rev up your engines, today i'm going to talkabout why not to by a variable compression ratio engine, and tounderstand why i say that, here's a little history lesson, displacement ondemand engines, to get power when you want power and better gas mileage when you want better gas mileage, have been around for a while,in 1981 cadillac made the first production engine that was called the l62v8 6-4 it could run as a v8 for full power, then turn to six cylinders andeven four cylinders, but alas it was a massive failure, and the engines tended tofall apart after a short period of driving, and as time went on,electronics got better, in 2005 gm tried
it again with a 5.3 liter v8 ls4engine, where half the cylinders could be shut down when you had low power demands,really the cylinder deactivation systems they're pretty much a massive failure,but now they're making variable compression engines, that have varyingcompression ratios inside, now in itself this isn't a new idea, they've beenaround for a long time, they were test engines they weren't engines they put incars and people drove around, and yes it's very interesting technology, but asfor myself i don't want to be a guinea pig, spend a bunch of money for someengine that they're just trying out and find out that, whoo they blow up after acertain period of time or they have
significant driving problems who knows,the first production variable compression engine, is the infiniti qx50it's a 2.0 turbocharged four-cylinder engine, that can change its compressionratio from eight to one all the way up to fourteen to one, as you can see inthis animation, instead of having a piston and a rod that goes right tothe crank, it has various different angles which can adjust how muchcompression is in the engine, all these moving parts are just things that aregoing to break down over time, i mean let's look at it logically,you have a piston and a piston rod in a normal engine this bolts to the crankand it goes up and down and up and down
and up and down, simple designs beenaround for 100 something years reliable, i mean really, do you want to replace thesimple system that has a piston and a rod, to one that has a piston, a rod, thenother rods, cantilever system, another rod and then a computer-controlled servothat adjusts how high and low it goes now yes the variable compression enginethat infiniti has out, does get better gas mileage it's 27% better than the old2-liter non variable compression engine and it certainly beats the heck out ofgm cylinder deactivation which only got five to seven percent better gas mileage,but really when you got an old system that's totally dependable, if you want tomake radical changes, i think that you go
radical changes for completely differenttypes of engines, not four-stroke gasoline engines or even two-strokegasoline engines, if you're going to use that much technology, you might as wellgive up with gasoline engines and do something else, rather than modifygasoline engines with all these crazy designs, where computers control the liftof the pistons and hey, you know that what's going to break it always does,look at nissan they have a history of problems, the company almost wentbankrupt, and since reno and nissan merged, hey their quality has gone, so it's kindof fascinating that that's the company that's bringing out the first variablecompression engine to sell to the public
i'm not against technology, but i like mytechnology to actually work, personally i'd wait a while till those things havebeen out and tested, toyota starts making them and they start selling them by themillions, and then over the years they're proven to be reliable engines, yeah i'llbuy one then, but since i'm not a fortune-teller, hey i'm staying away fromthese variable compression ratio engines until they prove their worth, and reallywhat are you getting for all this technology, the infiniti hey it'scombined economy it's only 26 miles a gallon, that isn't that great gas mileagewhen you think about it, and that's the rated gas mileage, everybody knows youalways get worst gas mileage than what
the ratings give you, so really i'll givea pass on these variable compression ratio engines, till things change andmaybe they will but i'm not betting my bank on it, so if younever want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring thatbell!
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