Carmakers forced back to bigger engines

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Carmakers forced back to bigger engines
October 14 2016 at 02:17pm
By Laurence Frost and Agnieszka Flak

Paris, France - Tougher European car emissions tests being introduced in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal are about to bring surprising consequences: bigger engines.

Industry sources say carmakers that have spent a decade shrinking engine capacities to meet emissions goals are now being forced into a costly U-turn as more realistic on-the-road testing exposes deep flaws in their smallest powerplants.

Renault, General Motors and Volkswagen are reportedly preparing to enlarge or scrap some of their best-selling small car engines over the next three years. Other makers are expected to follow, with both diesel and petrol engines affected.

The reversal makes it even harder to meet CO2 targets and will challenge development budgets already stretched by a rush into electric cars and hybrids.

Alain Raposo, head of powertrain at the Renault-Nissan alliance, explained: “The techniques we've used to reduce engine capacities will no longer allow us to meet emissions standards.

“We're reaching the limits of downsizing,” he said at the Paris motor show, which ends on Saturday, while Renault, VW and Opel all declined to comment on specific engine plans.

For years, carmakers kept pace with European Union CO2 goals by shrinking engine capacities, while adding turbochargers to make up lost power. Three-cylinder engines of less than a litre have become common in cars up to VW Golf size, while some Fiat models run on twins.

Unrealistic

These mini-motors sailed through official lab tests conducted - until now - on rollers at unrealistically moderate temperatures and speeds. Carmakers, regulators and green groups knew that real-world CO2 and nitrogen oxide emissions were much higher, but the discrepancy remained unresolved.

All that is about to change. Starting in 2017, new models will be subjected to realistic on-the-road testing for NOx, with all cars required to comply by 2019. Fuel consumption and CO2 will follow two years later under a new global test standard.

Independent testing in the wake of Volkswagen’s exposure in 2015 as a US diesel emissions cheat has shed more light on the scale of the problem facing car companies.

Their smallest European engines far exceed legal emissions levels when driven at higher loads than current tests call for. Heat from the souped-up turbos generates diesel NOx up to 15 times over the limit; petrol equivalents lose fuel-efficiency and spew fine particles and carbon monoxide.

Industry analyst with influential forecaster IHS Automotive, Pavan Potluri said: “They might be doing OK in the current European test cycle, but in the real world they are not performing.

“So there's actually a bit of 'upsizing' going on, particularly in diesel.”

In retreat

Carmakers have kept understandably quiet about the scale of the problem or how they plan to address it, but industry sources shared details of a retreat already underway.

GM will not replace its current 1.2-litre diesel when the engines are updated on a new architecture arriving in 2019; the smallest engine in the range will be 25-30 percent bigger.

VW is replacing its 1.4-litre turbodiesel three with a four-cylinder 1.6 for cars such as the Polo,the sources say, while Renault is planning a near-10 percent enlargement to its 1.6-litre R9M diesel, which replaced a 1.9-litre model in 2011.

In real-world driving conditions, Renault’s 900cc H4Bt turbopetrol injects extra fuel to combat overheating, resulting in high emissions of unburned hydrocarbons, fine particles and carbon monoxide.

Cleaning that up with exhaust technology would be too expensive, sources say, so the three-cylinder will be dropped for a larger successor developing more torque at lower revs to stay cool.

The turnaround on size is a European phenomenon, coinciding with diesel's sharp decline in smaller cars. Larger engines prevalent in North America, China and emerging markets still have room to improve real emissions by shrinking.

Inevitable reckoning

Fiat, Renault and Opel have the worst real NOx emissions among the newest “Euro 6” diesels, according to test data from several countries; brokerage Evercore ISI warned in September that they now “face the biggest burden” of compliance costs.

Thomas Weber, head of research and development at Mercedes - which has nothing with less than four cylinders - said such reckonings were the inevitable result of on-the-road testing.

“It becomes apparent that a small engine is not an advantage,” he said. “That's why we didn't jump on the three-cylinder engine trend.”

Analysts predict the tougher tests may kill diesel engines smaller than 1.5 litres and petrol engines below about 1.2, increasing the challenge of meeting CO2 targets and adding urgency to the scramble for electric cars and hybrids.

