rev up your engines, today I'm starting a new segment, every Thursday I'm going to
answer one of the viewers questions, and make an entire video on that question
and today's question comes from Charles 737, Charles says Scotty you talk about
four-cylinder engines, six-cylinder engines, and eight solar engines,
what about three cylinder engines, well I know an awful lot about three cylinder
engines because I was eyes into motorcycles, and when I was young in 1969
triumph came out with their Trident which is the three cylinder motorcycle
engine, which kind of revolutionized things at least for the British, but within
a year or so, Honda came out with a 750 four-cylinder engine and that blew away
the triumph three cylinder 750, so it's a very short-lived amount of speed for
triumph, but it's kind of the end of the line too, the company soon went bankrupt
but decades later, triumph came back and now 2018 they have the Triumph Speed
Triple that's a three cylinder engine, it puts out 140 horsepower and for only
driving on two wheels and a vehicle that weighs maybe 500 pounds it's a lot
of power, now in car engines three cylinder engines in the past got a
really bad rap because they didn't have much power, the first really big one sold
in the United States was the Geo Metro, that had a three cylinder engine made by
Suzuki that was 1.0 litre, but that little Suzuki engine only put out fifty
five horsepower, they could barely get out of their own way, especially if they
had an automatic transmission, and those Metros they tended to shake at idle
because the three cylinder engine isn't inherently all that well balanced least
the old ones weren't, but if you're talking about modern three cylinder
engines, like this Ford EcoSport, it's got a three cylinder engine but guess how
much horsepower it puts out, and we're sitting here in drive and this thing idles
really smooth it's not shaking, you can see on the tach it's not wavering the
engines not shaking I don't feel any vibration in the steering wheel, with
modern advancements in metallurgy, engine design, fuel injection designed
these modern 1.0 three cylinder engines are far cry from that little 55 horsepower
washing machine that the Geo Metro's had in them, now this one that Ford has
you can see it's got three cylinders, one, two, three, but it also has gasoline
direct injection, which makes it have the most power and burn fuel the most
efficiently, plus it has a very advanced turbocharged system, here's the
intercooler here to cool the air so it works more efficiently, so it can put out
horsepower when you need it, but when you don't and the turbo doesn't kick in, you
get a lot better gas mileage, now you might think hey what do Americans know
about three cylinder engines they're never that popular here, well
check out this Ford three cylinder engine, as you can see right here, it's
it's made in Craiova engine plant which is in Romania, Europeans have been into
three cylinder engines for quite some times, so that thing comes from Europe
they need gas savings and they need power, they've been messing with that stuff for a
long time so this isn't just some brand new thing that Ford came up, with they
took an already existing technology and made it better, with a smaller engine you
can fit it into a smaller space, so the vehicles gonna weigh less, and you're
gonna get better gas mileage and much better handling, because the less an
engine weighs, the less weight it has to pull itself, as such a three-cylinder
engine is fighting against the law of diminished returns, if you keep making
engines bigger they weigh more, then they need more power to pull themselves, and
since this is the Thursday segment where I answer a viewers question, place your
own question on the YouTube comments below, and I'll pick the best ones to
make a single video to answer your questions, and where else can you find a
guy with 50 years experience of fixing cars to answer your own question with a
video, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos
remember to ring that Bell!