10 Most Complicated Engines Ever Made

Join Scott and Ben as they explore some of the strangest, most complex -- and arguably coolest -- engines in the world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Go behind the wheel, under the hood and beyond with
car Stuff from house stuff works dot com. I welcome
to Car Stuff. I'm Scott, Benjamin and Ben Bolling. Today's
topic is one that we may think we've already covered
in the past because we have done a lot of
engine shows and I kind of went through our RSS

(00:22):
feed and looked at a bunch of the engine shows
that we've done in the past, and we've done Harley engines,
tank engines, rotating detonation engines, which was a complex jet engines,
rotary engines, fire engines. I'm just kidding, that's not really
an engine. Well, no, we did one on fire trucks
though fire trucks. I think we called them fire engines,
though we did so technically. I'm gonna give you half

(00:46):
points on that, all right. I threw that in there.
I saw sterling engines, um diesel engines, steam engines, all
kinds of engines. But what separates today's show from those
other shows is that this isn't just one type of
engine that we're gonna focus on. It's a lot of
different types of engines, and every single one of these,
for some reason, is overly complex. Uh yeah, they're uh,

(01:08):
maybe not needlessly complicated, because we're going to find that
in several cases there were engineering specifications or constraints that
they wanted to fit sure or their you know, the
technology just wasn't there yet, you know, at the point
when these were developed, like it was the early form
of that type of engine, So this is the only
way they had to do it, and that that kind
of makes sense for some of these, but for a

(01:30):
lot of them, they just seem like they've tried to
add just a couple of things too many to these
engines that make them not operate in the way that
they should. Yeah, we're going to see that there's some
fairly good engines here, but there are also a lot
of stinkers. But you know what, I shouldn't say that,
you know, that they didn't operate the way they should,
because there's some that were fantastic. But the thing is

(01:50):
they're so complex, they're so difficult to work on, to understand,
engineer to to repair that, um, you know, they they're
just not feasible for a typical production car. Some of them,
one or two remind me of like a Rube Goldberg machine,
just the level of complexity a little bit. Yeah, some
of them do, and we'll we'll get I'll point that

(02:11):
one out when we get to it. Yeah, you want
to just dive in. Yeah, sure. So we're kind of
following along with an article that was was from Gelotnic
and it's called the ten most complicated Engines ever made.
Is the name of their their their article and these
suggestions came from their listeners. And what we've done is,
at least my notes here, I've gone through and I've
added a bunch of materials, so you know, you can

(02:32):
go there and get the main story and see some
of these photos and uh, some of the diagrams of
the engines if you like. But we're gonna add quite
a bit of information to each one of these and
kind of kind of make this our own in a way, right, Yeah,
because we have also included, um, just a little bit
something extra for you guys for each of these, uh,
starting with the intro because the very first paragraph. Did

(02:53):
you see what it mentioned there? Cameless engines? Yes, Now,
they they interviewed a guy, um who's the founder of
Kona Seg. His name is Christian von kona Seg and
uh he's what they call the father of Sweden's hyper cars.
In the article right and Um, they interviewed Gelatman actually
interviewed this guy at the Geneva Motor Show and he

(03:15):
told them that, you know, in about ten years or so,
automobile engines won't have cam shafts anymore. He said, he's
been working on camels engines for a while now. But
it's not just that company that's doing it. There's several
of the companies that are working on this, including Renault,
BMW G, M, Ricardo, lotus Ford and Valleo. So it
looks like this is something that's going to happen, but

(03:37):
we're just not seeing it quite yet. And you know
a couple of things that we need to mention her.
Fiat already has something that they call um the electro
hydraulic variable valve actuation technology that they using something called
their multi air engine, and the multi air engines are
actually in production. But it's not exactly cameless yet. I
mean it still has a cam but what it is

(03:57):
is where the air intake is controlled with out a
throttle valve, but it's still a gasoline engine. And Fiat
pattent to this in around I think it was about
two thousand two and a very small engine at one
point four leader engine. Um, but it was given the
Best New Engine at two thousand ten award, so you
can see that. You know, it's a it's a great
design and they're working on it. They're they're they're working
towards the Camela's design, but they're not quite there yet.

(04:20):
And that's just one example of like what's going on here.
There's there's engine development happening all the time from the
early actually way before that. But we're gonna talk about
I think our earliest examples from about nineteen o four
from where in there. You're right, So, um, you know,
let's let's start at number ten maybe, and that's a
more recent addition, right, yes, number ten, the Volkswagen W eight.

(04:44):
So Volkswagen has a reputation for you know, engine innovation,
right and as you as you mentioned earlier, Scott, the
automobile engine has been a continual work in progress since
since its creation. Uh. The W eight goes right along
with Volkswagen's traditions. But man, this, okay, this thing is weird.