Volkswagen has been far more vocal about ambitious plans announced in June to sell two to three million electric cars annually by 2025 - about a quarter of its current vehicle production.

Frost & Sullivan analyst Sudeep Kaippalli predicts a hybrids surge.

“You can't downsize beyond a certain point, so the focus is shifting to a combination of solutions,” he said. “In future, downsizing will mean you take a smaller engine and add an electric motor to it.”
Click to expand...

Have to get off the hype-train at some point.
 
Or you could just go electric... just a thought.

/runs

For real though, a hybrid genney/electric car is probably the future. You can tune the generator for maximum efficiency and emmisions, then you dont need to bother with the headache of making the engine complient over its entire operating and power output ranges.
 
I dont see many Hybrid cars being designed/manufactured except for the Prius, CRZ, Insight, Leaf and the i3/8.

The prices of hybrid cars are rather steep compared to a petrol so people would obviously choose the petrol model.
 
What they need to sort our foremost is these testing centres who conduct emission tests and certify cars incorrectly. Shout all you want at VW and Opel but some certification centre signed off and certified their cars.

On a personal note - I do not want a god-damn electric car. I want to drive 500km, put more fuel, and drive some more, not wait 4-12 hours before I can. Bring on Hydrogen engines.
 
Rickster said:
I dont see many Hybrid cars being designed/manufactured except for the Prius, CRZ, Insight, Leaf and the i3/8.

The prices of hybrid cars are rather steep compared to a petrol so people would obviously choose the petrol model.
Click to expand...

Honda nsx, mclaren, that porsche job, I'm sure there are more... also, see opel below.
 
Last edited:
lcbxx said:
What they need to sort our foremost is these testing centres who conduct emission tests and certify cars incorrectly. Shout all you want at VW and Opel but some certification centre signed off and certified their cars.

On a personal note - I do not want a god-damn electric car. I want to drive 500km, put more fuel, and drive some more, not wait 4-12 hours before I can. Bring on Hydrogen engines.
Click to expand...

[video=youtube;LZHhpkmWf24]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZHhpkmWf24[/video]

Put an efficient charging engine in there, and no reason you cant do 1000km+ per day.
 
Rickster said:
Ah i wasnt really including supercars but focusing on the average income, not sure why the i8 is in there.
Click to expand...

I edited, apparently there's an opel.

More to the point. The high end stuff comes to the everyday stuff. Think of abs.
 
......well its certainly not April Fools

Is there a link to the article?

So my little turbocharged 3pot Frenchie that I love so much is already dead? :( That's quite sad.

Guess I'll be selling it much sooner than I wanted, as only hell knows what will happen when it gets older if it is spewing that much right now.
 
And in the meanwhile, the factories in China continue spewing out their atmosphere killing emissions :)
 
My charade was light as air and that was 1000cc, was a nippy little power plant too, perfect city runner.
 
agentrfr said:
Or you could just go electric... just a thought.

/runs

For real though, a hybrid genney/electric car is probably the future. You can tune the generator for maximum efficiency and emmisions, then you dont need to bother with the headache of making the engine complient over its entire operating and power output ranges.
Click to expand...

carbon footprint may actually be worse for electric and hybrid vehicles when taking into account their production and electricity generation sources.

but more generally, its apparently not transportation that's the problem, but rather the red meat (cows) industry that's the major cause of human introduced climate change.
 
lsheed_cn said:
Really?

And how does petrol / diesel get to the petrol stasie? magic?
The sooner we go electric, the better, less pollution all round.
Click to expand...

your response to this

[video=youtube_share;17xh_VRrnMU]https://youtu.be/17xh_VRrnMU[/video]

the problem is not transportation, but the consumption of red meat
 
European automakers have been downsizing their engines for the best part of a decade, all in a bid to meet increasingly stringent emissions standards. But now, thanks to new, upcoming emissions testing slated to be more realistic, that trend may well be reversed.

Yes, according to a Reuters report, which cites “industry sources”, a shift to engine “upsizing” is just around the corner.

These sources claim that Renault, General Motors and Volkswagen are all preparing to scrap many of their popular small, turbocharged engines over the next three years. Reuters adds that other manufacturers “are expected to follow”.

