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- By now, you know turbochargers are not the failure-prone spinners they were in the 1980s, no longer the bolt-on pieces that pulverized weak engines and their weak parts with surges of intoxicating power. Today, nearly one in every four new vehicles sold in North America comes with at least one turbo, if not two. Enough of our favorite engines have succumbed to pressurized, exhaust-driven induction—Mercedes' AMG V-8s, BMW's inline-sixes, and, most recently, the Porsche flat-six—that there's no turning back. They're efficient, reliable, and getting better—and cheaper.
- "There must be a matching of all systems, so what you produce in the certification exercise translates," Davies said. "You can validate something on the test bed that fails to convert on the road. This is the challenge of the industry now."
In other words, mainstream automakers aren't integrating turbochargers and optimizing each part of their engines for forced induction as well as they could be. The technologies we've mentioned here bring serious potential, but like every automotive advancement, their complexity, reliability, and extra cost have to be hurdled first.