Ford F-150 | Ecoboost vs. 5.0 V8 (I've owned both)

hi youtube this is ian from big rock media so after i posted my f-150 review several months ago i got a lot of questions and comments about the ecoboost engine versus the 5-liter v8 and really this kind of devolves into a debate between turbocharging a smaller engine versus providing a larger displacement v8 with no turbocharger there's a lot of concerns and discussion about the reliability of the ecoboost with the twin turbo versus the perceived long-term reliability of the 5-liter v8 or any other v8 engine so today that's what we're going to talk about this little badge right here this ecoboost badge what does it mean how do i like driving it but most of all how does it compare to the last f-150 i had which was a 2015 f-150 with the 5-liter v8 and the 6-speed transmission and we're going to compare that to this truck which is a 2017 platinum with the second generation ecoboost 3.5 and the 10-speed auto so i've actually owned both of these not just theorized about them so i'm going to tell you why i made the switch what the trade-offs were good and bad and would i buy this truck again so here's how i'm going to break this down first i'm going to tell you why did i make the switch from the 5-liter truck to the ecoboost truck then i'm going to give you the pros and cons to each motor as i see them then third we'll take a deep dive into sort of the reliability discussion on the ecoboost engine and finally i'll tell you what i would buy if i was buying a new truck today okay so first let's go over what led me to trade my 2015 with the 5 liter coyote v8 for this truck a 2017 platinum with a second gen 3.5 ecoboost and the 10 speed okay so really to tell the story i have to take you back to 2017. so at the time i was driving a 2015 chevy colorado that was the newer generation colorado that they're still selling today now i really love the colorado for kind of its smaller size how easy it was to park the fuel economy and just the everyday livability of that truck now the problem with that truck came in when i tried to tow our travel trailer which at the time was a forest river r-pod but i also wanted to take a motorcycle and a bed of the truck with me now i had made the stupid mistake of getting the five-foot bed without colorado which meant that i could not tow a travel trailer and have a motorcycle because with the tailgate all the way down it would really interfere with the hitch of the travel trailer also when having a lot of weight in the bed and also between a travel trailer the v6 engine of the colorado felt a little bit strained so i started test driving different trucks and seeing what was out there now in the past i had owned a toyota tundra a 2010 model and i had also owned an older gmc sierra so i never owned a ford at that time and i was kind of curious to see how they were my local dealer had just gotten in a pre-owned 2015 crew cab short bed with the 5 liter v8 the 6-speed transmission it didn't have the 10-speed at that time it had the 302a package which was a nice package on the xlt it had a 373 rand the towing package and other stuff and it was a nicely equipped truck for a great price after test driving that truck quite a bit i kind of fell in love with the 5-0 motor and just how that truck drove in general and we ended up making a deal on it so i traded my colorado and drove home with the 2015 f-150 now i also forgot to mention that i had had a mustang with the coyote v8 so i kind of already was predisposed to liking the engine and so when i found it in the truck package i really was kind of a no-brainer for me now during the time i had that truck i had zero issues with it it it drove great the sound was amazing um there's a lot of things i liked about that engine and that truck in particular so why then would i get rid of that beautiful guard metallic green f-150 and get this truck well that's the story that i'm going to tell you now so when we traded in our our pod trailer for a larger and heavier lance trailer that's when things started to shift so we took one trip that i can remember in particular where we went up and over both sides of the rocky mountains all through colorado and utah and going over those high passes i remember many times where we were you know eight nine ten thousand feet or even higher you know the truck in second gear four or five thousand rpm trying to get up those grades you see a naturally aspirated uh smaller v8 especially something like the 5-0 while it's a great engine it doesn't really have a lot of torque at the very low end of the rpm range so to pull a heavy load up a hill you need to use a very high rpm there it goes yeah yeah well this is a 6-speed and it's holding the rpms up that's what it's all about if you want to hold your speed you've got to have the torque and you've got to be able to shift down and have the rpms coming back from that trip we ended up driving all the way across utah like on the 70 i think it is and there was a really really bad headwind and i remember for most of going through utah that day we were in like second or third gear at like over 4000 rpm we were getting around six five to six miles a gallon and the truck really just didn't seem to enjoy it very much now this was made worse by the fact that i had 34 inch or 35 inch tires actually had the rafter tires and wheels on that truck which changed the final drive gearing i do admit that but the other thing that was bugging me about that particular truck was that i made the mistake of not checking when i bought it and it actually had the 23 gallon gas tank in it not the 36 gallon tank that you can get as an optional upgrade now if you've ever towed a trailer you know you're getting like 8 to 10 miles a gallon and when you only have like around 20 gallons of gas that means you're looking for fuel every 150 to 200 miles which gets old