This is footage from the 2011 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. It’s the culmination of a promotion program that Ford did for the new at the time EcoBoost V6 that was going into their F-150’s. What they did was they pulled a standard EcoBoost engine off of the assembly line in their Cleveland Ohio engine plant. The engine was put on a dynamometer and put through a simulated 150,000 mile test which also included some thermal shock testing. The engine was then put into a F-150 where it was used to haul 55 tons of lumber up a mountain, tow 11,500 pounds for 24 hours straight around a track, performance hill tow testing and then its last stop was being put into a race truck that won its class in the Baja 1000. After that, the engine was taken back to Ford’s facilities in Dearborn with 164,000 total miles on it and it had only lost 1 of the 365 horsepower that it started out with. They then shipped it to the Detroit Auto Show and disassembled it for the first time in front of a live audience. The engine shows hardly any wear after the barrage of torture tests it was put through which is pretty impressive. It shows they had some talented engineers behind the engine design.

Ford is pretty ahead of the curve with this EcoBoost engine. It has a lot of the key technologies that we are going to see all car makers adopt in the near future to meet fuel mileage standards. Smaller displacement engines with turbochargers harness some of the heat energy produced by the engine to make more specific horsepower (power/liter). Direct fuel injection allows precise fuel control and better atomization in the combustion chambers. Variable valve timing changes how much the opening of the intake and exhaust valves overlap each other making sure it’s always optimized for engine speed. At higher engine speeds, the air coming into the combustion chamber is moving at a higher velocity and has more momentum. You want the intake valves to stay open longer because that momentum will keep carrying the air into the cylinder even while the piston is compressing it. The situation is different at low engine speeds when the air is moving slower. If the valves overlap too much at low speeds, the piston will actually push some of fresh air and fuel straight out of the exhaust before combustion happens. Having variable valve timing on both cams allow a computer to optimize the fuel usage and it also helps reduce turbo lag.

The video covers the entire demonstration and it runs about 50 minutes over three parts.