(05:06):
So it's a compact four leader engine, Scott, but it
is not the it's not what you're thinking of right
now unless you've seen a picture of it, because in
the Gelotnic article they describe it as a flat plane
crank V eight engine combining two narrow angle VR four
engine blocks that share a crankshaft. That sounds like a

(05:28):
complicated way to say that. It just seems like it's
and I know that's the exact description of it, but
if you think of it, it's a it's a swish together.
V eight is what it looks like, right, And that's
the thing, because it can still fit in the same
area that a V six would. Yeah, and a four
cylinder maybe is a little bit smaller, but probably approximately
like the size of V six maybe, So yeah, yeah,

(05:51):
give me some stats. Two hundred and seventy one horsepower
and two hundred and seventy pound feet of torque, which
is not bad out of this tiny little V eight.
I mean, it's really small. Here's the small onest was
installed in the vw Pisatte, which is a wagon. The wagon,
you know, design of that vehicle anyways, is the one
that used this and I think about ten thousand of
these were built each year between two thousand one and

(06:13):
two thousand four. And the thing was that you know,
this engine was installed longitudinally in the pisade from about
against September to September of from one to oh four,
and then at the two thousand five redesigned for the
Pisat wagon, the design called for a transverse amounted engine
and the W eight simply wouldn't fit into the engine

(06:33):
that it was just too big. So they had to
get the three point six leader VR six right right,
and that's what replaced this whole thing. Now, the sound
from these engine engines is pretty incredible. I mean, I
don't know if you've listened to any of the audio
of these things we had. We used to have one
here at this building. I know that when I was
leaving the structure a couple of times, I remember seeing
a pissat with a W eight badge in the back

(06:55):
of it, and it sounded pretty good. It didn't sound
like the ones that I hear in the video. So
I'm assuming that there's a lot of exhaust work that
goes on in some of these, you know the people
put online, But some of the sounds that come out
of this engine are just incredible, especially when you see it,
you know, combined with that the visual of the Pisade wagon.
It just doesn't seem to match up. It's kind of
a strange mix. But they sound so great. Yeah. Well,

(07:16):
I've got to ask the person that you saw here,
was their engine running quieter or louder louder? But um no,
um quieter than the videos. It sounded louder than a
typical Piscade should have in my mind. I mean it
sounded it has that interesting V e berbal you know that,
that that crazy V sound that um you know, it's

(07:37):
the loping sound that we all know. Not quite like
a hot rod or something like that, but um, it's impressive. Nonetheless, yeah,
you can definitely hear the difference. Uh, speaking of different things,
our next engine is surprisingly small. It's very small. Actually
it's the Lancia a bar triflex engine. Now let's say

(07:57):
it's a mouthful. Uh. And this was supposed to be
this is uh, this is the trick to this whole thing, Ben,
This was supposed to be a Group S rally car
engine originally from Lancier. Now, um, the thing is the
Group S was canceled along with Group B following that
sorry six accident. Remember they canceled it four I believe

(08:19):
it's for the eight seven season. We've talked about Group
B Rally in the past was crazy UM car. You
know the crazy Rally scenes where people are lining the
road and nearly getting squished every time someone you know,
makes a jump. Amazing stuff. UM. This was to be
used in a vehicle called the e c V one,
which was UM the experimental composite vehicle, and it was

(08:40):
sort of a Remember we talked about a car called
the Delta S four that Lancia powered. UM. It was
supposed to be the replacement car for the Delta S four,
but it was a very very light vehicle because it
used these, uh, these experimental composite materials on the body.
So interesting, interesting history that goes along with the whole thing.

(09:00):
And I'll tell you the operation of this. If we
were to read this, it would take too long. It's
really it's its own episode. It's it's definitely it's the
only episode. There's gonna be a couple of those in this.
But you can read all about this at the gelopnic
carticle if you like, you know, as far as the
way the airflow goes and etcetera. But I do want
to say this. I found this from a reader in
a note um and they had looked up the stats

(09:21):
are the specs on this engine. This is a one
point eight leader engine. This engine pushed out four hundred
and fifty five horsepower per leader. That's how strong this
engine was. So it's nearly two leaders and it puts
out four five per leader. That's incredible. What a strong,
strong edge of perfect for rally race. See now people
who said, oh, one point eight leader not worth my time,

(09:43):
Now you guys are gonna go check it out. Exactly right,
So let's jump on to the number eight. That's right
Scott the Porsche firm, and this thing is a beast.
So Porsche, some of you may be familiar with this
car company. I would think that some people would be right.
They they were living high on the hog when they

(10:04):
set about to refine and finesse the five fifty. Uh So,
they had the the original engine and there was a
push rod u s and it's described arrange loptink article
as a tweaked Volkswagen power plant. All right, so here's
what's going on the Porsche of You know, the production
was from nineteen to ninety six, and they were trying

(10:27):
to refine what was already there, right, So this guy
they contact this guy, um Ernest Ernest Furman, and Furman
creates a what they call the sophisticated engine. Uh, you
know that would be fitting of a Lama winning mark. Right.
So in other words, it's it's overly complicated really in
a lot of ways, but it's a very strong, very
very very powerful engine. So the type five four seven

(10:50):
engine UM, which they call an incredibly complicated roller bearing
equipped quad cam quad cam. Yeah. Now he says, these uh,
these first four cam engines to a skilled man one
hundred and twenty hours to assemble and complete the engine,
and the timing alone could take between eight and sometimes
fifteen hours if the tolerances were not just right. So

(11:12):
timing alone to set on this engine, timing, which is
usually just a quick operation to take very long at all,
takes between eight and fifteen hours on this engine. That's incredible.
And the whole thing about assembling the engine, I mean
a skilled the skilled assembly person one hundred and twenty
hours to put together this engine. I mean that's you
know the size of a Porche engine. It's not an
overly huge engine or anything like that. It's just it's

(11:34):
just that complex. And to underline the point about the complexity,
you can check out online there are some images of
a disassembled ferment. Did you see those? I guess, like
the exploded views? Yeah, which I love those things, man.
And they have all of the pieces, you know, neatly
arranged semi in relation to where they would be. That

(11:56):
takes so long to set those up. And can you
imagine with this this engine how long that would take.
That's what really got me, because you know, when you
see that, you want to start putting it together in
your mind, and it just blew me away. It's like
every every model that you've ever put together, you know,
like the plastic models, they all have those exploded views,
and it's like, wait a minute, is that right? You know,
try to lay every lay everything out and put it together.