really fast so it goes without saying that as i was driving home from that trip i really started to think about what my next truck might look like so i knew that the ecoboost engines were known for having almost diesel-like low-end torque because of the turbocharging that they have what gear are you in now fifth gear fifth gear so it seems like fifth gear is what it likes yeah fifth gear rated sixty right yeah yeah that's four it's worth yeah i kick down there yeah and that certainly gets up to 3 600 rpm which is still not much for a gas engine but you still have reserve power i mean yeah i could i could go up the steel 90 miles an hour if you let me no i won't touch me you really like me no no it seems like there's so much power left over well there is there is based on the lower gear i'm almost surprised that it was sitting in fifth the whole time 3100 rpm okay they were also claimed to get a little bit better miles per gallon and they just seemed like a really good package and something that had worked for ford for quite a long time now i also wanted some other features in my truck so my xlt was a fairly basic package although some of you would disagree with that but i kind of wanted some of the stupid features that most of you will make fun of things like the adaptive cruise control and the ventilated seats and other things that probably aren't worth it to most of you but it's something that i kind of wanted now i didn't feel it was time for me to go to a heavy duty truck because after all our trailer was under 6000 pounds and i wasn't really i didn't have the use usage case for getting a diesel and all the expense of the maintenance and the initial cost of that so i kind of wanted to stick to a half ton gas truck so i i went to test driving stuff again so i tested the new gm trucks both with the 53 v8 and the 62 v8 i did like the 62 with the 8 speed i tested the ram with the 5.7 hemi the newer ram was very attractive the 2019 redesign with a better interior that looked really good but i kept coming back to the ford and every time i would test drive an f-150 with the 3.5 ecoboost i was blown away by the power and the torque and just how it drove so after kind of narrowing my search down to an f-150 with the ecoboost i started looking for platinum so i ended up finding this this white platinum up in the la area and made a deal on the truck long story short so i've had my 2017 f-150 here for about a year and a half and it's been a really great truck so far so why don't we get into talking about the different motor choices why i chose the ecoboost and how it differs from the other motors so if you've looked at f-150s if you're in the market for one you realize that there's a ton of engine choices now that's a great thing for the consumer because you have a ton of different choices to choose from and you can choose what suits your needs but the question is what engine should you get for how you're using it so in the f-150 of these generations from 2015 and on you can get a number of different engines you can get a base v6 engine naturally aspirated which mostly you find in like work trucks after the base v6 you step up to the 2.7 liter ecoboost now the 2.7 is a newer engine than the 3.5 ford developed it for use in a lot of their different vehicles it makes less power and torque than the 3.5 and it also has a little different design but we're not going to get into that in detail in this video after the 2.7 technically in terms of power and torque you've got the 5 liter v8 now the 5 liter v8 sometimes called the coyote v8 is a very popular choice for the f-150 a ford also uses it in a mustang a lot of people know it from the mustang and it's certainly a great engine for that car now after the 5-liter v8 you go up to the 3.5 ecoboost the 3.5 ecoboost is one of the best sellers in the f-150 in this generation a truck it made quite a bit of power though they've increased it for 2021. i should also mention you've got a three liter power stroke diesel it's not a very popular choice because it's an expensive option to upgrade to and when you look at the power and torque compared to the other engines for the price that you have to pay for that it doesn't make a lot of sense for most people but some people who just love diesels they're going to go for that choice now for 2021 they've added a hybrid engine which is kind of an amazing option to go with if you're looking at a new 21 but that truck is just hitting dealerships i don't even know if you can buy one as i'm filming this so we're not going to get too much into that but the hybrid adds um quite a bit of power and a lot of torque 570 foot-pounds of torque which is quite a accomplishment for a half-ton truck so for this video i'm really focusing on the coyote v8 versus the 3.5 ecoboost now a lot of the things i'm going to say about the turbo versus the v8 would apply also to the 2.7 but i'm going to kind of focus on the power numbers and the engineering of the 3.5 because i think that's what a lot of you are comparing it to now i'd be remiss if i didn't mention transmissions because transmissions affect how the truck is going to drive based on what engine you get as well depending on what year so through 2016 the only transmission uh in the f-150 was the six-speed 6r80 uh ford automatic transmission uh it was a good transmission um doesn't seem to have too many failure points now for 2017 ford introduced the 10-speed which they had co-developed with gm and they put that on the 3.5 ecoboost truck but not on some of the other engine choices that they had in 2017 but for 2018 the coyote v8 also got the 10 speed which was a pretty big upgrade now we need to talk about the changes to the ecoboost the 3.5 ecoboost for 2017 and then a little also a bit about the changes to the 5 liter for 2018. so in 2017 ford introduced the second generation 3-5 ecoboost now this was