As the car industry moves further and further towards electrification, most manufacturers aren’t bothering to do much development on internal combustion engines. One of the ones that’s bucking this trend is Toyota. The Japanese automotive giant has refused to follow the same route as all the other major manufacturers, still putting a big focus on ICE and hybrid cars. That’s reflected in their work on a couple of brand-new ICEs.
There isn’t a lot of information out there at the moment about what these new ICEs are like and what Toyota is planning to use them for. There’s a lot of speculation going on, and we likely won’t hear the real specifics of what’s going to happen with them for a while yet. However, senior figures at Toyota have already revealed enough information to make anyone excited about these upcoming Toyota engines.
One of the main things about Toyota’s new generation of internal combustion engines is that they’re going to be small, compact units. At the moment, we know that the new engines will come in two different sizes. The smaller engine will be a 1.5-liter inline-4, and the larger engine will be a 2-liter inline-4. Both of them are also designed to be more compact than previous Toyota engines of the same size. The 1.5-liter engine is around 10% smaller in terms of its volume and height than the current 1.5-liter engine Toyota manufactures, and it’ll also be 10% lighter. Toyota’s managed to achieve this through designing an engine with a shorter piston stroke, something which Toyota’s CTO Hiroki Nakajima said was “a very difficult task” to get right.
Why make the engines more compact? It’s to allow Toyota to design cars with a lower front end. This would allow Toyota’s designers and engineers to create cars with better-optimized airflow, and therefore more aerodynamic efficiency. This helps fuel efficiency in turn, something that’s so important now with car design.
While the new more compact design will help with efficiency, it will result in the engines having less torque. That may not be the end of the world though, as Toyota is definitely going to use these engines as part of hybrid powertrains. In a hybrid system, the instant torque of the electric motors would make up for any lack of torque the internal combustion engine may have.
One of the big things Toyota has managed to do with these new engines is make them more efficient than its current ICEs. As we’ve already mentioned, efficiency is a huge concern with today’s cars, and especially when it comes to ICEs and hybrids. It makes a lot of sense, then, that Toyota would try to make its latest combustion engines as efficient as possible.
While Toyota hasn’t provided any specific figures, it did manage to hit 40% thermal efficiency several years ago. Those efficiency improvements came from a fairly surprising source. That’s for a project involving internal combustion engines, at least. Toyota learned a lot about improving thermal efficiency as part of developing the Mirai hydrogen fuel-cell car. The Mirai has stayed a slow-seller, thanks to barely any markets existing for a fuel-cell car. But, its existence has clearly been worth it, as the efficiency lessons Toyota learned from it have filtered down into these new engines.
One of the most important parts about Toyota’s new internal combustion engines is that they’re designed for a world moving away from fossil fuels. That means they’ve been engineered for sustainable fuels from the very start. What kind of sustainable fuels these new Toyota engines will be able to run on hasn’t been specified. We do know, though, that Toyota has been doing a lot of research into hydrogen-fuelled combustion engines. They’ve tried putting these hydrogen-fuelled ICEs into multiple test cars. This has included a modified Toyota GR Yaris, for which they shot a promotional video starring racing legend (and current driver for and Team Principal of the Toyota Gazoo Racing World Endurance Championship team) Kamui Kobayashi.
There’s also been a lot of advances elsewhere into creating brand new synthetic fuels (such as E-Fuels). You can’t count out biofuels, either. They’ve been around for ages now, and Toyota has been hedging its bets on them already as a way of keeping ICE cars on the road.
Toyota isn’t the only big car manufacturer betting on sustainable fuels keeping the internal combustion engine alive. Porsche has poured a lot of money into sustainable fuel research, as has its Volkswagen Group sibling Audi. Subaru, Suzuki, and Daihatsu have also pledged to put resources into making the fuel powering ICEs more environmentally friendly. Whether this will help to keep combustion engines going in any way is all speculative for now. But, it is a step towards sustainability, and that’s one of the big things the automotive industry is trying to do to adapt to the changing times.
With the big focus on efficiency and moving away from fossil fuels, you might think that Toyota’s new generation of engines would be a bit boring. That probably won’t be the case, as they’re going to have a bit of motorsport DNA in them! Toyota’s Gazoo Racing division is involved in developing the new engines. This was confirmed by Bart Eelen (the head of Gazoo Racing and Toyota’s motorsports efforts in general) in an interview with CAR Magazine. That not only means they’ll benefit from the expertise of Gazoo Racing’s engineers, but they’ll also potentially have high-performance variants!
Toyota has mentioned the possibility of the 2-liter engine being able to have up to 600 hp. While that might sound crazy, it’s worth remembering that it managed to get 300 hp out of the 1.6-liter 3-cylinder engine in the GR Yaris and GR Corolla.
Having the racing arm of a car company become so involved with the development of new engines so early on is very unusual. With most companies, the regular end of the engineering team will develop everything first and then hand it off to the motorsport division later. But, unconventional strategies like this involving motorsport have worked for Toyota in the past. The GR Yaris was designed as a rally car first and then a road car later. In fact, the sole reason the GR Yaris exists is because Toyota wanted a 3-door version of the Yaris to take rallying! When you think about that, it doesn’t actually seem so weird that Toyota is involving Gazoo Racing so heavily in the development of these new engines.
Sources: CAR Magazine, Motor1, Toyota
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