(12:18):
It's it's it's difficult to do in your mind, but
when you see it all together, it all makes sense.
That's true. That's a good point. Let's see. Now we're
onto number seven, the Oldsmobile jet fire. Here's the thing,
nineteen sixty two, right, that's that's when this engine comes out.
Sure it's aluminum. Yeah, that's one. Yeah, that's just one.

(12:41):
Though there's some other stuff as well, right, turbo charge
water injected. Oh, I should say it's a V eight
YEP turbo V eight biolsmobile way back in nineteen sixty two,
and they they produced this from nineteen sixty two in
nineteen sixty three, and again it's a it's a turbo
charged version of the two fifteen engine, which again all
aluminum V eight back in. It's pretty incredible. Uh you

(13:04):
know it's a two fifteen engine coincidentally, and had two
horsepower with three pound feet of torques. That's pretty strong.
And one thing that grabbed me about this, uh this
the entry here is this bottle if it's in the
the image here, the for this for this entry turbo
rocket fluid. Yeah, there's a bottle that has like this white,
uh milky looking material and it says turbo rocket fluid.

(13:26):
And you had to use that in your car. How
cool is that? The water alcohol mixure, Yeah, it's this. Yeah,
you have to use that to suppress the engine now
because you know it's aluminium turbouts all that stuff, right,
So you suppress this, uh the knock with this this
water alcohol mixture that came in this really cool looking
old bottle with you know, skull and crossbones on it.
How how awesome would that be to use that in

(13:48):
your car like for a real purpose. Yeah that's true,
So it's not just some ornamental thing. But but what
happens if you run out of turbo rocket fluid Scott, Well,
then you've got severe engine. Not because um it had
a very high compression ratio. It had a ten point
two five to one compression ratio. And again it's back
in nine two. The fuel just wasn't there at that point.

(14:08):
You had you had to have this. Uh, you had
to have this extra add in. Uh, you know this
water alcohol mixed to make it work. So this next
one is just crazy. I I think that sometimes in
the never ending quest for innovation, we as a species

(14:29):
figure out if we can do something, but we never
ask ourselves if we should. Yeah, and that is the
case with number six, which is the Sezetta, the sixteen
t You heard it right, folks, the sixteen yea. And
the idea behind this if you want to, if you
want to buy into what they're saying here, is that, um,
the idea was to out Lambeau Lamborghini, and uh, that's

(14:52):
kind of a funny way to say it. But you know,
you know, they come equipped with with twelve cylinder engines.
This one has sixteen, so that's just that much. And
it's almost like a system of engines, you know what
I mean, because the transmission is in the middle of
the transmission is at the heart of this. Here's the
crazy thing now, and most people can probably picture a

(15:14):
V sixteen engine and they're enormous right there, gigantic. This
is this is transverse mounted, so it's in the back
right behind the driver and passenger. But it's a transverse
mounted V sixteen engines. So uh. The idea is that,
you know, with a with a transmission in the middle
as well, so this becomes like a V at engine
transmission and then a V eight engine. If you can

(15:36):
picture that in your mind. Now, that's crazy, I know
that to think about it that way. But I also
want to tell you this, it's not it's not really
two engines as they depicted here. It's really one engine
because it does have a common block. I look this
engine up and it is a common block. So it's
really not like two V eights stuck together. It's one
continuous V eight engine or sorry, V sixteen engine. And

(15:58):
if you look at the design, I mean it's extremely wide.
It's like, um, it's like a full lane of traffic wide.
It's really really wide vehicle and low. But it looks
extremely close to the Lamborghini Diablo in design, I mean
very very close. And it's got these crazy looking pop
up head lamps. I don't know if you saw this photo,
but the headlamps are like the pop up head lamps
on the old Corvette. Yeah, you're right, how do you like?

(16:22):
They're um, they're stacked. Yeah, it's a four eyes vehicle. Yeah,
and it's not you know, side by side like you
might think with a pop up head lamp. They're stacked
like one on top of the other. One. Liked, very
very strange, But the Czetta V sixteen T is an
unusual vehicle and extremely wide and again overly complex. They

(16:42):
didn't have the stuff a V sixteen and there and
from what I hear, you know, performance was about what
other supercars were at the time, so it didn't really
gain them anything to go up to V sixteen. But
I'm still it's got supercar supercar performance. So you know,
when what price can you put on hyperbole? You know
what I mean, yeah, a lot of people will do
anything to get that E S T at the end.

(17:04):
That's probably gets fastest. All right. So speaking of weird things, Scott,
this is one that I'm hoping you can explain to
me a little bit. Maybe maybe maybe. All right, you're ready,
Let's let's give it a shot. Uh, the SOB variable compression.
So this is the SVC engine. And I'll tell you
what I can about this one because I quickly looked

(17:25):
up just to see what's going on here. But this
is gonna take a lot more investigation to figure out
what's happening, all right. So the idea is that the
SAB engine UM has variable compression through a tiltable block.
Now that the block actually moves it pivots and this
is so strange. I mean, it's it's got normal UM
internal combustion engine operation other than you know, the this

(17:48):
flexible block. Now that's the big asterisk on this one
right right now. Because the cylinder board diameter, the pistons
strowth length, and the combustion shape or volume are almost
always constant, the compression ratio for a give engine is
almost always constant as well. Right. So this engine, though
that was designed for the SOB nine five. UM uses
a technique that dynamically alters the volume of the combustion chamber,

(18:10):
which which changes the compression ratio. Yeah, it tilts this,
but what's really happening is UM the SBC lowers the
cylinder head closer to the crankshaft, and it does it
by replacing UM the one piece engine block with a
two part block, and with the crankshaft in the lower
block and the cylinders in the upper portion of the block.

