Takes an age to develop any boost (about a month)
Has zero torque (possibly negative) until it gets some boost
Has a on-boost power band of about 6rpm
Has 6 gears (two more than any diesel should ever need, unless it's for agriculture)
1st gear rivals most cars 5th, and is usable for 3mph when redlining it, so you need 2nd instantly. but you can't start in 2nd because the engine stalls more easily than any car I've ever driven.
And the brakes are way over-servoed.
The steering is way over assisted and has zero feedback
The dash is so boring it makes my forehead look positively exciting.
I can't think of one good thing about it. It even goes wrong regularly, despite being a Germany.
^^My Dad had a similar experience with a petrol 2.6 V6 A4, sounded nice but everything else about it was horrible, it fell to bits the digital dash display was too dim to see and it was horrible to drive, everything was ridiculously over power assisted, no feel at all and it had some kind of weird fault with the idle that meant it would just pull away normally if you gave it 2500rpm when you started slipping the clutch, which didn't seem to have a bite point either. For a 140bhp car it wasn't slow in a straight line, although unfortunately I never got to sample that bit from the drivers seat, and apparently the pedals were perfectly positioned for heel and toeing, that's about it. This was about a 4 year old car which had done mostly motorway miles to Holland and back, he bought it off the same guy that he got his 300E off, which it replaced. The Merc was a brilliant car it was enormous and comfortable, and completely unsporting and despite having 255000 miles on the clock when he sold it nothing had ever gone wrong with it until the day he sold it. Two pairs showed up at the same time following an ad in Autotrader, one was a rather comical father and son pair who turned up wanting to buy the car for a student in London, well a big barge isn't a terribly sensible choice of car if your a student :doh: Anyway they got about inspecting it and had drawn up a concern when it emerged the car had been imported from Holland when new and were worried about its second hand value (now we are talking about a 15 year old car with over a quarter of a million miles on the clock FFS) then the muppets decided to test the electric reclining seat all the way back, it got stuck fully reclined but thankfully they chose the passenger seat and the other pair were quietly standing in the corner pissing themselves watching this. Anyway the muppets went off to lunch to think about it and the other guys went for a test drive and bought it no fuss. So nearly the first car we've had where something hasn't gone wrong
theres so many things wrong with 911s i wouldnt even know where to start
i kind of fancy combining super and turbochargers but it invovles more fine tuning than what id be willing to do
youre probably right and tbh the only modern turbo car ive been in was a diesel which in itself isnt a good start
of course a high reving engine can also be driven at low revs which more or less equals the effects of driving a turboed car on low boost
that is except for the obvious fact that the engine im talking about here is an old dtm engine which they somehow got past the german mot (very hard to do and i expect that the process involved a large bag of money changing ownership) that runs like ass below 3-4000 revs and makes the whole car vibrate to the point that you need hearing protection at any other speed than 160kmh
the most compelling argument against turbos is sound though ... hearing the same engines both with turbos and with high rev individual throttle body mods on track the turbos definitely fail to impress
same with the bmw 1 series the parents of a friend of mine own
the straight 6 2.2l bmw my parents had for a while was pretty sweet but this i4 diesel monstrosity blows (and i dont mean the turbo by that)
honestly id rather drive my moms 60hp punto (which despite having stock exhaust with a diameter of ~1mm sounds sweet) that that diesel
Well trying to get some kind of very short stroke, big bore engine to work as a road engine will take a lot of work. Converting a race engine for road use is always going to produce an unreliable engine that's horrible to drive round town in, a bike engine is probably the closest you'll get to a ready made high revving reliable engine but it would still be a pain to try and use one round town and painful to have to cruise at 5500rpm down the motorway
I agree I'd take a naturally aspirated petrol anyday
being a dtm engine (the old kind when it was still a series with road cars not silly space frame carbon thingies) it was nescessarily based on a relatively short stroke road car engine
iirc there were no modifications done to either the stroke or the bore and the only mods done on the internals of the engine was stronger and lighter parts
what makes the engine run worse at low revs are the stupidly agressive cams it has which are still a bit less agressive than the actual dtm version
iirc this was done to get rid of the need of warming the engine up with different sprak plugs
the effect is that the rev band was pushed down a little to the point where you can sensibly drive the car over longer distances without ruining the engine within the first 1000km which would be about the maximum with the original rev limit somewhere above 10k (current one is at 8.8 iirc)
either way its a beautiful machine that sounds amazing
I own one of each... sorry guy, but a 350 beats a beemer any day IMO
With that beemers high reving ALUMINUM block, You're totally screwed if it overheats. just throw the whole thing away. All those valves? all those nice camshafts? that's more moving parts, expensive moving parts. oh you forgot to mention the cast aluminum heads. If you blow a head gasket on a 350, you might have to do a valve job and you'll have to regrind the head. But you really can't do much with a blown aluminum head and besides, who really wants a car motor that melts if you bore it out and stick a blower on it?
Don't get me wrong, BMWs do make a real fine car. just that if something goes wrong, it REALLY goes wrong.
Anyhow, I imagine that VW uses alot of the same block type in various models and makes. Ford, GM, Chrysler and Toyota have been doing it for decades.
I severely doubt you own an S65 (or 85) engined BMW, they are awesome engines, although they do seem a bit excessive in a road car.