um somewhat similar to the 3.5 they had offering before but it it it was re-engineered so in 2017 for the second gen they added port and direct fuel injection to the engine so by having dual injection it really helps prevent the carbon buildup in in the valves that's important because if you only have direct fuel injection what tends to happen is your your valves will kind of get carboned up by adding a port fuel injection to give an extra kind of explosion in there to keep the heat up it doesn't build up carbon as much so that's a nice feature to have they still used borg worn or turbos but the turbos were different they have different blades on the turbos the truck had higher compression they also made changes to the cams uh the cam phasers uh it had two cam chains instead of one so so they went through and made quite a bit of changes to the engine to with the aim of making it more reliable more durable and they took what they learned from you know seven or eight years of producing the first gen ecoboost three five now i mentioned the coyote v8 so for 2018 not only did the coyote v8 get the 10 speed 10r80 transmission but it also got dual injection as well now they made some other small changes as well to the engine in 2018 but we're not going to go into details there so let's quickly review the power ratings of these different engines so the five-liter coyote up until 2018 its rating was 385 horsepower and 387 torque so that was the engine that i had in my 2015 f-150 uh the second generation 5.0 2018 and later they bumped that up to 395 horsepower and 400 torque so a little bit of a bump there in power combined with the fact that you got the 10 speed in 2018 that truck felt quite a bit more lively so the first gen ecoboost like the 2010 around 2010 all the way up to 2016 f-150 on the three-five was 365 horsepower and 420 foot-pounds of torque now you notice that the horsepower is slightly under the 5 liter v8 of that era but the torque is higher but most importantly it's the torque curve that you have to care about and we're going to put up some images here of the torque curve the ecoboost engines make more torque at low rpm far more than the v8s do so it's not just the p it went up to 375 horsepower and 470 foot-pounds of torque so a nice increase of 50 foot-pound-feet of torque so we're going to get to the pros and cons of the coyote v8 versus the ecoboost engines in a minute but first i want to touch on fuel economy so i'm not going to delve too deeply into fuel economy i'm not even going to list the epa ratings because number one you can look those up on your own if you care but also sharing my experience of what i found between the v8 and the ecoboost is that the fuel economy is not dramatically different between the engines now i understand ford's idea behind the ecoboost branding and you know i know how branding is done i know how marketing works i know how companies work so they wanted to give this eco image to the whole these engines saying oh well they're lower displacement but we're adding a forced induction so they're going to give you better fuel economy well in the real world they really don't give you much better fuel economy if any and the reason is that in real world driving you're dipping into the turbo boost and once you add that boost in and you're driving around under boost it has to add fuel to compensate for all that air getting crammed into the engine and if you really think about this if you're driving 70 miles an hour down the freeway everything else being equal it takes a certain amount of horsepower to overcome the wind resistance and the friction resistance of your tires and push your truck down the freeway so yes there are slight differences in efficiency between different engines but ultimately there's other factors that come into play so i don't really like the name ecoboost i think it's a misleading name but again marketing that's what marketing is about i don't find it this to get much better economy than my coyote v8 did for towing or towing a 5000 pound trailer i get around 11 miles per gallon than this and i would get around 10 to 11 miles a gallon in my 5-0 so it was kind of the same there now i will say if you go out on the highway and set the cruise control to 65 on this truck i can get on a good day um i can get 24 miles a gallon maybe on the highway at steady state cruising now the 5 liter v8 wasn't really able to quite get up to that i might get 22 23 on on that similar run but again pretty small change in efficiency overall for around town driving again i don't see much difference between the ecoboost and the five liter i guess if you really really stayed out of the boost and had a super light foot that may be just maybe the ecoboost will give you a better economy but it's it's pretty minimal to be honest so i wouldn't use fuel economy as really a deciding factor now the caveat to what i'm saying is i'm talking about the 3.5 ecoboost here in this discussion the 27 does get a little bit better economy than the 35 and the coyote v8 so do need to keep that in mind if you don't have a lot of heavy loads and you want the better fuel economy the 2-7 is something you should really look at so as we get into the pros and cons here between the different engines uh what are the first things you notice when you drive them back to back so there's a couple things one of the first most obvious things you notice is the difference in sound it goes without saying that the coyote is an amazing sounding engine yes went to the floor you know the coyote wakes up over like 4 500 rpm it sounds like it looks like it goes right to red light too right to 57 it goes over red whereas the ecoboost engines sort of sound like you know amplified vacuum cleaners now they do give you uh they do pipe like a fake engine sound to the speakers but it's not that convincing i don't find it offensive at