(18:32):
The two block parts are kind of hinged together at
one side, and then it pivots the upper block around
the hinge point so that the volume of the combustion
chamber can be modified. UM. So the SBC adjust the
upper block through a small range of motion using a
hydraulic actulator and that's how they have to they draw
it down or back up again. And I know that

(18:54):
sounds extremely complex, and it is, and you'll have to
look at a diagram to totally get what's going on there.
That this was patented by a guy or you know,
I guess it was patented by a guy from Lakeland,
Florida here in the United States, and it was actually
slated to be a production engine UM and the SBC
project was, you know, on the books. It was ready

(19:14):
to go on the STAB nine five when General Motors
bought UM, you know sob but General Motors decided to
shelve it because it was just way too expensive to
produce this thing. Right, But this is one of the
engines that people are super impressed with because this one
one uh an award in two thousand and two thousand
one h for its development. This is our first I think,

(19:36):
award winning engine on the list. Oh no, I had
with that other one that won the best stuff. But
you know what, it's not on the list. You're right,
it's a technicality. You're right. That is the first one
on the list. I was thinking of the Camel's engine
that we talked about. That's an intro. Yeah, okay, all right,
so all right, I guess you know, I can off
a two separate sets and let's call it a draw.

(19:57):
I'd say you win that one. Well, that's you're too kind.
But speaking of vehicles that did not win awards, let's
go to you like that intro. Let's go to the
Cadillac eight six four, which I've got a little bit
of stuff on here. So you know, General Motors pops
up again. You will recognize them as the guys who

(20:17):
canceled the SOB project earlier. Uh. They wanted the world
to still drive Cadillacs, but have more fuel efficient Cadillacs. Uh.
So they came up with a nifty process that they
were going to implement called cylinder deactivation. Spoiler alert. This
did not work, but it worked about two and a
half decades later. Um, so it didn't work in the beginning. Now,

(20:39):
I didn't work in the beginning. And Ben, can I
tell you something. This is one that we've mentioned on
the show before because my grandfather had a Cadillac with
an eight six four engine and it was just it
was a thorn in his side? Was it? Really? It
really was it. It was always always given him trouble,
and there was there was not a day when he
wasn't talking about how bad this engine was. I think
I do remember you mentioned Yeah, exactly right, I mean,

(21:01):
and I mean just the whole thing about this this
engine design, with the cylinder deactivation, everything it was. It
was a good idea. And they called it modulated displacement,
I think, and that's what Catillac called it at the time.
In and that's the the year of the vehicles that
it was released on these and um, it really didn't

(21:21):
quite work out because the electronics were just not there
until when Chrysler tried it about twenty four years later
with you know what they came out with that Hemi
engine that had that multi displacements and that one worked
really well and everything was fine there. But um, you know,
at the time in Cadillac called this a technical masterpiece

(21:42):
and uh, and they made it standard equipment across the
entire Cadillac lineup, which was a mistake because the Big
V eight has a hundred and forty horsepower two sixty
pound feet of tork, so it's low horse power, big
V eight big you know, big huge chunk of metal
under the hood, and it's a big vehicle. If you
look at the eighty one Caddies, there's still big, still
enormous boats, you know land yards. Um. And they tried

(22:05):
to make them more fuel efficient, you know, being able
to deactivate cylinders so that you know, it's either operating
on eight cylinders, six cylinders or four cylinders. That's the idea,
right right. Yeah, So here's how it works, which is
still kind of funny to me when one of us
says how how it works and how stuff works, you
think we get tired of that joke. Well, we haven't yet, right,

(22:27):
so clearly I'm not tired of Yeah. Uh so, cylinder deactivation.
The solenoids are mounted to the rocker arms studs of
the cylinders, right, and they disengage the full crumbs. And
what happens there is that the rockers just kind of
float and the valves are closed despite the push rods

(22:49):
still being in motion. So you can look under the
hood of a caddy and you can tell if you're
looking at this kind of engine because they have the
covers for the rockers that have elevated uh elevated sections
on them right over just two of the cylinders over
just too great points. And when the valves are closed,
the cylinders act as air springs, so that eliminates the

(23:11):
feel of missing, right, well, feel like it's missing a beat. Yeah,
that's the thing, Like I thought that, you know, if
you deactivate cylinders, you're gonna feel like it's missing, Like
you're like, you're gonna feel like this car is way
long power and I'm I'm pushing the gas pedal down
it's just not operating the way it should, right, But
that's that's what they didn't want it to feel like.
They wanted to feel like continuous power, right. Yeah, and
so uh. This also keeps the cylinders warm, so they

(23:34):
can reactivate easily and jump in with the rest of
the active cylinders. One thing that's interesting is there was
a display there that they called a mild gallant MPG
sentinel that will pop up and tell you how many
cylinders you have, four, six, or eight, your current fuel consumption,
how far you could go based on the amount if
you were made in your tank. I mean, this is

(23:55):
all neat stuff, right and yeah, yeah, oh it's a
digital display. Not bad. I mean you would expect something
like this in the vehicle, right. The problem was all
this stuff didn't really work all that well. Yeah, not
in practice. The solarnoids were often crapping out. Yeah, they said,
you know, in the article here they say it was
the Malaise era engineering at its finest, and I agree.

