How Porsche, Toyota and Ferrari are redefining internal combustion engines

More and more car makers are shifting towards electric cars because of ever-tightening emissions regulations, however some brands are hard at work trying to keep the internal combustion engine alive.

Porsche has just patented a new type of petrol engine which promises to be both more powerful and more efficient, Toyota is working on hydrogen combustion, and Ferrari has decided it would be better if the engine was mounted upside down…

Porsche’s new six-stroke engine: a game changer?

Porsche isn’t ready to give up on the internal combustion engine. It’s already invested heavily in synthetic e-fuels, and now it’s building a new six-stroke combustion engine. To understand why this is significant, we need to talk about how a normal engine works.

All modern petrol-powered cars have four-stroke engines, and four-stroke refers to the number of steps in the combustion cycle. These steps are known as ‘suck’, ‘squeeze’, ‘bang’ and ‘blow’.

First the piston moves down and sucks in a load of fresh air, then it moves back up to mix the air with fuel and squeeze the mixture. A spark plug then ignites this mixture (‘bang’), causing it to expand and push the piston back down. Finally, the piston comes back up and blows the burnt exhaust gases out of the engine.

This means the engine is only making power once in every four stroke cycle, or 25% of the time. Porsche’s new six-stroke engine on the other hand can make power 33% of the time – making it more efficient.

This is thanks to a new crankshaft design, which makes the piston move further up and down in the cylinder on every third rotation, and this allows the engine to suck in more fuel and air through additional vents – called scavenging ports – cut into the bottom of each cylinder.

The fresh air and fuel is sucked in while the engine is blowing out the exhaust gases from the previous stroke, meaning it’s ready to make power much more quickly. It not only makes the engine more efficient and more powerful, it also has the potential to reduce particulate and carbon monoxide emissions because it can burn off any fuel which was left behind in the cylinder.

So which car will this new technology appear in? Well it’s unlikely to be an SUV because the Macan has already gone electric, and the Cayenne will go the same way by the end of the decade. Porsche also says in the patent that this new six-stroke setup will work best on engines with either three, six, nine or 12 cylinders.

This strongly suggests that the next Porsche 911 will be the first car you’ll see with this revolutionary new engine, which will keep the petrol-powered sports car alive for many years to come – especially if the investment in e-fuels pays off.

Toyota’s hydrogen combustion: Is this the future?

Meanwhile, Toyota is taking a very different approach to prolonging the life of internal combustion. Instead of making a complex new type of engine, it’s working on burning hydrogen instead of petrol.

Hydrogen-powered cars are nothing new, however models like the Toyota Mirai use a hydrogen fuel cell to make electricity to power a motor. The GR Yaris and Corolla prototypes seen here have almost exactly the same engines as the standard cars, they’re just fuelled with hydrogen.

Burning hydrogen produces no CO2 and significantly less carbon monoxide than a normal engine. It does produce nitrogen oxide emissions which can be harmful, but the only other byproduct is pure water vapour.

The main issue with the uptake of hydrogen in cars is the lack of infrastructure, with less than 20 filling stations across the UK. Toyota believes that heavy industry and the use of hydrogen-powered trucks and buses could pave the way for mass adoption of the technology in private cars.

Ferrari’s inverted inline-six: Turbocharged and supercharged

Ferrari is also confident that hydrogen has a place in the future of internal combustion, because it’s just patented a totally bonkers new engine configuration.

It’s a straight-six engine which is turbocharged and supercharged, but that’s not the weirdest part. That would be the fact that it only works when it’s upside down. Changing the spark plugs would be a right pain…

But why is Ferrari doing this? Well it’s all to do with packaging. Mid-engined supercars don’t have a lot of room to spare in the engine bay, and there certainly isn’t space for two massive hydrogen tanks.

So to get around this, the cylinders are arranged in a straight line and the whole thing is flipped around, allowing the narrow engine block to slide between the two cylindrical tanks. This also allows the engine to be mounted lower in the chassis, improving the centre of gravity.

It’ll be a while before you see a hydrogen-powered Ferrari hit the streets. The new LaFerrari successor is expected to use a V6 engine, so it’s likely to be close to the end of the decade before this technology goes into production.

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