all but it also doesn't really sound anything like the deep growl of the coyote or any v8 for that matter now the other thing you're going to notice when you drive them back to back and this is going to be amplified with the more weight you're carrying or towing is the ecoboost engines especially the 35 right off the bottom of rpm range like right off of idle you feel the shove of torque like propelling you forward and you don't get that in the coyote v8 the way the v8 drives is that it's a linear power band but the rp the the torque and horsepower build with rpm so it's satisfying to drive but you really have to wring its neck to get the power out of it whereas with this engine with the 3.5 it can short shift all day at 2500 to 3000 rpm and propel you along really well whereas if you try to get the same acceleration out of the 5 liter you're going to be revving a lot higher now that's just kind of a personal preference thing but again as you get into towing or heavier loads having that low end torque i mean really that's why people go to diesels right so the ecoboost is to me is kind of like a halfway point between a naturally aspirated gas engine and a diesel because of the way it delivers that low rpm torque so my pros and cons to the 5 liter versus the 3.5 the 5 liter the pros are it's very reliable it doesn't have many reliability issues now there's a caveat to that i think in 2018 and later they had some deceleration rattles if you go on the forums there's a lot of people who've had this problem and some trucks have even been lemon law buybacks but i don't know how widespread that is so we're not going to go too far into that but generally the 5 liters been a good engine for ford the 5 liter also has a nice thing which some people don't know which is that it has an eight liter or eight quart oil capacity that allows you to maybe go a little bit more between changes and i like having that extra oil the ecoboost engine at least three five only holds six liters of oil so i tend to change it quite a bit more often of course the other pro to the 5.0 as we've already mentioned is the sound now the downsides to the 5.0 are the lack of torque and not just the lack of peak torque but the lack of torque at the low rpms it simply can't match the ecoboost for that the other potential downside to the coyote is that the tuning potential is not nearly as much as with the boosted engine so with the boosted engines you have the ability if you want to turn up the boost pressure through aftermarket solutions and basically have your truck make a crap ton more power you can add something like 100 foot pounds of torque and almost 100 horsepower by simply flashing your computer on the ecoboost trucks and there's no way you could ever do that with a 5 liter v8 it's just something to consider so the pros to the ecoboost 35 are the peak torque and the torque curve are just incredible on this engine you can get huge gains from tuning it feels really really fast and it's pretty fun to race people with it and it tows amazingly well and that ultimately is why i switched to the 35 i think if i wasn't towing a travel trailer i'd probably have the coyote v8 just because i like the reliability of it i like the sound of it and i don't need to have the complication of the twin turbos if i'm not towing a lot of heavy load the cons to the ecoboost engine we've gone through some of this already but it doesn't sound very good it's much more complex so in theory there's much more to go wrong with two turbochargers and all the plumbing involved with that also here's something that a lot of the car reviewers don't talk about is that a small turbocharged engine is going to generate a lot more heat so the ecoboost engines are run very hot um when i tow my trailer up steep grades and i'm running quite a bit of boost my coolant temperature my engine temperature gets up there pretty high you know 230 240 now some people have said that's normal some people have said oh that's not normal that something's wrong with it i can't find anything wrong with my truck other people have experienced this i think just in general with running a lot of boost on a small engine like this there's no way around it there's a lot of heat going into that engine and it's got to deal with it so that's something to consider so how do you decide which engine to get i mean that's really the question right so i think it boils down to this if you're willing to give up the sound of the v8 and the reliability and the less complexity that that engine has and trade that off for more low end torque more peak torque and better performance hauling weight and towing trailers then you should then you get the ecoboost but if you're not really into pulling heavy loads and you can live without that nice shove of low end torque and you really like the sound of the v8 and you like the fact that there's not twin turbos and all that stuff to break then you should definitely stick to the v8 choice you're not going to see a huge difference in fuel economy the initial cost is you know pretty similar when you buy the trucks resale value is about the same so you know really you have to decide what you're doing with the truck but of course a test drive is going to be the most useful thing for you as well now for the 2018 revisions of the 5.0 it is a little bit stronger and with a 10 speed it definitely does feel a little bit quicker but when you're towing trailers you're still going to be at those high rpms much more so than you would be with the ecoboost engine if you're okay with that then fine the 5 liter is totally up to the job of pulling heavy trailers but the ecoboost is just better now i did say we were going to try to talk about reliability so reliability is a really hard thing to talk about because there's not many accurate data sources for reliability on these trucks you look at organizations