(car revving)
(music playing)
- The SF90 is Ferrari's new age halo car
that doesn't have a V12 in it.
And, it's also the Scuderia's first ever
plug-in hybrid.
Did I mention that this is Ferrari?
It builds on the foundations laid out
by the legendary LaFerrari, which had minor electrification.
But believe me when I say that the SF90
is a major step for Ferrari,
and goes against a lot of what they've done
and said in the past.
Now this electric pony is a testament to what happens
when a company gets with the times.
So today, we're going to break down the SF90
first by looking at the electric side of things,
it's hybrid drivetrain.
And then we're gonna dive into the good old
carbon dioxide producing Stradale's twin turbo V8 engine.
This is the first Ferrari that's more Prius than Ferrari.
And surprisingly, that is a good thing.
(music playing)
Ferrari is a company full of contradictions.
They cash in on their racing heritage and pedigree
when marketing and selling road cars,
and yet they haven't won a Formula 1 Championship
in close to 15 years.
That's right, what are they doing?
They make grand statements like,
"Ferrari will never race in E-Sports"
and then just two years later,
Charles Leclerc is off winning e-races.
In 2010, Ferrari Chairman Luca di Montezemolo, nailed it,
said the company would never make an electric car.
And now, we have a plug-in hybrid Ferrari as their halo car.
Now if you don't know what a halo car is,
it's a manufacturer's light-up sign.
It's them shouting,
"Hey, hey. This is what we're about now.
"Thought we were off resting on our laurels?
"Well we weren't. We're doing cool (beep) over here."
Yes, it's designed to make you drool,
but it's also the brand showing the world
that it's putting their best foot forward.
It shows the people the future goals
and direction of the company.
So, is electric the future of Ferrari?
Well let's look at the SF90's hybrid system to find out.
(music playing)
This is Ferrari's first ever plug-in hybrid.
It's only their second car to feature
electrically produced horsepower after the LaFerrari.
Now the fundamentals of a hybrid powertrain
are pretty much the same.
Whether you're talking about a Ferrari, or a Prius.
You guys probably know the drill.
The idea is that in addition
to an internal combustion engine,
one or more electric motors offer additional horsepower.
Now these electric motors are powered by a mixture
of electricity from a plug-in source and by electricity
the system is able to harvest from the combustion engine
via methods such as regenerative braking.
(beep)
I'm gonna call regenerative braking regen braking,
because I can't say regenerative more than once
in a minute without messing up.
So we're gonna call it regen braking.
So when I say regen braking,
it means regenerative braking. See? I (beep) up.
Now regen braking is when you take kinetic energy
from your moving car and you store it as
potential energy in the form of electricity
in a battery for later use.
When you go to step on the brakes right,
the car's electric motors then get put in reverse
causing the electric motors to run backwards,
slowing the car down and turning your
kinetic energy of the moving car into
electrical potential energy that you can use later on.
Let's look at a Prius for example.
It uses a 1.8 liter 4-cylinder gas engine
as well as a dual-motor system
powered by an 8.8 kilowatt hour battery.
And the power is generated by either plugging it in,
like that, or like we just mentioned
regenerative braking, also known as regen braking
if you can't say it.
With the SF90 Stradale, it uses not one, not two,
but three electric motors.
One electric motor powers each of the front wheels,
which also allows for torque vectoring.
Now torque vectoring is actually pretty cool.
Typically you have a differential
that transfers the torque of the engine to the wheel.
But with a car with torque vectoring, you have the ability
to control and vary the amount of torque
that you're supplying to each of the wheels
that have those motors.
And this allows the wheels to grip the road better
which means you can increase your handling capabilities,
you can increase your grip, and overall
you have a more stable car.
Those motors also provide the car's reverse power
as the 8-speed dual-clutch transmission
has no reverse gear.
And that lack of a dedicated reverse gear
helps the transmission be significantly smaller
and 22 pounds lighter.
It also has a shifting time 30 percent faster
than the previous Ferrari's dual clutch system.
