I just spent my first two minutes in the 2015 Ford F-150, with the brand-new 2.7 twin-turbo V6. As you're about to see; the power did catch me by surprise. Enjoy my unedited initial impressions on this brief ride-along.
(Disclosure: Ford flew me out to San Antonio and put me up in a nice hotel to check out their truck. Their camera recorded this video.)
The truck driven here is a 2015 Ford F-150 Sport SuperCrew 2.7 EcoBoost 4WD with a cloth interior. I drove it in 2WD with auto start/stop mode activated (meaning it shuts itself off at stops to save fuel), and traction control on. You'll have to excuse my reaction time; my driving style is more dialed in to keeping a beverage upright than honing lap times.
Ford's smallest truck engine, which is a completely-new, blank-page affair, has monster volumetric efficiency barfing out 325 horsepower and 375 lb-ft of torque, with the latter coming in full steam at just 3,000 RPM.
With that in the back of my mind, I thought I'd feel the engine's power a little sooner as I booted the gas off the stoplight. But of course, the engine wasn't running half a second before it was under full-throttle acceleration. And when the juice did come on, the truck rode a tidal wave of power that overcame the traction control enough to take a few miles off the rear tires.
Since I know I'm going to catch grief for calling this demonstration truck "not particularly well put together," I'll explain; the first thing I noticed climbing in was a lot of duct tape around the seat mount (UPDATE: I learned that was just holding the camera wires) and a shifter boot that was coming off. That said, I'll give it pass because it is a preproduction rig... I reckon the necessary tweaks will be made before this truck hits a showroom.
As for the spongey steering wheel, I'm still not sure about that one. But for what it's worth the King Ranch is still rocking a nice leather-wrapped helm.
Regardless of how you get along with the surfaces inside, that little engine under the hood is no joke. As Jalopnik columnist and D-list automotive celebrity Doug DeMuro pointed out to me, Ford knew they'd have to knock it out of the park to sell pickup buyers on a V6. The effort shows.
The engine's designer Ed Waszczenko gave us an overview of his baby; a 500 pound compacted graphite engine running two Borg-Warner turbos up to 31 PSI at 5,700 RPM. Those snails are spinning at 53,000 RPM at idle, screaming to almost 200,000 RPM at full noise.
With the pistons running a 10:1 compression ratio, the engine is pretty much high-pressure across the board. Ford's confident they've done enough for longevity to keep that mix running strong with innovations like "bushingless connecting rods" coated in Teflon and a cooling system that siphons oil to the turbos after shutdown.
The powerplant has already been announced in a front-wheel-drive form as well, where it will see duty in the 2015 Ford Edge Sport. I guess we'll start seeing how it holds up soon.
Images: Andrew P. Collins