(24:16):
I mean I think that there was. There was a
pretty dismal time in the American auto industry right around
there when when you know, these electronics just weren't working right,
didn't have exactly, you know, fine tune the way that
they should, and so the cylinders would often ping as
if it was running on four or six cylinders. But um,
you know, just because it didn't have the correct E
g R system, it just wasn't sounding correctly, you know,

(24:39):
it wasn't people felt when the cylinders would deactivate when
they were in practice, we're not supposed to feel, you know,
feel when that happened. It was supposed to be just
smooth power throughout. And uh, you know, again this is
a big, heavy or eight cylinder engines, so fuel savings
were actually pretty minimal, and there was a lot of maintenance,
a lot of repairs that went along with this as well.
But there were some fixes, you know, there were some

(25:00):
there were some things that you could do to to
change this. And you know, GM would have its uh
you know, programming fixes that it would do, etcetera. But
if you would take it to a local mechanic, they
would they would kind of bypass the whole system because
they could disable the cylinder deactivation to allow the engine
to run on eight cylinders at all time and just
completely bypassed the six four part of the right. And

(25:23):
there's uh, there's another thing here that's tangentially related. Uh
if I could tell you a little bit of a
story about a related engine, Okay, the HT, which was
the a Cadillac attempt to further pursue these E p
A fuel requirements, which you know we call cafe standards here. Uh,

(25:44):
and a lot of people can get the eight six
four and the HT fort confuse, Uh, the eight six
four just that one year, right, HT forty one two
through eight five to pursue these cafes andres and uh,
by far like the worst one of those. I've heard

(26:06):
it called the worst engine in Cadillac history. Have you
heard it that? Because I've always heard the A six
four the worst? So uh, there there are there's a
lot of misinformation there about what the what the HT
actually does. But the six four and the i'll just
call the HD now are very different. HT fort hundreds

(26:29):
of tiny aluminum block. It's a four point one leader
cast iron heads. Uh. Let me just read this real
quick for you. It had very little power, even less torque,
with a small transmission that failed often and tiny differential
behind it. In other words, if you wanted to change
an HD forty to a better motor, it goes much
deeper than just the motor way deeper. It often failed

(26:53):
before twenty tho miles in its first year, I know,
can you believe it? And so so I just want
to put out a little bit of UM A P
s A two listeners out there that you might hear
some of your buddies say really bad things about the
eight six four. Um. In addition to those being true,

(27:15):
they might also be talking about this other Oh man,
that's pretty bad. I hadn't heard about that one. But
you know, let me just say one last thing about four. Um.
This is uh, this kind of proved it, I guess
ben it's it made it onto the Time magazine fifty
Worst Cars of All Time list catallact Fleetwood V eight

(27:37):
six four, so it it was officially labeled as one
of the fifty worst cars of all time by Time Magazine.
I think I would think it was somewhere in the middle.
It was like thirty one or something like that. But
I don't know if they're they're actually in order. Um.
And I do think that, you know, we mentioned that
it was just eighty one, but I think I think
they continued production of that eight six four for special
vehicles like for limos and uh, I want to say herses,

(27:59):
but maybe that's not right. Uh. Some specialty Cadillac vehicles
I believe carried the eight six four through, but as
far as passenger vehicles go, you know, the ones that
were ailable to the general public, you know, on the
dealer lots. I believe nine one was. It's you're right,
so well, what if Here's the question though, what would
have happened if Cadillac kept working on the six four

(28:21):
instead of going straight to this h You know, I
don't know, they might have ended up going mad in
the in the in the laboratory, you know, because uh,
I think it was just driving crazy because the electronics
just weren't there. It wasn't it wasn't available at the time.
The technology wasn't available at the time. So, you know,
twenty four years later, like I mentioned, you know, in
two thousand five, Chrysler came out with that three C

(28:42):
and then the Dodge Magnum RT that used de activations
and de activated cylinders in the in the five point
seven leader Hemi engine, you know, so he could operate
on eight or four cylinders. They didn't try to go
with the in between step and the six cylinders. It
was either eight or four and it worked incredible and
you know that was the worry when they first came
out with it, was that, you know, here we go again.

(29:04):
There's gonna be a lot more problems. But of course
they have developed it and tested it and you know,
for years probably and it worked flawlessly. It was a
great engine. So, uh, speaking of fantastic segues, Yeah, let's
go to number three and fantastic engines. Uh. This b
r M H sixteen, which BRM stands were British racing motors.

(29:24):
So you know, you can see that this is gonna
be an interesting one here right from the get go.
This is a nineteen fifties Formula one engine and it's
pretty incredible. Then it's a it's an H layout, so
it's like, um, think about two flattened V eight engines
that are geared together at the cams in the middle. Right,
So we have another sixteen cylinder vehicle on our list,

(29:47):
and like the like the earlier example, it's easy to
mistake this for two V eights, but they're not. They're
not really separate anymore because they're united by that camp.
Well they are their joy going together. I mean these
are think about it like two v as just laid
down on their side and then and stuck together right
in the middle. And that's how they're operating. And that's
exactly the way it is now. They can be either

(30:09):
a top one another and an h layout. They can
either be a top one another or they can be
beside one another. Now each has its own crankshaft, but
they're geared together at the camshafts, so the cams are
where they come together. So these are these are geared
together at the cams. And uh, this stuff is incredibly heavy. Yeah,
it's a huge engine, and it looks like it's on

(30:31):
a palette of some kind of metal palette photo. But again,
this was used in in Formula one engines, sorry, Formula
one cars from the nineteen fifties. And you know these
are sixty four valve engines, you know, four valves per cylinder,
extremely high out with six hundred horsepowers. What these things
would put out um, and they had some advantages, they
had some disadvantages, which we'll talk about in just a second.

