rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk
about why not to buy a Ford EcoBoost engine, for those of you who don't know
an EcoBoost engine system is an engine that has turbocharged, gasoline direct
fuel injection, and variable valve timing it can increase fuel economy and
decrease carbon dioxide emissions, but of course here's the warning, you get a
turbocharged car with gasoline direct injection it has more power, the average
Joe like me is going to be driving it like a maniac, stepping on the gas,
revving the engine up, and then of course it
gets worse gas mileage, now first let's break it down, turbocharging
it's been around for a long time, it just uses your exhaust gas to
spin a turbine, and then the other end of the turbine, that compresses air and
shoots more air into the engine, giving it more power and yes you can get better
gas mileage if you drive like the granny going to church on Sunday, but like I say
if you drive it hard that's going to negate any positive effects, most people
I know that have turbocharged cars they get worse gas mileage, because they drive
them harder, now turbocharging is used instead of supercharging in most cars
because turbocharging is more efficient, it's using the gas that's in your
exhaust that's already there, where supercharger has a pulley that either
runs with an electric motor, or runs off of your crank with a fan belt, and that
actually decreases gas mileage because you're using up energy in or operate the
supercharger, that's why they're all turbocharged now, because the gasoline
ratings by the government is higher, now the second aspect of these EcoBoost
engine is variable valve timing, and that's been around a while too I've even
made videos on that, the modern cars can control how the valves open and close, so
when you're just idling or cruising, it can have a lower profile to get better
gas mileage, but when you want to accelerate, it can open the valves up wider give
them a little longer duration, so you can have better acceleration and power, now
Hondo is really the first company to mass-produce efficient VVT variable
valve timing engines, and they've been around long enough that they're a pretty
reliable system with the exception of a lot of the ford motorcraft
ones they would wear out prematurely, gears run by a chain and operates the cams
that assembly would start coming apart and wobbling, it's a design flaw they
work fine until they broke, but they broke too early I had to replace some of
them when I had 70-80 thousand miles on it, and the third part of the EcoBoost
engine is the GDI the gasoline direct injection, instead having fuel injectors
like this Toyota that spraying the intake manifold and the fuel is then sucked
in through the valves of the engine, the fuel injectors spray fuel directly
into the cylinders, they're much higher pressures, this old Toyota is maybe 45 psi
the GDI ones are well over a thousand psi inside, it's an interesting design
but when you start bumping up the pressures like that, kind of asking for
problems as they age, so when you combine super high fuel pressure with super high
air pressure being pumped in by a turbo, variable valve timing where the cams can
move around so the valves open and close less, there are a lot of things that can
go wrong in these engines, carbon buildup on the intake valves, now in 2018 Ford
redesigned it, especially in their v6 engines are putting in f-150s, so they
had both the port fuel injection like my Toyota there that has lower pressure, and
a GDI system that worked by computers, so that every once in a while the port ones
are used so they clean the valves up and carbon doesn't build up, because gasoline
is a very good solvent, it has two separate fuel injection system another
level of complexity run by computers and I'm predicting, hey they'll probably have
problems with them in the future, they just started doing it last year, knowing
how these things work out there's almost always teething problem with those things
GM had their version of it and they put it in their 4-cylinder engines, their
little big four-cylinder engines, and those high-pressure fuel pumps that had
to put over a thousand psi out to those GDI injectors, tons of them went
bad, and either would leak or wouldn't work anymore, and it didn't happen until
they were a few years old, so me I'd wait, take the 2012 f150 that had the v6
between the turbocharger and engine is what's called
the intercooler, because you don't want the air to be too hot it cools it off
and they were getting condensation inside the intercooler which would build
up water, then the water would be stuck in the engine and it caused problems, a lot
of stumbling, hesitation, and that was 2012, it takes a few years to figure
these things out, and if you have one of these 3.5 liter v6 EcoBoost engines
realize that their have been at least nine software updates, they have to do with
the vacuum, they have to do with the ignition timing, and they even have to do
with the transmission shifting, so as you can see this is kind of a work in
progress, but if you happen to own one of these 3.5 v6 EcoBoost engine systems
hey if you're having a problem, first thing you do is have all the software
calibrations checked, it's easy for them to do at the dealer, if it needs upgraded
software they can just update the software, and if you haven't had any
software updated and you've owned it for a long time
odds are it's going to need some updating, I'd get an f-150 with a v8 engine
in it, I would want one that's proven, it's gonna hold up be able to pull stuff
and not have any problems, they're worried about gas mileage and power, they
can always put smaller engine in and then they don't have enough power, so they add
all this stuff on top of the small engine, it's a recipe
for disaster in the long run, now Ford it does put EcoBoost in lots of their
engines, they have a 2-liter four-cylinder one, they had to redesign
them and the new design doesn't share that much with the old design, they kind
of found out that the old design it wasn't panning out so well, when they
redesigned it, it's still a 2 liter engine but they put a twin-scroll
turbocharger compressor on it, changed a bunch of stuff, it's lighter they use a
lot more aluminum, I'll wait until something's been tried tested out and
proven that it's reliable, especially when it has anything to do with aluminum
parts and cars, look at the Honda CRV they went to all this aluminum stuff, now
they've got an oil dilution problem that fuel is getting into the oil because of
either the software or the engine design Honda's never had that problem before,
you start ramping this technology up, your just ask
for failures here and there, because there's so much technology, so much
higher pressure, much larger use of aluminum, which as anybody knows, aluminum
is pretty soft, this stuff's gonna wear a lot faster than cast-iron,
the shelby cobras that they were making at one point in time they tried using an
aluminum block on that big v8 well they had engines overheat and
blowing, the aluminum just wouldn't hold up they went back to making them with cast iron
blocks and they stopped having the overheating and cracking problems at the
aluminum ones had, oh yeah that's great technology, better gas mileage bla blah, I
can make a lot of money fixing those things when they break down too
you know, but I'm not that kind of guy that's the advantage of low overhead
like me, I work by myself for myself, I don't have to pay a million dollars in
overhead like at a big dealership, just to break even, and sure there's all kinds
of pressure on the manufacturers to have better gas mileage and pollute less, and
Americans of course they still want fast vehicles, you don't want to drive around
some tiny little thing that doesn't go fast, but you're using smaller and
smaller engines, using this technology is about the only way that you can do it,
but believe me all this they had a technology and complexity, it's gonna
cost you in the long run, if you keep your cars longer than the warranty
period, cuz car repair hey it's got a long way from my grandfather's day who was
also a mechanic, he fixed cars with hammers, screwdrivers, listen with his
ears, you can't do that with modern cars even I can be stumped when a car comes
in and it doesn't shift right, it might have nothing to do with the transmission,
it could be that there's a problem in the fuel injection system and that feeds
back to the computer, so the transmission acts up, and it's actually an engine
problem not a transmission problem, even though you feel it in the shifting,
because you kind of get a hint that they're guessing when they have nine
software updates to these systems, I would advise you not to buy an EcoBoost
system as they presently stand so if you never want to miss another one
of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell
