The W12 Engine - The Science EXPLAINED

when you think of Volkswagen you probably think of Jettas with golf's or maybe even the punch buggy thank you when you don't think of is huge power or extreme luxury I mean their name literally translates to the people's car so why and how did they create one of the most bonkers highly sophisticated amazing sounding luxury engines of all time well today we're gonna dive into that incredible engineering of one of the coolest most bizarre engines ever built the w12 it's like two engines in one it's crazy let's go the w12 the name itself already sounds pretty nasty and everyone knows W is the nastiest letter out there unless you put two peas next to each other and that's P P so to explain the w12 let's look at some other engines for a second so you got your in-line Forge you got your inline sixes and they have all the cylinders in a line one after the other then you got your V mainly in the V configuration you have V sixes the 8 v tens and v12 and those engines have two lines or banks of cylinders in a V shape so we got our inline so we got our V's and there's some boxer engines too but for the sake of this video we can skip over those which then brings us to the W and I'm going to show you a little magic trick when you take two V's and you slam them together get a W I just blow your mind I just blew my mind yeah why is it W it should definitely be double V double V even sounds cooler the W we're changing the alphabet one letter at a time let's go and I didn't know this but when the first w12 engines were designed and built they were intended for use complaints that were built by this British company called da Pierre and Sun during the First World War and the Napier lion as it was called was a 24 litre w12 that produced 900 horsepower making it the most powerful engine ever built up into that point that is insane that same engine also powered the Napier Campbell Bluebird to a hundred and seventy four point eight eight miles per hour in 1927 a land speed record at the time now these early engines had proven that the w12 configuration was capable of producing excellent torque and horsepower so why was the Napier w12 the last notable w12 before Volkswagen built theirs 70 years later well unsurprisingly w12 engines are pretty complex so complex that Volkswagen needed to make it more complex typical Volkswagen in actuality it was just too big so if they were going to use it in a modern car they had to figure out how to make this setup smaller fortunately Volkswagen had already solved the problem of making the V engine smaller and that's what their v.r design that's right we're talking br6 you've probably heard of vr6 before we are six badges are on the backs of golf's Passat Jettas they're all up in the VW lineup so you might have seen the badge what do you really know what it means so let's talk about so the r and v r6 comes from the german word for in line which is ryan mcpoyle nailed it what up my German buddies so what we call an I six for example the Germans call an r6 of course the six denotes that it's a 6-cylinder hence the vr6 it's a V in line six but how can you have the V engine that's also an inline engine it's either one or the other right well what the VW engineers wanted was to keep all of the benefits of a v6 in terms of performance but package it in a way which would allow them to fit them in compact cars without having to compromise on their size and their way and having to redesign a bunch of stuff in the engine bay the question was how do you house all that v6 technology in a smaller space and the solution was simple you have a Papa v make love it's an inline mama and they have a baby av Ryan motor baby by making the angle between the two banks of cylinders incredibly acute that's this okay you got 90 you got a cute and you got up to ice I actually missed my sixth grade miss Walker geometry class and it took me years to remember that I actually had to look this up because I still can't remember what acute and obtuse is so just 15 degrees and staggering the cylinders so that they were snug up against one another the engine could have a dimension similar to that of an inline four aside from size what's the benefit of having a narrow angled staggered VR sixth I out well only one cylinder head is needed for both banks of cylinders which means only two total camshafts are needed see in a dual overhead cam 60 degrees setup which is kind of standard angle for v6 you need four camshafts two in each bank like the Nissan 300zx for example it's a quad cam and regardless if the engineers fitted two or four valves per cylinder at br6 needed only two this helped keep the cost down and probably more importantly the size and weight of the engine compared to a regular old v6 there's a couple of other cool things inside the vr6 that allow for it to be smooth vibration less power producing you guys know that's kind of a custom with the vr6 but we're not gonna get into that that's for another day now the vr6 is only slightly longer and wider than a four-cylinder engine and yet it produces considerably more power with just two extra cylinders this all meant that it could be mounted transversely that's this way decide and then you do that in a small front-wheel drive cars without having to be redesigned to allow for our larger engine bay now one of the compromises of the vr6 compact design is in the head now since the cylinders aren't mounted centrally against the cylinder head this means that the distance to the valves and every other cylinder Bank would be different and if Volkswagen didn't do anything to compensate for this it would have meant that each cylinder would have been producing vastly different horsepower compared to one another so the engineers had to be clever and how they arranged the valves in