Life | 4/16/08

As I was wandering around the Washington Auto Show, I invariably ended up in Ford's corner of the floorspace, engaged in a deep philosophical conversation with a Ford corporate rep.

Here's a slice of Ford's convoluted history: the Ford 500 died in 2007, only to reappear for model year 2008 as the Taurus-a nameplate which also gave up the ghost in 2007, only to reappear on the automobile formerly known as the 500. Confused yet?

I still am. Ford works in mysterious ways.

In any case, this guy and I end up talking about where Ford is headed, and he points out the Explorer America concept. It's a test-bed for cutting-edge technology, he tells me. Like direct fuel injection (DI), and a turbocharger. Whoa, hold up. Stop the presses. Direct injection and a turbo are newsworthy?

In a regular gasoline engine, fuel is mixed with air before it enters the cylinder port. The intake valve opens and the mixture is allowed into the cylinder combustion chamber. Some fuel invariably gets wasted.

In a direct-injected gasoline engine, the fuel is sprayed right into the cylinder combustion chamber, meaning very little, if any, fuel is wasted.

Direct injection has been widely used in cars in Europe and Japan for at least a decade now, and Mazda, oddly enough a subsidiary of Ford, uses a modified form of direct injection in half its U.S. lineup.

Somebody should tap Ford on the shoulder and tell them DI is old news. It's wicked cool, yeah, but it's still old news.

And the sweet new turbocharger was explained to me as follows:

"It's not really a turbo. The exhaust gases that normally get wasted spin a turbine mounted on the same shaft as another turbine, which forces air into the intake at higher pressure. So, again, it's more than a turbo."

I don't know whom he thought he was kidding. It isn't "more than a turbo." It is, in fact, really just a turbo. Ask a mechanic. Look it up in a dictionary. Google it.

The Ford Explorer America has a 2.0-liter turbocharged direct injected straight four cylinder that makes 275 horsepower. Big punch (and big compression) from such a little engine. But if you want to get great gas mileage, walk. Or cycle. Because at the end of the day, it's still a Ford Explorer. We need to start putting things in perspective.

The only really, truly cutting edge thing about the Explorer America concept is the dash-mounted topographical map. Which is pretty nifty, but not nifty enough to distract from the fact that Ford could have been putting direct-injection turbocharged engines in Explorers a decade ago.

But I don't hold it against them. We, the American people, just didn't want it then, and now it smacks me as being too little too late.

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