German Car Zone

With the pressure of the environmental lobby, I would say it's only a matter of time, until we wave goodbye to the big displacement normally aspirated engines, and embrace the Turbo, Supercharged-Turbo, Twin-Turbocharged or even Quad-Turbocharged small displacement engine.

BMW proved with the 335i it is possible to get the same power and torque of a V8 of not so long ago, with a couple turbos in a 3.0 litre straight six engine, with not turbo-lag at all and less carbon dioxides than a normally aspirated V8 engine would produce. BMW claims 306 Bhp, but there are rumours out there, that this engine may produce at least 330 Bhp and Alpina recently created a hot version of the 335i, which they fiddled about with the engine ECU and still managed to get 360 Bhp. Exactly the same power output as the normally aspirated 4.8 V8 from the 550i.

Despite Jeremy Clarkson's rather soppy remarks, Volkswagen done an excellent job with the 1.4 4-Cylinder 16V TSI engine. You have a supercharger for instant torque at any rev and as the revs build up, the turbocharger kicks in with no jerkiness at all. Unless of course, you drive the car really hard with the Winter mode activated (the W sign next to the gear-lever) just like Jeremy Clarkson did. And of course, because you have the turbo and the supercharger working together, there is no sudden loss of power and the torque is abundant at any rev. The engine produces 170 Bhp, that's just a gnat (10 Bhp) less than the old 1.8 4-cylinder 20V Turbo (180 Bhp), but then again the 1.4 16V TSI is OK with the Euro V regulation whether the previous 1.8 may not be.

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Now, I would like to know what you guys reckon about all this?

I would forsee such a trend happening, FI engines are all after all far more efficient. Those being more hardcore will still go for NA, but for me I like the torque figures for a FI engine, together with the reduced fuel consumption.

Just to prove how capable FI engines are, the 335i crawls dangerously near to the M3's figures even though it has a lower price, a smaller displacement and lower fuel consumption.

The future Golf GTI, I believe, will have a smaller engine if I remember correctly from what Yannis told me.