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1 year agoI think a good analogy to this is (no offense intended here) many “Flagship” phone buyers. They want the most current, awesome one they can get, don’t give two shits about what its worth after 3-5 years, that’s not part of the equation. People who buy used 3-5 year old flagship phones are an entirely different crowd than that.
So I’m going to break from the crowd here and say its actually been possible for a long time. We’ve had the technology.
But what we have had:
Lets go back to the 90s. Ford would have never bothered with the DOHC 4.6 if they weren’t getting wrecked by GM’s LT1. The LT1 wouldn’t have been needed if the Corvette was competitive. The Coyote wouldn’t have existed if the 3V Mustangs weren’t getting wrecked by LS2 Camaros. I don’t think BMW wanted to start adopting turbo engines that much in the mid 2000s but they would have been down on power relative to competition at the time so they had to. Those are just off the cuff examples. Making power has never been the challenge, its meeting emissions and fuel economy standards while doing it.
The E46’s S54 is a fantastic engine but at the end of the day, its an 8000 RPM redline engine. Anybody could have shoved a set of big cams in a I6 with big head ports and short runners and made that power. The power isn’t the noteworthy part. To sell a car like that, you have to make the engine make the power while also being tame enough for street use, last the warranty period, and pass emissions standards. You can’t just do that in a temperamental big cam engine. Variable valve timing lets that be a reality, electronic throttle control probably helps, and then from there its just making an expensive engine built to handle high RPMs. It needs to have the rigidity, valvetrain control, oil control and bottom end strength to do it. That’s well established tech, its just more expensive than building a more basic engine not intended for such a rigorous life. The Honda B16 came out in 1989 and has similar power density, VTEC is what made it possible. VVT Tech existed since the 80s, manufacturers just were slower to adopt it on larger engines because it required R&D investment and they needed to have a need for it.