order to feed the intake and draw the exhaust gases away this meant that each cylinder had to have different length intakes pretty cool the way Volkswagen accounter for that was to compensate for the cylinders which had longer intakes by increasing the length of the runners to the manifold as well as the cam profile in the lift of those particular cylinders that's pretty neat they're like there are no weak links in a vr6 motor one cylinders all I like hey six bro why don't you pull your weight so under six back shut up Volkswagen made me this way though he would probably have a German accent he wouldn't sound like Joe exotic the vr6 made its debut in the Passat but it's probably best known as the engine found in the Corrado from there it was fitted in other compact Volkswagens including the Jetta and the GTI and a bunch of others but more importantly it's got a reputation for its super smooth power delivery in its sweet sweet sound just go ahead and take a listen so how do we go from a vr6 to w12 well way back in the olden times the 90s Volkswagen chief ferdinand key had a little pet project he wanted a car to battle sales from the top of the food chain mercedes s-class the only problem Volkswagen didn't have the right engine for the job so what did they do hold on don't get ahead of yourself let me say it I want to be the one to say this is what I'm talking here okay yep they essentially just put two BR sixes together enter the WR 1248 valve it had four rows of three cylinders so yeah essentially two 15-degree be our engines married in a W formation which is what makes the W shape and they kept the stroke the same as the vr6 and that's this part boom boom boom but each cylinder was bored out slightly from 81 millimeters to 84 millimeters and this allowed a tiny bit more air into each cylinder which meant a little bit bigger boom and of course more power that extra bit of board diameter gave the engine a displacement of six liters and the cylinder block was cast from an aluminum silicon alloy which would allow for greater torsional rigidity but also more importantly greater heat dispersion than one made from steel because you got those two banks of six cylinders packed in so tightly you got to be able to remove the heat from the block which was a critical critical engineering challenge plus this aluminum silicon Owlery also made the block far lighter than it would have been if it were made out of steel steel weighs more than aluminum silicon uh you guys get it and each of the two cylinder banks has its own air filter and throttle body the intake manifolds they're even made out of magnesium alloy Volkswagen really wanted to keep as much of the weight in the base of the engine hence the use of magnesium and aluminum at the engines top side okay you're like Jeremiah cool whatever but what are the numbers all right geez chill we're getting there okay I have a degree in mechanical engineering that I'm doing nothing with so I like to like to nerd out a little bit just join me so the naturally aspirated Volkswagen W r12 produces 444 horsepower that might not sound like a ton but this was also an ancient year of the 1990s and here's the real kicker with it and make 413 foot-pounds of torque from 2750 to 5000 rpm that is a wide range to have that much torque and really that's a big part with a 12 cylinder design in the first place smooth consistent torque across the power band pretty damn freakin wild right it's wild engine so to showcase this thing Volkswagen plopped a special 600 horsepower version and a concept car they literally just called the w12 you want another eargasm will close the door put on some headphones and tell your mom you're taking a nap cuz you're gonna need some alone time just listen to this this car smashed a bunch of records in 2002 where they were ripping around the Nardo ring in Italy for 24 hours straight with an average speed of 200 point six miles per hour that is so crazy now obviously you don't see these w12 cars driving around the concept ones but you do see WR twelves driving around volkswagen dropped this engine in versions of the audi a8 which Volkswagen owns they own Audi you know that in the Volkswagen Phaeton the giant looking Passat thing which is a car so weird we should probably give it an episode at some point the thing is completely wild plus the w12 Touareg I love that these fairly standard looking cars have w12 s in them if you didn't know what you were looking for it there's no way you would know what w12 would be in some of those cars it's just pretty pretty insane there are now twin turbo versions of the w12 powering the Bentley Continental GT and the Bentley Flying Spur and the same basic engine principles and layout are what's used in Bugattis w16 engine and the ver on the sure on the Divo and the cyntha bici and the pops of au lait I freaking love Olive Garden if this was your first car video or your thousandth welcome we do this thing every single day we got new car content we're always trying to be funny and informative we even have a subreddit Facebook group there's always something going on with the donut fam we are a whole community 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Channel: Donut Media

Views: 1,794,045

Keywords: 2020 Volkswagen, VW, Volkswagen, Jetta, Beetle, vw bug, dune buggy, passat, uti, gli, VR6, W12, W12R engine, W12 Nardo, W16, Bugatti, veyron, chiron, inline 6, v6 engine, i6, i4, inline 4 engine, fwd, euro car, vw golf, mkIII golf, vr6 Corrado, vw Corrado, vw prototype, audi a8, Bentley continental, Bentley, flying spur, car engine, w12 explained, v12, v8, v10, Donut Media, donut, doughnut media, Cars, Automotive, B2B, Bumper to Bumper, Bumper 2 Bumper, Car Science, Car Tech, James Pumphrey

Id: AcveN3Iplww

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020