Well, It’s Really Not That Far Away.
Remember when your average car used to do around 25mpg? Well it wasn’t too many years back and I can remember as a young salesman feeling particularly proud telling a customer if they drove their new car carefully, they might even get it to do 30mpg.
We all know that the advent and subsequent refinements of diesel engines has seen potential MPG figures rocket with 60mpg possible on many cars we drive today. Well, as with everything in the motor industry, things keep moving forward and as part of that, engineering breakthroughs are allowing car makers to come up with more and more frugal engines and not just diesel powered ones.
It would have been easy to stick with diesel, but the emphasis now seems to be with small efficient petrol units and one of the leaders in this technology are Ford, who have stunned people by announcing that within just a few years, the new models of many of the cars we drive today could be achieving up to 100mpg! and if that’s true, it’s spectacular.
Well, hold on to your hats guys, because its real, as Ford development engineers based at Dunton in Essex are already testing complete motors and Ford tell us that these next generation power units they are going to introduce are very likely to break the three litres per 100km barrier, which in English money means around 94mpg. It doesn’t stop there either, as Ford is confident that within just five years, theses new power plants could reach an amazing 100mpg.
All this is part of what Ford call ‘Ecoboost’ which is effectively aimed at replacing the bigger engines we use today, with much smaller more efficient engines, that return higher mpg and chuck less emissions out of the back. These engines are likely to be 3 cylinder units (don’t shudder) of just around 1000cc which produce 100ps or 130ps and they could find their way into special “eco” versions of cars such as Fiesta and C-Max.
Ford’s Marketing Director Mark Simpson has reportedly referred to the new power plant as “potentially the most significant engine we have ever put into a car. We think it will be a motoring milestone – it’s very exciting and we think we’ll be at the 100mpg level in five years’ time at the latest,”
It seems incredible that power outputs of 130ps can come from such small engines and that highlights just how hard the motor manufacturers like Ford are working to give us what even the harshest critic of the internal combustion engine, must consider to be groundbreaking technology. Well Done Ford.
