This is partly due to the application of computer controls and partly due to the application of things like direct fuel injection, turbocharging, etc. that were previously available only on racing or aircraft engines.
For example, the Cosworth DFV normally aspirated Formula 1 engine with 182 cubic inches was making over 520 horsepower (2.9 / cubic inch) by the end of its career in 1983.
Combustion engine development was oddly stunted though. We have known the basic formula for power for a very long time (forced induction + high compression + high octane fuel). Superchargers are ancient, turbos aren't new either, although I guess fuel injection had to wait for computers to be reliable and cost effective. Even then I don't fully understand why it took 30 years for automakers to figure out how to produce high power engines that met emissions standards.
It didn't take long to know how to do it. It took a long time to make cost effective parts that were reliable in doing it for the service life of a car. the bearings in a modern vw turbocharger are incredible. Imagine getting 100K Miles out of a turbocharger which can regularly spool to 200K RPMs. those bearings need to be made to incredible tolerances, which were not previously cost effective.
People generally overestimate the difficulty of designing a product and underestimate the difficulty of designing the equipment, processes, and systems needed to mass produce the product economically.
Is that true? There are a number of interesting corollaries if so, notably that China should get a lot more respect for extremely cheap mass-production of products, the U.S's position as "designer of products that are built elsewhere" is quite precarious, that software and other IP (where mass production is basically free) are basically the perfect businesses, and that services that can be provided without mass-producing a product will grow in importance.
I could buy all 5 of those statements, but it's interesting that the combined effect of them would be to push people out of making things and into manipulating brains (which itself is a statement I could believe).
It is true, and some Chinese production lines are truly feats of engineering. However, it's a little tricky to determine whether this is really Chinese values and engineering or the values and engineering they have imported from other countries. There's a lot of production lines in China that produce nonfunctional goods.
In the microelectronic and mechanical areas the strength of the Chinese market seems to be very, very lax IP law. While most of the interesting parts don't make it over to the western market, they have very featureful, accessible, and novel components that are made by cobbling together (potentially stolen or at least unlicensed) IP.
Historically US manufacturing used to be the best cost/performance optimized and this is what helped win WWII.
It's my impression that Germany and Japan are leaders in producing the capital equipment needed to set up manufacturing, although the US is fairly capable in some areas. I think that China imports a lot of equipment from them and then integrates it into factory systems.
You 5 statements are probably right with some qualification. For example, software mass production is basically free (actually just low cost) for apps distributed via the app stores. However, if you are selling software as a service at scale, setting up a cloud service with five 9s availability is complex and expensive.
musk tweeeted a few years ago that "it isn't about the car, it's about the factory". he then proceeded to fail and redesign production due to overautomation, but the point stands and perhaps was stated in bold at that moment.
I think of it as a rule of five. Takes five times as much effort to design the production process as it does to design the product. And five times that to put it into production.
The number five is fungible depending on volume and similarity to existing products. It's why a hobbyist in his garage can design a product but can't commercialize it.
Turbos often use fluid bearings, and if treated well can last indefinitely. I have an old Jap sports car in the shed with over 400k km on the original turbo.
Fuel injection has been done forever without electronics even (purely mechanical), and with electronics but without computers decades before the first microprocessor came around.
The increase in performance goes hand-in-hand with emissions standards because - to some approximation - a more fuel efficient engine is more powerful for the same displacement than one that isn't. CFD is what really drove the last 25 years of improvements in this field, better models of what actually happens in a combustion chamber have helped tremendously in extracting the last bit of performance from the engines. The F1 engines are amazing in this respect, their longevity is terrible but their performance is nothing short of incredible in terms of thermal efficiency (> 50%; long thought to be impossible).
> more fuel efficient engine is more powerful for the same displacement than one that isn't
Not necessarily true, but for kinda stupid reasons. Carburetors often run cooler at the intake than fuel injection, resulting in more peak power despite worse economy. I am aware that this is not actually relevant here, I just think it's interesting.
My main point is that in that in the early 70s Chevy's small blocks could make damn near 400 horsepower. Fast forwards and it isn't until that late 80s that you see a consumer car with north of 250 (grand national), and that was a pretty extreme outlier. Move to the early 2000s and we finally get modern Chevy LS motors which are once again making north of 400hp from the factory. These are still single cam, 2 valve per cylinder V8s though.
In 1971, Car & Driver claims a Corvette with 425 hp did 0-60 in 5.3 seconds[1]. 1/4 mile was maybe 13.8 s. A 2008 Corvette with supposedly similar power did 0-60 in 4.1 seconds and 1/4 mile in 12.5.[2]
Yeah, there's some difference in weight, and modern transmissions, tires, and suspension are better and so on, but there is usually such a big difference that I think most of it is that horses used to be smaller.
I've seen several cases where a famous old sports car, likely running at 75% of the power when new, manages to beat the 0-60, 1/4 mile, and lap times of old. Just because tire technology has come that far in the last several decades.
But also keep in mind that significant engineering has gone into the best engines of today to broaden the torque and HP curves. It's not unusual to have 90+% of torque from 1800 rpm to 6500 rpm. That alone could significantly help performance numbers. After all it's the area under the torque/hp curve that matters, not the peak.
Imagine judging a runner by their peak speed, instead of the time to get across the finish line.
"the mammoth 500 cu. in. (8,194 cc) engine in the Cadillac Eldorado fell from 400 gross horsepower (298 kW) in 1970 to only 235 net horsepower (175 kW) for 1971. The real decline wasn’t quite as steep as it looked; the 1971 engine did have a lower compression ratio to prepare for the adoption of unleaded gasoline, but the 1971 gross rating was still 365 hp (272 kW), so the actual loss was about 10%, not more than 40%"
>Even then I don't fully understand why it took 30 years for automakers to figure out how to produce high power engines that met emissions standards.
They could probably have done it before, but this stuff is expensive. The current make/model of the first car I bought in the 90s costs double what it did then if you buy it new. I don't think the demand for efficiency really came in until oil prices started shooting up and the government imposed stricter CAFE standards.
Car ICEs have to be dirt cheap. Jet engines are expensive enough to include expensive goodies.
For example, an Mercedes claims its F1 engine achieves 50% thermal efficiency. That's insane, and maybe double what a car engine achieves. It also costs $1million(???)/unit.
Not sure I agree with that one. Turbos are hardly new, the benefits of higher compression ratios are new, and generally the design goals of the engine is the biggest part of a change.
It used to be that engines were robust. You could turn them off whenever, you could change the oil rarely, and without significant abuse or poor luck they would easily hit 200k miles. MPG wouldn't precipitously drop if you had something on the roof, a trailer, or were speeding. Just look at any manufacturers v6 3 liter for an example.
Today's motors are mostly 2 liter 4 cylinder turbos. They are pretty heat sensitive, have CPUs to manage their cooling, and are pretty hard on oil. Even with good maintenance they have a surprisingly high failure rate within the first 100k miles, but often outside of warranty. Look at the decreasing CPO warranties from Subaru, Audi, Lexus, BMW, etc for evidence. These high strung 4 cylinder turbos are efficient within a narrow range, but can often produce surprisingly poor efficiency when towing, putting anything on the roof, or even just speeding.
The biggest technological improvement I've seen in cars in the last decade is the transmission. Today's automatics and DCTs are mechanical marvels that exceed the performance and efficiency of manual transmissions. They also largely obviate the problem with the 2 liter turbos that have much narrower power/torque curves than the larger displacement engines of yesterday.
Internal combustion engines in cars have been around longer and we’re still pushing record amounts of power and record amounts of efficiency.