Well it's a bit like trying to argue that a Napier Lion, which is actually far more sophisticated than the Chevy engine (aluminum block and four valves per cylinder in 1918 and not much heavier than a big block given it was 24 litres, 390 vs 300kg dry weight!) is a better engine because it's easier to keep going and can be made to produce more power than a 2007 F1 engine? It's also about four times as heavy and it would be a really really awkward job to shoehorn one into the average cars bonnet whereas you'd be searching around try to find an F1 engine if you popped it under the hood of your Chevy.
The S65 makes a far better engine for trying to drive around in traffic and is a bit more economical, although I still reckon neither engine should ever be fitted to an everyday car on the grounds they're such ridiculous excess of requirements. Properly serviced the BMW is likely to be more reliable than the Chevy, granted you can fix the Chevy with a sledgehammer and some tank tape while you need a toolbox and a laptop to fix the Beamer, but lets face it you'll need to get that sledgehammer out far more often than your laptop.
As a performance engine the Chevy is a very basic thing with the policy of rather than trying to make it run properly just add superchargers and make it bigger, nicely illustrated in this table I've made of bhp a litre (all standard figures), remembering that the American SAE is a far more generous measure than the European equivilents
BMW S65: 103.5
DFV (all versions): 133-317.0
Ford Duratec 20: 68.4
Chevy 350: 25.4-64.9
A series: 34.9-74.0 (yes that Chevy did just get beaten by a Morris Minor...)
Napier Lion: 20.9-56.5
Honda Fireblade (2002): 156.2
Ok so now we've established it's a heavy, unsophisticated heap of junk that won't give a substantial power output until it either dwarfs the Hoover dam or employs a couple of fellows called Katrina and Dean to blow a bit of air in. The upshot of which is it can be hit with a blunt object and will be magically fixed.
The BMW on the other hand will not melt if you tune it unless you don't call it properly. You can't get easy power out of the Beamer because it's already well designed and very efficient. The team I did some work experience with were running a full race one bored out to 5 litres, substantially lightened, admitably it wasn't a straight forward job, requiring skilled modifications to the block and a night on the rolling road setting it up but the end result is a car with 560bhp that will safely rev to over 9000rpm (remember we're talking about a production based big V8) and still produce bags of torque and have a useable powerband between about 4500-8500rpm and this is an engine which is designed to run reliably at these speeds for a 24 hour race, in fact the team has a pretty much perfect record with there engines, if they're going to go bang they'll go as soon as they either get on the rolling road or on the track and this has only been caused by component failure outside of their control, to be precise a specially rated con rod bolt that had obvious had a crack in it from a manufacturing defect and you can guess which country this bolt came from
Despite the increase in capacity it produces 112bhp/litre, closing in on the DFV, now how many Chevy V8s could genuinely produce anywhere near that reliably for 24 hours in race conditions? Then we get onto the size, the S65 is smaller and lighter than the straight 6 and critically has a much lower weight distribution and sits very low in the engine bay. If you'd told me it was a 5 litre V8 in an E36 I'd of expected it to be shoehorned in with big bulges in the bonnet to try and squeeze it in, actually it takes up less room than the average four, a lot less than can be said for the Chevy.
They're two completely different engines that serve two different purposes, IMO neither is suitable for everyday transport the BMW makes a superb engine for a high performance race car and can make a reliable high revving full race engine. The Chevy offers cheap grunt but isn't suitable as a high performance engine partly due to its prehistoric designs limitations and partly due to it ridiculous size. Of course it has its appeal of making lots of noise and being a rather brutal tool which appeals to some, although the sound is nothing to the BMW which growls like a Chevy on steroids then screams like a LeMans car before shooting flames out the exhaust on lift off.
If I want to go racing I'll take the S65. If I want a big brutal engine I'll take the Napier Lion (the Chevys just a bit to crude for me)
Oops I wasn't really thinking of these motors as just a performance oriented motor like for actual racing. I was talking about comparisons against things like grid lock, long commutes in said grid lock, and now that you mention it - hurricane evacuations. No I think BMW most assuredly has a faster racing engine, but when your comparing engines, I think there's more to it than just BHP. Namely how long do they last? how versatile is it? a 350 may not be as Hi tech as the bmw's, but how good would it be for hauling a load of lumber or a campertrailer on a long road trip? and no the beemer I have isn't a megabucks model, well my wife has is a 4 banger a 318i to be exact. and i was comparing its overall performance verses the 350. and not really in terms of horsepower. but things like everyday wear and tear. In that respect I'm more in favor of the rebuilt manhole cover than the recycled beer can.
You know I honestly didn't know you could bore out an aluminum block and not weaken it substantially. LOL learn something new every day.
And now that it's been established that you know alot about BMWs, how cheap can you get parts?
I agree with you that for lugging stuff around and being a low cost easy to run motor the Chevy is a better choice. Although neither of them are really a sensible option in an everyday car.
Nothing is cheap like it is on the Chevy, the end result is awesome but you could just go and buy a Mustang and stick a supercharger on it for less than the costs of the engine build
muslce cars annoy me... poor gearboxs matched with low ridigness
ive been in plent of mustangs a few chargers and a camaro and tbh i wouldnt own one , even if my life depened on it
turbos arent that bad... get a nice anti lag system set up and you'll have fun all day though if you need a good n/a engine look for a = 2.5 e30 m3 engine ( you cant break them engines
toyota supra/is300 engine , basicly the same but you need the vvti version for heavy n/a tuning
