The following article just goes to show its not necessarily WHO builds it but rather how its designed.
Mechanic's Tale: Good Enough?
Japan Inc. knows the advantage of a good four-cylinder engine.
by Douglas Flint
(2003-09-01)
Related Articles:
Mechanic's Tale: Ka-ching of the Road by Douglas Flint (8/18/2003)
Platinum service for a little more copper - it's not a thing of the past.
You can't have a great car without a great engine. A car may be a best seller, as the Ford Taurus was for many years, but it was not a great car. I have never heard anyone pine for the now-gone '92 Taurus, but I do have customers who are wondering how much farther their '92 Honda Accord with 380,000 miles will go. You see, that car had a really great engine, and to this date no American manufacturer has built a great or even good four-cylinder engine, or even come close to a '92 Honda Accord engine.
Why? Part of the problem is attitude. My comic hero Dogbert said something along the lines of, "what's inside a person isn't important because no one can see it." I read a book, "Taurus: The Making of the Car That Saved Ford" by Eric Taub, on the development of the Taurus, in which the Ford execs seemed downright pleased with themselves that they shot down the idea of building a modern overhead-cam engine for the Taurus because it would waste time and money on something consumers couldn't see. So they stuck in the old 3.0-liter pushrod jalopy engine.
Perhaps it was the right decision at the time. Ford needed a winner and the Taurus was a sales winner. But when the money started rolling in they could have developed a modern small six or even, God forbid, a good four capable of powering a four-door sedan. But by then the money was rolling in, and who wants to upset the assembly line, and why spend money when the car is selling? Sometime in the mid-Nineties, Ford spent a billion dollars redesigning the Taurus and still came out with the 3.0-liter pushrod engine. It is still the base engine today. What did they spend a billion dollars on, the really neat center console?
Missing in Detroit
Ford isn't alone. Neither GM nor Chrysler has a good four-cylinder engine. GM seemed to oscillate between push-rod jalopies such as the Chevy Cavalier, buying off-the-shelf technology from second-tier Japanese companies such as Isuzu and Suzuki, or trying really hard to build a good four-cylinder engine, but somehow getting lost trying to reinvent the wheel and coming out with a bucket of blown bolts that is the quad four engine. Chrysler seemed to be on a good track in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Their 2.5-liter overhead cam four was crude and noisy but it could move a four-door sedan well enough. And in the turbo form it had very adequate power. But somewhere they gave up and started using Mitsubishi technology, whose motto should be "mediocre engines for really bland cars."
Without good fours, American carmakers are generally dependent on obsolete sixes to be able to move a car of any size, paying a price in mileage, quality, and smoothness. And whereas the Japanese manufactures started by making really good fours and then working up to sixes and eights, the Americans make all their money on trucks and SUVs whose engine technology often goes back to the Fifties (we're talking crude here) and will lend no help or expertise to building good car engines.
Good design, good materials
The answer is very simple, but it runs counter to everything that is practiced in the auto industry now. I take apart engines and there's no magic in the '92 Honda Accord engine. It's just a really good simple design built with really good materials. I am talking the forgotten science of metallurgy. I can take the head off one of those Honda engines with 200,000 miles on it and the surface looks and feels perfect. A '99 Neon will have pits so deep in the head as to render it unusable. The Cadillac ht4100 engine used pot metal so cheap on the rocker supports that a Chinese toy manufacturer would have rejected it.
And why, on these obsolete pushrod engines whose technology is thirty years old, do head gaskets blow and heads crack when they didn't 30 years ago? Metallurgy! It won't matter how well it's designed or assembled if the accountants make you buy substandard material. Though it's late in the game, resist the temptation to go long and leapfrog over the Japanese. You can't do it - that's what led to the GM Quad 4. Don't try tricks. Swirl combustion technology will not make a bad engine good. Thinner lubricants resulting in less friction will not help. Stop praying for a 42-volt electric system so you can have a camshaft-less electric solenoid valve engine - it's too far away.
Do design and build a rock-solid overhead-cam four of the best materials. I don't care if the engine costs more than you sell the car for. It will be worth it in the long run. Improve the engine every year even if it seems okay. Look at Subaru: they stuck with that silly little pancake four and now it not only powers the Outback, but can go racing in its sports cars. And don't be ashamed to go to junkyards. Buy an old Honda or Toyota engine and copy it. It's a strategy that worked for the Russians for over fifty years.
