Ford’s Fox engine project gathers pace
By: John Mortimer, Monday, April 20, 2009, AutomotiveWorld.com
Work is proceeding apace at Ford’s UK Engineering and Research Centre at Dunton, Essex to progress the company’s all-new Fox three-cylinder gasoline engine, with some of the company’s best brains currently active on this challenging project. Dunton handles both gasoline and diesel powertrain development for Ford’s European and world products.
The 1-litre engine will be the latest power unit to join the company’s line-up. It will be the smallest engine the company has made since the 933cc four-cylinder engine (56.6mm bore x 92.5mm stroke) produced at Dagenham in the 1930s for the Model Y Popular, the first Ford car designed for markets outside the US.
The company has yet to announce publicly where Fox will be built, although the decision could well have been taken internally. Last August, Ford of Europe’s chairman and chief executive, John Flemming, said a facility in Craiova, Romania could be used to manufacture the new engine family, but other sites in the reckoning include Bridgend, South Wales.
Whatever the final production plant location, the compact, three-cylinder engine will be built in a capital-intensive facility. A plant capacity of up to 700,000 units a year has been mentioned, but the economic downturn could well affect the magnitude of the first phase. The plant will use the latest machining, assembly and test, and dynamometer equipment, most of it sourced from Europe. Machine tool vendors have been very active in the last few months preparing proposals for the new Fox engine family, in response to Ford’s RFQs.
Waiting anxiously for the location announcement are the 1,200 or so workers at Ford’s Cologne, Germany engine plant. Cologne builds six-cylinder gasoline engines for the US market and reports suggest production of these units is due for phase-out in 2010. Last year, Cologne built some 200,000 six-cylinder engines for the company’s Mustang coupe, the Ranger light pick-up and Explorer SUV vehicles.
Particularly challenging aspects for Ford engineers working on the Fox programme are light weighting, packaging, low internal friction, smoothness (balancing), breathing and emissions, and fuel economy. Calibration is always a long and tedious task of any new engine programme. However, Ford engineers have a number of competitors against which to benchmark the new three-cylinder engine, including units from Toyota, General Motors (Opel) and Volkswagen.
Toyota’s Polish-made 1-litre all-aluminium three-cylinder engine with VVT develops 50kW/67bhp and 93Nm. It offers a 109g/km CO2 rating. This engine appears also in Citroen, Peugeot and Subaru models.
The GM/Opel 1-litre three-cylinder used in the Corsa model develops 48kW/65bhp and gives 120g/km CO2 fuel economy. The engine has an aluminium cylinder head and block.
Volkswagen’s 1-litre three-cylinder engine with balancer shaft and DOHC develops power of 55kW/74bhp and 120Nm torque. It also has an aluminium head and block.
Despite these all-aluminium configurations, aluminium components are more expensive kg for kg than grey iron and the Fox engine will have a cast iron cylinder block and an aluminium cylinder head. Ford has particular expertise in high-volume cast iron machining.
In a downsizing exercise, German piston supplier Mahle recently created a concept three-cylinder turbocharged 1.2-litre engine targeted to offer a 25% fuel economy gain over a 1,600kg C-class car such as a Ford Mondeo.
In 2001, Ford engineers in Dearborn, Michigan, developed a three-cylinder gasoline engine with direct injection spark ignition (DISI), employing a stratified charge.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Automotive World Ltd.
Published on Monday, April 20, 2009
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