Why? Well, in 2017 in Europe, all new vehicles are expected to have to undergo real-world, on-road (rather than in a laboratory) testing for nitrogen oxides. Similar realistic fuel consumption and CO2 testing is set to follow around two years later. And the downsized, forced induction engines – which have been set up to ace these official lab tests – are expected to struggle in the new on-the-road tests.

“The techniques we’ve used to reduce engine capacities will no longer allow us to meet emissions standards,” Alain Raposo, head of powertrain at the Renault-Nissan alliance, told Reuters.

“We’re reaching the limits of downsizing,” he admitted.

Pavan Potluri, an analyst with IHS Automotive, explained that downsized, forced induction engines are neither as clean nor as efficient in the real world as manufacturers claim, largely due to the fact that they are typically driven at higher loads in the real world.

“They might be doing okay in the current European test cycle, but in the real world they are not performing. So there’s actually a bit of ‘upsizing’ going on, particularly in diesel,” Potluri told Reuters.

Thomas Weber, head of research and development at Mercedes-Benz, said this was the reason the German brand’s smallest engines were still comparatively large, with at least four cylinders.

“It becomes apparent that a small engine is not an advantage. That’s why we didn’t jump on the three-cylinder engine trend,” he told Reuters.

http://www.carmag.co.za/news_post/downsizing-is-dead-bigger-engines-to-be-revived/
 
FiestaST said:
European automakers have been downsizing their engines for the best part of a decade, all in a bid to meet increasingly stringent emissions standards. But now, thanks to new, upcoming emissions testing slated to be more realistic, that trend may well be reversed.

Yes, according to a Reuters report, which cites “industry sources”, a shift to engine “upsizing” is just around the corner.

These sources claim that Renault, General Motors and Volkswagen are all preparing to scrap many of their popular small, turbocharged engines over the next three years. Reuters adds that other manufacturers “are expected to follow”.

Why? Well, in 2017 in Europe, all new vehicles are expected to have to undergo real-world, on-road (rather than in a laboratory) testing for nitrogen oxides. Similar realistic fuel consumption and CO2 testing is set to follow around two years later. And the downsized, forced induction engines – which have been set up to ace these official lab tests – are expected to struggle in the new on-the-road tests.

“The techniques we’ve used to reduce engine capacities will no longer allow us to meet emissions standards,” Alain Raposo, head of powertrain at the Renault-Nissan alliance, told Reuters.

“We’re reaching the limits of downsizing,” he admitted.

Pavan Potluri, an analyst with IHS Automotive, explained that downsized, forced induction engines are neither as clean nor as efficient in the real world as manufacturers claim, largely due to the fact that they are typically driven at higher loads in the real world.

“They might be doing okay in the current European test cycle, but in the real world they are not performing. So there’s actually a bit of ‘upsizing’ going on, particularly in diesel,” Potluri told Reuters.

Thomas Weber, head of research and development at Mercedes-Benz, said this was the reason the German brand’s smallest engines were still comparatively large, with at least four cylinders.

“It becomes apparent that a small engine is not an advantage. That’s why we didn’t jump on the three-cylinder engine trend,” he told Reuters.

http://www.carmag.co.za/news_post/downsizing-is-dead-bigger-engines-to-be-revived/
Click to expand...

I would call balls on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Forfour#Engines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Fortwo
 
Rickster said:
I dont see many Hybrid cars being designed/manufactured except for the Prius, CRZ, Insight, Leaf and the i3/8.

The prices of hybrid cars are rather steep compared to a petrol so people would obviously choose the petrol model.
Click to expand...

Jazz, Yaris, Lexus IS & ES & CT, Auris, Toyota Avalon, Accord, Optima are some of the hybrids in other markets.


Hyundai Ioniq, Kia Niro, Mitsubishi Outlander P-HEV, Renault ZOE, Kia Soul EV, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, VW e-up, e-Golf, Telsa, Ford focus are some of the electric hybrid cars in other markets.

Hyundai Tucson FCEV, Honda Clarity FCV, Toyota Mirai the only fuel cell vehicles available.


They are, the market is too small, many of them will never arrive in SA.
 
Already happening in bikes.

Ducati went from 899cc last year to 959 this year and everyone was like "awesome, more power".

Turns out it's the same or less.
 
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