Ford F-150 EcoBoost: Technology Is Awesome

Technology is awesome.  I mean, you knew that. High technology has long been one of the selling points of the most exotic sports cars and sedans.  Things like night vision, laser guided cruise control, rain sensing wipers - stuff that would have been considered science fiction back in the 60's is reliable reality today.  But what's more awesome than high technology for the upper echelon of society?  High technology for everyone when it trickles down.

Ford announced the  engine lineup for the 2011 F-150 quarter-ton pickup truck yesterday.  Now, normally, we don't give much of a rat's posterior about pickups here at CarThrottle - due to the ox-cart suspension, center of gravity comparable to a Zamboni, slow pushrod motors and a shortage of gears, and the fact that we're more interested in Alex Zanardi than drywall construction.  But reading through the 2011 F-150 engine lineup is much like reading through, say, a BMW engine lineup from a few years ago.  It's crazy.  Here's the long and short of it.

• 3.7L 24v Ti-VCT V6: Base engine, replaces the old SOHC 4.2L V6 which made no power.  It's all aluminum, it's got chain-driven dual overhead camshafts and four valves per cylinder, independent variable cam timing on intake and exhaust cams, and it makes a stout 300 horsepower and 275lb-ft of torque.  This means the new base engine actually makes more power than the old 4.6L 2v or 3v V8, and almost as much power as the previous top-of-the-line 5.4L 3v Triton V8.  With better fuel economy, of course.  It'll happily spit these numbers out on either 87 octane dino juice, or E85 ethanol corn-juice.

• 5.0L 32v Ti-VCT V8: Code-named "Coyote" during development, this is a version of the highly-acclaimed 2011 Mustang GT's engine, tuned to run on regular gas and produce more low-end grunt and less high-end horsepower, which is what truck buyers need.  It's still all aluminum with the same variable cam timing on intake and exhaust as well as 4v heads, but power drops from 412 in the Mustang GT to 360, and torque drops to 380 lb-ft from 390.  Although it makes more peak torque than the outgoing 5.4L 3v Triton engine, it's at a higher RPM peak (4,850rpm versus 3,500 rpm) and the towing capacity is slightly smaller (gosh, a piddling 9,800 pounds.)  Compression drops from 11:1 to 10.5:1, the intake cam's duration drops from 260 to 240 degrees, and there are cast-iron log-style exhaust manifolds for increased longevity.  Still, for a "mid level" engine, that's a ton of power.

• 6.2L 16v V8: This big gun debuted recently on the exotic SVT Raptor dune-jumper truck, and it's coming to the full F-150 line for 2011.  It's a more traditional motor for the truck world - iron block, aluminum heads, two valves per cylinder, single overhead camshafts - but it does not disappoint.  It makes 411 horsepower and 434 lb-ft of torque.  But most interesting...

• 3.5L EcoBoost (haha) V6: Ok, ignore the dumb name.  There's nothing "eco" about strapping two turbochargers to a direct-injected quad-cam V6.  Let's talk parts and numbers.  This is a variant of the same 3.5L all-aluminum twin-turbo V6 that can be found under the hood of the Taurus SHO, and Lincoln MKS, MKT, and Ford Flex Ecoboost.  It's got high-pressure direct injection, two small low-inertia Honeywell turbochargers, and low-end torque for days. In fact, if you want low-end torque, forget the gigantic 6.2L V8, and get the "little" six.  Although the power and torque peaks are lower (365 horsepower for the V6, 411 for the 6.2L; 420 lb-ft for the V6 and 434 for the 6.2L, respectively), it's all about when that power occurs.  In the huge old-school 6.2L V8, peak torque occurs at a relatively high 4,500 rpm.  In the EcoBoost F-150, peak torque of 420lb-ft occurs at 2,500 rpm.  More interestingly, 90% of peak torque is available between a diesel-like 1,700rpm and 5,000rpm.  In fact, the power chart reads mostly like a diesel with some high-rpm breathing abilities.  This engine makes the kind of low-end torque that the large-displacement V8's, the norm in the class for decades, can only dream of.  It makes the kind of low-end torque that high-output HD diesels 10 years ago would've found acceptable.  It's got enough low-end torque to pull the trailer park off it's blocks.  Or, as Jalopnik put it:

It'll do a massive burnout.  Ford is taking an interesting strategy by positioning this as the "top" engine in the F-150 lineup, along with the 6.2L V8.  On paper, it makes sense.  It's got the power and the torque (have you read the word torque enough in this article yet?) along with an identical 11,800 lb towing capacity.  It'll get remarkably good fuel mileage for a crazy-powerful engine in a quarter-ton pickup.  Those numbers, by the way, are superior to the old 6.8L(!) Triton V10 which used to be the top gas engine offering in the F-series pickup, at about half the displacement.  The question is, will pickup truck buyers go for it?

The jury's still out on that one.  Much like Taxis, pickup truck buyers are afraid of change, and for good reason.  A lot of people that buy a pickup truck rely on that pickup truck to do work so they can make the payments on that pickup truck. This is why single-cam low-compression V8's and 4-speed automatics have been the norm for pickups for years.  They work.  They make tons of reliable low-end power for hundreds of thousands of miles, they don't break much and they're very cheap to fix when they do, and it's easy to find parts.  And while the F-150 EcoBoost has got the numbers going for it (oh yes!), the reliability is an unknown.  How long will it pull a 9,000 pound trailer up a long steep-grade hill before that high-pressure fuel pump blows out and costs three month's worth of payments to fix?  How many miles will this truck tow a trailer full of horses, or race cars, or drywall before one of the turbos decides it's had enough?  How many miles will that trick Ti-VCT system do it's thing before it quits?  How well will the brand-new six-speed automatic deal with 400+lb-ft of torque at less than 2,000 rpm?

All this is unknown.  Of course Ford will swear up and down that it's going to be reliable as death and taxes and jury duty, and that you can heat the turbos up to approximately the temperature of the sun on a long grade and they won't cook their bearings, but the proof's in the pudding.  Ask BMW 335i or Audi RS4 owners how they feel about their HPFP's.  It will take some brave fleet buyers to prove this engine over known quantities like, say, a 6.2L 2-valve iron-block V8.

Still, what we do know is that this truck is going to be bad-ass. I hardly need to say "just imagine it with some free-flow downpipes, a chip tune, a transmission remap, and short rear-end gears."  Hello 12-second quarter mile times.  Sure, it'll be awesome to drive.  But we'll have to see how it sells.