like jd power which is kind of just really a marketing firm and even other groups like consumer reports it's kind of hard to sort out truth from fiction and there's always some sort of advertising by the manufacturers somehow getting in there and making it not so objective when you're researching things online you have to keep one thing in mind people go on the internet on truck forums or motorcycle forums or whatever it is usually to complain about a problem they have or to seek a solution for something they're going through that's wrong with their vehicle so you don't if you're happy with your truck and you're just living with it no problems and you're not going online to say oh i really like this who else likes it no you go online to complain or have problems so you might perceive that there's a reliability issue with a certain engine or a certain vehicle but how do you separate that from just internet hype and maybe a few dozen owners being very vocal about their problems that's really an anecdote and not a data set so you really can't go based on that unfortunately no engine is perfect and no vehicle is perfect so while yes the ecoboost does have more complexity and certainly does in the long run have a lot more that can break and cost more money to fix there's really no hard data saying that the the coyote is going to be more reliable than the 35 or the 27 or anything for that matter so you might be wondering what would i buy for my next truck so i'm really pretty happy with this truck besides the fact that i mentioned about kind of it it gets a little hot going upgrades when i'm towing sometimes that does bug me and i do worry a little bit about the long-term reliability of the ecoboost engine but i'm still within the factory warranty i've got about 53 000 miles of warranty expires at 60 000 miles i think once i'm out of that warranty once i'm above 60k i'm probably going to be a little more nervous at that point about the reliability but i'm not sure enough that i would trade this in right away for me it's not just going to be about the engine choice on my next truck it's going to be more about the hauling capability so if you were to watch my video on towing for dummies or towing made easy i talk a lot about how to calculate your payload and how that affects what kind of trailer you can tow and the fact is when i tow my small 20-foot lens trailer and load my motorcycle in the bed of this truck i'm overloading my truck i'm over the maximum payload so with only a 1500 pound payload on this particular truck i really don't have a lot of room to haul weight when i'm towing my trailer when you add the tongue weight of the trailer plus stuff i want to put in the bed of the truck passengers cargo etc so if i was gonna buy another half ton truck man you know there's so many good choices i like the gm trucks with the 62 v8 and the i think they have a 10 speed in them now i can't remember that drives really well i still like the fords a lot i've never owned a ram but i admit that their their interior quality is amazing and they ride really well because they have the coil springs on the rear end of those 1500s now for 2021 ford has redesigned a refresh i should say the f-150 and they have some revised engine choices so that hybrid ecoboost is pretty tempting on the new f-150 because of the torque at 570 foot-pounds the horsepower is impressive you can get that on-board generator up to 7000 watts which is kind of cool i have to admit that that's a really nice thing to get but i did spec out one of those trucks on ford's website for the 2021 f-150 and i was able to build an xlt truck not even a lariat to almost sixty thousand dollars so we're getting pretty high up there for half ton trucks in terms of the prices now if i look at heavy duty trucks i'm not going to get a diesel anytime soon just because i don't need that i don't haul over ten thousand pounds you know i don't tow huge things i i don't need the complexity the weight the expense of a huge turbo diesel engine but what does have my interest is the 7.3 godzilla engine in the f250 and f350 i think that could be a really good choice for a lot of people like myself who kind of want something in between the half ton uh and the heavy duty truck so like it or not forced induction whether it's turbocharging supercharging or combination is taking the automotive world by storm there's no way around this automakers are searching for any efficiency gains they can get to meet government standards they're trying to reduce emissions so by putting in smaller engines and adding force induction they're able to achieve that goal for the consumer you get maybe a little bit more torque maybe a little bit better driving that's debatable and also debatable whether you get better fuel economy but the fact is that's where the industry is going there's a huge percentage of new cars that come with turbo engines which never used to be the case so if you're in the market for a new used f-150 i really hope this comparison was useful for you you know go out test drive the trucks do your research and make the choice that's right for you please hit the subscribe button if you haven't already please hit the thumbs up button it really helps me out with these videos to make more content and we'll see you out there be safe have a good holiday [Music] you

Channel: Big Rock Media

Views: 453,566

Rating: 4.8294163 out of 5

Keywords: f150, f-150, f150 ecoboost, f-150 ecoboost vs 5.0, 5.0 vs 3.5 ecoboost, ecoboost review, coyote vs ecoboost f150, ford ecoboost reliability, ecoboost gen1, ecoboost gen 1 vs gen 2, f150 review, f150 platinum, f150 towing, ecoboost towing, ecoboost torque curve, ecoboost fuel economy, ecoboost mpg f150, ram 1500, silverado 1500, tundra, f150 engine choices

Id: 74XHxfJcUZw

Length: 28min 31sec (1711 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020