How bad did ford Sandbag the Ecoboost?

PewterCam said:

Well nothing here is a surprise at all. It's common for all mfgs to cut costs and purposely take power away from engines with restrictive exhausts and designing limits to the engines. If it was a Ferrari engineer Spouting off about the latest model having these deficiencies it would be a whole different story.

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Bullitt said:

Interesting read. I'm not sure about the whole idea of purposefully sandbagging the car just because they were scared of it being too close in performance to a GT. If that were the case they could have just tossed a less potent engine (like the Focus ST's 2.0L) in it and called it a day. Would have been way cheaper too.

The analysis is interesting, especially from someone that's been in the industry. But I feel like the actual Ford engineers aren't as clueless as your friend thinks. There's reasons for everything they do. And these days with strict emissions standards, they can't make an inefficient engine anymoreu. If the car could perform better for the same production cost, why shoot yourself in the foot? Sure they want to leave room for upgrades for the refreshed model (350hp rumored for 2018) but I don't think Ford is deliberately making the ecoboost slower. They did de-tune the V6 from 2014 but that was just in an effort to push people into EcoBoosts.

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doulos4jc said:

You have to wonder what goals the engineering team had during the R&D phase that led to the laughable Intercooler. Obviously money was near the top of that list...but what else?

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04SloSnake said:

Doing the bare minimum? I can't help but think they set their goals and went with the bare minimum to accomplish it.

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BmacIL said:

No, engineering is absolutely crushed by cost constraints. There's a lot they would rather do that would cost $3-10 more a vehicle but are shot down on purely cost reasons. They get to many of the solutions shown because they have to meet their performance targets but are not given any significant leeway on cost. A few cents, sure, but you have to go fighting for that too. Someone may say, well hey, they went with the expensive bellows. True, but this is done as exhaust engineering has design standards that require flex/bellows of certain types for durability reasons.

When I was there I was always arguing that adding the $5 or $10 and upping the base MSRP the same amount made sense, as the improvements were definitely noticeable to many customers, but the difference in price wouldn't be. I always lost, because sales/marketing.

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DB23 said:

Watch the doc "A Faster Horse" on the design of the 2015 - at one point there's a major crisis because the engineers want to make a change (single pin or bolt just a bit longer or something) that'll cost $1 more per car - you'd think they were asking for the moon the way the bean counter reacted lol.

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doulos4jc said:

I think it boils down to a cost vs. performance compromise. The overly conservative factory tune works ok with these built in restrictions, for a car built for the masses, 98% of which will never modify anything. I'm kinda glad they left a little something on the table. And as stated before they were definitely mindful of staying out of the GT's performance bubble.

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DB23 said:

Watch the doc "A Faster Horse" on the design of the 2015 - at one point there's a major crisis because the engineers want to make a change (single pin or bolt just a bit longer or something) that'll cost $1 more per car - you'd think they were asking for the moon the way the bean counter reacted lol.

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Glenn G said:

So I asked him what he thought he could do if unshackled.

"If I were in charge of the project from inception, but had to use the same turbo this engine would make 360 hp and save around $1 per car over the current design. If I was not limited on turbo this would be 400 hp at the same manufacture cost, and get better gas milage on the EPA cycle, Emissions would be slightly worse unless I spent 50 or 60 cents on a better cat and you could not run 87 at all. That's as far as I'd push the Hypereutectic pistons on a motor. If the fuel system has the capacity, $20 per car which would translate to around $1000 to the purchase price if we passed it all to the customer would be 450-470 hp on 93 only with forged pistons, 500 on a short over boost function. I can guarantee you that will not exist as long as the top trim level engine is naturally aspirated."

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