but designing a high efficiency NA, with the power/weight ratio of a turbo, costs on the development side, while both GM and Ford have turbo technology ready now. So there really isn't another ready alternative to meet the new CAFE regulations that I can think of. You got some inside dope on a NA strategy?

But the extra-special-happy thing about turbos is cranking up the boost.... and then watching your mileage plummet like a rock filled with lead.

@DoctorNine: You're right, that's what the gasoline direct injection turbos are going to hit the market. That's the strategy. I don't know that it's even possible to do NA with the same efficiency as a turbo (but I'm not an engine guy). I was trying to point out why we don't have them now. It's certainly because they cost more, and until recently no one cared about mileage, so there was no point to incurring higher costs for fuel economy purposes. Any superchargers were for performance. The Bonny SSEi's were fun, not econoboxes.

@AndyDuncan: What's wrong with having a tall sixth? My Protege was a five-speed geared like a six and it drove me insane. 3700 rpm on the freeway? For serious?

Fact is, fifth gear works well for passing and driving fast, sixth works well for cruising.

So, do they still cook the oil in the turbo bearings if you don't let them idle for a minute or two before shut down? Do they still fry things like vacuum lines and hoses under the hood? Has turbo lag been conquered entirely? Are turbochargers expected to last the "life of the engine"--said at one time to be a relatively measly 100,000 miles? Will the EPA mileage numbers be as impressive under the new test conditions as they were back when "highway" was measured at a 55 MPH cruise?

Time will tell, I suppose.

@al_beaton: I was thinking it is the perfect turbo for use with a direct exhaust injection system (if only I could be bothered to find a link).

I won't buy a car that isn't Turbo...After my WRX I was hooked...My new purchase (friday) CX-7. 244hp 2.3L direct inject Turbo. 9.5:1 compression! All power all the time.

@JanTheMan: Skol!

Per, working his magic again...

Anyone seen his daughter? {insert cat-call}

@RalphieDC: Actually, quite the opposite. GM encouraged Saab to move turbocharging technology forward using variable turbo geometry to direct ignition to Trionic ECM (the original Koenigseggseggsegg used Trionic) to variable compression engines to piston-mounted spark plugs to a lot more...some in development, some implemented in production...

Guess who was intimately involved in the Global 4 engine development? And responsible for the timing chain instead of a stupid timing belt?

@jdepould: Most six-speed cars have a sixth gear with a similar, if not identical ratio as the fifth gear on the five speed version, there's just more gears in between to keep the engine in the revs, so I'm not sure what you mean "geared like a six". There are exceptions of course, including the vette where 5th gear (0.7x:1 or 0.8x:1 I forget) would be considered a tall gear, so the vette's transmission really is more like a 5-speed with an additional 6th gear for the highway. There's nothing inherently wrong with such a tall top gear, the issue is that because it's so tall, you might not spend much time in it, negating the benefit of having it. Certainly the vette has more than enough torque that it doesn't need 6 gears spread around the "normal" ratios, but 6th is the reason that car does so well on the tests. Just look at the "city" rating of 16mpg versus the highway rating of 26. That's a pretty huge range, and guess which side of it you're actually going to see.

I've felt that small turbo engine are awesome for a long time. My first one was in an 88 Thunderbird turbo. That car was terrific! It handled well, it could approach 30 mpg, and it was reasonably quick for the time. Above all, it was reliable. I got rid of it @ 150k miles and it still had the original turbo.

@AndyDuncan: Geared like a six, as in 3700 revs cruising on the freeway was normal. I shift around the same speed now with my six speed as I did with the fiver.

@Macgyver:

I have heard that the T-Bird TCs were much better than the comparable T-Bird Super Coupe built after 1988 from more than one source. The only issue I have with turbos is if they turn out to have the reliability of the turbo Lebarons, Lancers and Lasers offered by Chrysler. Those over aspirated Mitsu motors would hold up well, but it would cost $1,500.00 every 75,000 miles to to rebuild the cooked turbocharger.

@Beluga: That is simply not true anymore. There have been major strides made in turbo technology. Variable geometry turbos, designs that allow oil to drain more effectively, and proper placement under the hood have all but eliminated all those issues. Thanks to constant development overseas, turbos will now last well over the expected life of the engine.
Something gets a bad reputation and it takes decades to correct the error. That's about the same as diesel's reputation for being loud and dirty (diesels are only getting quieter and cleaner).

Oh, and can anyone say "Grand National"? How 'bout G-N-X?

What powered the Syclone & Typhoon?

Wow, a big debate about turbocharging. Yippee.

I'm more interested in this "logic" idea. Is this the Bosch auto-stop functionality offered on 1-series BMWs? One sure way to reduce fuel consumption is to not waste it at red lights.

As for people who live in rural areas, it doesn't matter what the sticker on the rear decklid says, 2.0T or 5.0 -- either engine at constant load in overdrive will burn about the same on the highway.

1993 Saab turbo. More than adequate 200 hp out of 2.3L 4-pot, 26/35 mpg in a large comfy 3000lb car with a huge trunk. No, I wouldn't tow a 26 foot fifth wheel with it. Like most people, I don't have one.

Did I mention this is a 1993 vehicle?

Turbos are nice, but we have to remember that the origins of turbos (in cars, at least) are due heavily to the taxation-on-displacement system in many European countries.

For everyday "driveability", I would take a nice V6 over any I4t with the same peak specs. I have found great fuel efficiency gains when driving around from 1200-2500RPM in a V6 or V8, while a four-pot often has to be wound up to nearly 2000 just to ensure a solid start in 1st gear. My measly 190lb-ft V6 does a terrific (and quiet) job at low RPM, returning respectable fuel economy.

@lascauxcaveman: Actually, I had a '92 C900T as my last daily driver, before my current '96 9000 Aero.

120mph (indicated) w/ a small sofa in the rear (Ontario 401). A buddy said he did 125mph similarly on I-495 around Boston, Mass with his '89 w/ Red Box APC. 'Nuff said.

@SeanKHotay: Express Delivery.

@JanTheMan: except half the V8's in cars are american so there isn't really any technology to speak of in them