(30:53):
But this wasn't the only one. I mean, there were
there were other H layout engines. Right, There was a
smaller one. Yeah, from also from BRM one point five
leader with tow. Yeah, that's right, and again the same thing,
you know, the gears that rested between the cylinder banks. Uh,
we're actually protected by and I don't know if I
should say protected by, but maybe maybe protected by a

(31:16):
flame trap that was made by Rolls Royce which came
from a Merlin spitfire engine which prevented unburnt fuel from
the supercharger making his way back into the combustion chamber. Um.
And as they point out here in this article, the
sound is absolutely amazing with these things. And I did
listen to it with headphones on and high volume and
it it makes a huge difference between that and uh

(31:37):
and like them the speakers on your laptop or something.
I mean, it really pays off to listen to them
where you can really hear these engines because they sound gorgeous.
They're really nice. And one when the Lotus used these
and when they were racing they did. Yeah, as a
matter of fact, Lotus one person that you may may recognize,
the name Jim Clark. He won the U has Grand

(32:00):
Prix in a Lotus forty three using this engine. So
there's another award winning engine exactly right. And they do
have some advantages, as I mentioned in some disadvantages. Now,
the advantages UM excellent mechanical balance. I mean, they're really
perfectly balanced, and that's that really pays off in raising
Now disadvantages. They have a high center of gravity um.
And they're also heavy and complex with with gear driven

(32:23):
twin overhead cams for each of the four cylinder heads,
which already that sounds complex, right, UM to gear coupled
camshafts and mechanical fuel injects. And if that doesn't sound
if if you're thinking, well that's okay, I'm fine with that.
That makes sense to keep it simple. Uh. You should
also keep in mind that their original plans were for

(32:44):
four valve heads and six camshafts. Now, think about this,
I mean, I mean, so it's super complex, right, but
they think about these numbers. This is a one point
five leader engine, so you know it's it's this enormous thing,
but it's but it's sixteen cylinders, it has six hundred horsepower,
and and get this, it spends at twelve thousand revolutions
per minute and it's super charged. So all this, you know,

(33:07):
all this power and all this complexity and everything. Think
about nineteen fifties race cars. Think about how skinny those
hard little tires were in the back, and imagine flying
around a racetrack in that just how just how brave
must have Jim Clark, Ben and the and the fellows
you know of that era. And speaking of super charging,
we have come to number two on our list, the

(33:27):
Auto Union v S. And we've talked about this one
in the past as well, but only in passing. I
think we mentioned it maybe on a Nuts and Bolts
episode because there's one little fact and I might as
well just throw it out there, like just to show
you how complex these engines are before we really talk
about them. Um, the crankshaft alone on on one of
these engines as eleven hundred parts. Eleven d parts in

(33:52):
the crankshaft alone. Now that's gonna blow a lot of
people's minds who put together engines. There's usually very few
parts on a crankshaft, but again, eleven hundred parts. And
I think that has something to do with with roller
bearings and and just overly complex and design. But it's
what they had to do back then. Because we're talking
about engines from the nineteen thirties. Yep, this is one
of our deep cut slaves and gentlemen. It only has

(34:15):
one cam shaft, so they kept that part simple. One
cam shaft. Okay, so it's a single over read cam.
And but I mentioned that overly complex crankshaft. And uh,
here's the thing. You know, these engines, these V sixteen
engines were designed. It was a Porsche design originally, and
they were later replaced by V twelves that developed you know,
about five or fifty horse power. We should talk about

(34:36):
some of the specs in just a minute, but I
want to tell you how powerful these things were. Wheel
spin could be induced at over one hundred miles per hour.
So let's say driving it one hundred miles per hour,
and these things, you know, a Grand Prix race, you
shift in another gear, you know, accelerate and it's enough
power to throw the back end out again because there's
so much power, it's gonna spin the wheels while you're
already going over one an It's incredible amount of power.

(34:59):
I mean, between nineteen and ninety seven Audio unions won
Grand Prix races and driven by about five different drivers.
Here I probably recognized a couple of names, but Ernst
von Delius, Tasio Nouvalari, Uh, Bernard rose Meyer, Hans Stook
and a guy named Achille ver BARSI I thin because

(35:20):
this last time I didn't recognize that last one. But
Hans Stook and Rosemeyer and Nouvalari. Of course, those names
we've mentioned in our Grand Prix podcast. Those are some
of the bigger names. But Audio Unions just dominated, um
you know, uh, the Formula One series or the Grand
Prix series, I guess prior just prior to World War
Two with those drivers them along with Mercedes, because the

(35:42):
Audio Union cars and the Mercedes cars were both called
the Silver Arrow cars. And we've heard the Silver Arrow
name brought back into Formula One again by Mercedes recently. Um,
so you know that the Silver Arrow thing is a
bit of a heritage thing for them. But again, prior
to World War Two they were just dominating everything about
the Grand Prix series. And looking at the specs, you

(36:05):
can tell us why they've got what three leader engine?
I don't think we mentioned that part now, three leader engine,
that's right, and again it's a V sixteen, right, and
uh what for the type, let's go through them type A, B,
C and D so Type A was nineteen thirty four.
It's a V sixteen. It had one supercharger and it
put out about two horse power at the top speed

(36:25):
ben one hundred and seventy four miles per hour. That's
pretty strong, right, especially given the time. Yeah, I think
about nineteen thirty four traveling a hundred and seventy four
miles an hour, and then look at you know, look
at a photo of a type A auto Union and
uh and see if you would want to travel one
hundred and seventy four miles an hour and that thing.
I mean, you're you've got the steering wheel at your chest,
you know, in your lap at a giant um almost

(36:46):
like a um like a tractor steering wheel. It's huge,
and there's no you know, there's nothing around you. I mean,
your body is out in the open from about your
waist up usually very high in the car. And they've
got that little leather cap on with you know, the guy.
But yeah, I mean it's they're really really extremely brave
to do this. Uh. Tight B which was nineteen thirty five,

(37:08):
so one year advanced, and you know, still V sixteen,
still one supercharger, but they opted to three hundred and
seventy horse power. The top speed was not listed, but
I'm sure that went up Type C, which was nineteen
thirty six to nineteen thirty seven, and this is kind
of the last of the V six teams for the
Auto Unions. UM. They had one or two superchargers on
these engines, and the horse power went way up four

(37:30):
hundred and seventy eight horse power. If you had one supercharger,
you had two superchargers, you could count about five horse
power out of that engine. It's five horse power in
that car in nineteen thirty seven thirty six whenever top
speed two and eleven. That's amazing. That's what we you know,

(37:50):
we saw Lamborghinis recently. We're standing next to supercars, you
know that that that costs more than our houses. I
mean they're they're you know, four hundred thousand dollars you
and they, you know, their top speed is like, you know,
to ten, you know, two to eleven, maybe two oh
seven something like that. Here's a car from nineteen thirty
seven that was doing two d eleven miles per hour

(38:10):
with very very little safety in mind for the driver. UM.
And then in type uh, you know Type d and night.
They went back down to V twelve that was about
the same power, but um, the V sixteen's were over
at that point. That's so just the engine itself has
a great history, the cars have a great history, the
drivers have a great history, the company itself. You know,
Auto Union, that's interesting in itself. We've never done a

(38:33):
show on Auto Union. We haven't, and we definitely should
because let's a that's a group of automakers that came together,
you know, way back when that it was really remarkable
that the whole thing worked out. That they were kind
of like the Avengers of their time, you know what
I mean. It was a pretty good, pretty good group.
And here's something weird. Before we continue, guys, I want

(38:54):
to give a big shout out to our Car Stuff
super producer Noel Brown. Noel, as you know, usually when
I give you a shout out, it means that I'm
about to ask for a sound cue. So maybe not
a drum roll, but you know, something weird as we
go into number one. Perfect, So the last on our list,

(39:15):
perhaps when the weirdest ones, is the Adams Farewell radial rotary. Okay,
this is really really strange. Now, this is one that's
I'll just tell you right up off the front here,
there's one vehicle that has this engine that exists today,
just one. So the the example that they show in
this article. You know, there's a video that goes along
with this. You can see the operation of the engine,

(39:37):
but there's only one left and it showed up at
a at a concourse event. I believe it's in Pebble
Beach back in two thousand eleven that that we see it.
But it is a it's a rotary engine, not a
radial engine. Now that's that's kind of confusing because the
name of this thing is the Adams Farewell Radial Rotary
and it's truly a rotary engine because this is so strange.

(39:58):
The engine rotates a round the crankshaft, the whole engine spins,
the crankshaft remains stationary. Yeah, the crankshaft is fixed when
it when it first was demonstrated in that had a
four stroke piston engine. So at the time he had
three cylinders that would rotate around the crank shaft. And
this was he wasn't the only guy experimenting with this

(40:23):
technology back then. There were other manufacturers who said, hey,
what if we just spin the engine. But this is
a little bit different, and it's in a car which
is head of strange. I mean you open up the
back engine and there's this little compartment where this engine
is just whirring away and it's only like I had
like something like twenty horsepower or something like that. But um,
incredible that they were working on us. Now. It's not
anything like the rotary engines of today. It's not like

(40:45):
a Wankel rotary engine that we've talked about in this podcast. Yeah,
not a bit. It's nothing like that. So this is
a four stroke piston engine which has either three or
five cylinder and five cylinders that that rotated around this
fixed crankshaft, right. I think later they experiment with seven cylinders.
They they also had, uh this pretty neat marketing. Widely

(41:07):
considered to be an alternative technology, an alternative engine technology,
because as we said, a lot of people were experimenting
with these, but there were some pluses and minuses. Uh.
For instance, it was air cooled. Uh so that worked
because you know, think about it, as the engine is moving,
it's getting more and more air flowing over it. Apparently

(41:29):
they had really good balance. They didn't need a whole
lot of plumbing and it didn't weigh very much. Yeah,
that's right. It was just one hundred and ninety pounds
for this whole thing, including the flywheel, so very very low,
low weight and smooth operation. I mean, it operated extremely smoothly.
It was a it was a a well running engine.
It was a fine tuned engine, I guess if you

(41:51):
want to call it that. You know, even back then.
I mean, it's sure it runs a little bit rough,
you know, according to uh, the way modern engines run.
But um, honestly, it worked fairly well and it was reliable, etcetera. Right. Um.
The other thing then is that, you know, we said
that it's air cool and you would think that it
would get awful hot, and you know the body styles
back then, because there's an awful lot of effort put
into cooling air cooled engines. You know, how the how

(42:13):
the air flow goes over them. We've learned that through
Volkswagen and Porsche through the ages. Um, but this one,
because the engine is is constantly spinning around like that,
it's constantly drawing air over the fins of you know,
the cooling fins on the engine. Once he's once this
guy shut this engine down. He could he could touch
the engine. He couldn't lay his hand on it, but
he could touch the engine and it wasn't going to

(42:34):
burn his fingers. It was it was warm, but it
wasn't extremely or overly hot, which is very interesting. But
one of to me, the largest con of this engine
goes back to the oil as as the speed picks up,
because this it did have an oil feed from the
center right, but the center of the inchine rather, But

(42:56):
as the speed increased, the oil pressure would build up
and the engine itself will become thirstier and thirstier. So
there's this great article in Hemmings that we checked out
about this, and uh, this means that it could also
lose efficiency with speed. Uh. This makes it one of
those vehicles that you would have to kind of perform

(43:18):
routine maintenance on like every third time you drove it,
which was not at all abnormal for cars in the
first era of the twenty century. No, not at all.
But what you're saying is that, let's say this engine
is rated at twenty horse power and x you know,
x number of pound feet. They didn't really rate them
at that at this point. But let's say that You've
got a twenty horsepower engine in this car, and it sure,

(43:40):
it operates at twenty horse power at certain speeds, but
as you go faster and faster, it decreases its ability
to go faster and faster. You know, it's and it
and it requires more effort. So, um, you know, you're
losing power as you're going faster. So there's there's an Yeah,
there's a sweet spot in there, but you want to
drive it where it's that where it's operating optimal efficiency. Now,

(44:01):
you know, after years of development of this, this Adam's
Farewell Automobile, which was built by the way in Dubuque, Iowa.
Um it finally it finally went on sale in nineteen
o five and it's sold in very small numbers through
about nineteen eleven, which I think is cool because this
you know, let's also keep in mind that this it

(44:22):
seems like a crazy idea to me. I understand it
wasn't at the time. But it wasn't because of because
of aviation, because there were there were ideas that you know,
we're going to use this for um um you know,
some experimental aircraft. I mean, and they were thinking even
about experimental helicopters in nineteen ten, which is a way
back farther than I thought they would. Um, so they
were thinking about using a five cylinder or possibly even

(44:44):
a seven cylinder engine like this in a helicopter. Pretty
remarkable and just one of these five cylinder helicopter engines,
these prototype engines, I guess um made it or or
you know, lived through the history to be able to
to make it to the Smithsonians Institution where you can
find it today. And there's only one Adams Farewell automobile,

(45:04):
which is the six model six A that survives right now.
That's the one that is the Pebble Beach one. And
you can see that are you know, see that engine
running that that vehicle and you can hear the I
don't know if it's the curator museum or who it is,
somebody that came out from the museum with the car
um to to describe its operation. And you know the
guy that came with it, he's it's owned by the

(45:26):
National Automobile Museum, which is UH which is housing the
Hack collection, you know, the if miss Bill Harrick collection
out in Nevada, and they've got some of the vehicles,
if not all of the vehicles from uh, from the
hair collection in the National Automobile Museum now, so these
cars are kind of making their way at the different
shows and everybody can get to see them that way

(45:47):
if you don't make it to the museum itself. But
it's worth going to this geloptic article just to see
that Adams Farewell in operation, because it's so unusual, so unique,
very strange. Yeah, you know, it'd be so it'd be
amazing to be able to make it out to that
car museum one day. I've seen the collection in Las
Vegas and I don't know who. That's the Imperial Palace collection.

(46:11):
It's kind of like a like an old parking structure
that they've carpeted, and you know, you walk up and
down the roads and beautiful stuff and I think it's
all for sale. They had Johnny Carson's car for sale
there for a while. They have some customs and hot
rods and just some really unusual vehicles that are there.
And it's constantly changing collection. So you can go once
and then go back, you know a few months later,
and uh and and check it out again and there

(46:32):
may be something new there. Um. But I've never been
to the Hair Collection or the National Automobile Museum. But
I think the Hair Collection was in Reno, Nevada. I
think it was at one point. I don't know where
the National Automobile Museum is, but we should. I wish
you make a field trip. Yeah, surely, let's get our
slips together, have our parents sign off, and uh, I guess,

(46:55):
I guess in our case, I'll have to run it
by my my boss at my house, which is my girlfriend. Yeah.
I know, I'm hoping for a promotion, right, but so uh.
We hope that you guys have enjoyed this episode. We
have added another engine another engine show to our list

(47:16):
of engine shows. There was another one that we forgot
to mention at the top. I think the world's largest engine.
Remember we when we did that one, Yes, we did? Yeah? Yeah,
and that thing is bananas. It's you can see some
great clips of the people started. It's an engine for
cargo ship. I want to say it. As far as
I know, the record still stands, and I think that's

(47:37):
still the largest. I mean, I can't imagine how you
would build something bigger or what it would power. You know,
that's a question. If you build an engine larger than
that engine. You're doing it just to say that you
built the biggest engine to power the earth to make
sure that the orbit continues. Uh. So let us know
if you have any experience with some of these gents

(48:00):
like uh Scott's uh unfortunately burdened grandfather driving that eight
six four right, Yeah, you get rid of it eventually. Yeah,
well that's good. I'm glad he doesn't save the albatross
around his neck, right and uh, or if you have, uh,
if you think that we have been unfair to one

(48:21):
of these engines, if if you think that I'm I'm
giving the eight six four of a hard time unnecessarily,
then let us know about your experience. And you can
check out all of our episodes about engines on our
website car stuff Show dot com. And of course we
are on Facebook, we're on Twitter, and we want to
hear from you. Uh. Many of our best episode ideas

(48:44):
come from you listening at home or in your car
truck right now. So go ahead and write to us directly.
Our email addresses our stuff and how stuff Work dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics is
at how stuff works dot com. Let us know what
you think, Send an email to podcast at how stuff

(49:05):
works dot com. M m hmmmmm