It takes just 200 milliseconds to change the gear.
You wanna see how fast 200 milliseconds is?
Check this out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(laughs)
It's this fast.
I bet you're noticing that I'm not wearing shoes right now.
(chuckles)
I have a Florida shirt on, I'm not wearing shoes.
Gosh dang it, I'm not setting a good example.
Now the third motor sits between the transmission
and the combustion engine.
And altogether, these three electric motors
add 217 horsepower to the drivetrain.
Together the electric motors and the turbocharged
combustion engine deliver an amazing 986 horsepower.
This car stores its power via
a 7.9 kilowatt hour lithium ion battery
which is also capable of being recharged
via regenerative braking, we already talked about that.
(dog barking)
(music playing)
(car rumbling)
(clapping)
Now for those of you who might not have
any context to what a kilowatt hour is,
it's just a measure of the amount
of energy capacity a battery has.
Now energy is just power times time.
And power is a measure of the instantaneous electricity
being used, and we use watts as a unit of measure power.
Kilo means 1000, so a kilowatt is 1000 watts.
And all this means is that the SF90's lithium ion battery
can produce 7900 watts of power for one hour.
Our Tesla Model X uses 100 kilowatt hour battery
but that's its main power source, so it has to be bigger.
But the SF90 is right there in line with
it's Prius bro bro, which has a, like I said before,
8.8 kilowatt hour battery.
The Ferrari SF90 is more Prius than Ferrari.
Dare I say it.
And, for the first time ever, you can even
run a Ferrari in purely electric mode.
Now with a range of 16 miles
and speeds up to 84 miles per hour,
which really isn't all that impressive,
but you effectively have
a front wheel drive electric Ferrari.
Now, I'm sure that's something the founder
Enzo Ferrari never thought that his company would produce.
Enzo Ferrari is for sure spinning in his grave,
screaming up, "You madafadas, you madafadas,
"I shoulda never died."
Actually, he shouldn't be that upset.
Well, not yet at least.
Because the hybrid system is only half of the SF90 equation.
The other half is the twin turbo V8 setup.
"Oh no a V12? I shoulda never died."
(music playing)
Now the main unit delivering power to the wheels in the SF90
is a 4-liter twin turbocharged variant of Ferrari's F154 V8.
Now this is the first turbocharged Ferrari road engine
since they put a turb-altered engine
in the legendary Ferrari F40.
But, it's not solely in the SF90.
It's actually been fitted in the 488
and the F8 models since its creation.
But in the case of the SF90, it's been bored
from 3.8 liters to 4 liters
and some changes have been made to allow for
the cohesion between it and the hybrid system.
You know that engine's gotta play nice
with the electric motors so they gotta do some fancy work.
Hi, welcome to Jerry's Auto Sales.
You're interested in the SF90? No problemo.
Let me give you some of the specs.
You're a spec guy? Cool, I'm a spec guy too. Okay?
We got forced induction, come from two parallel
twin scroll water-cooled turbos, two intercoolers.
Great. You like that? You want more specs? Cool.
It's got 4 valves per cylinder, 32 valves total.
Oh, you wanna know what kind of crank it's got?
It's got a flat-plane crank.
It's got dry-sump oil system.
It's got two camshafts with continuously variable
valve timing on the intake and exhaust.
Oh you want more? Oh you want some more?
Well too bad cause that's it, the paragraph's over.
Now we talked about VVT in the Viper episode,
Greatest car ever to come out of America.
So if you wanna know more about that,
go watch after you finish this episode.
Now Ferrari's twin turbo V8 is really an incredible
piece of engineering on its own.
With no form of hybridization,
it'll produce 780 horsepower.
To put that into context, a Dodge Charge SRT Hellcat,
which we love here at Donut, that has 717 horsepower
and it's considered by most to be
one of the most potent cars ever built.
Now the Ferrari's V8 has that thing beat
even before we get into the hybrid system.
But what's even more interesting is not how
but why Ferrari decided to give the SF90 a twin turbo.
At the time, when Ferrari launched their 458
all the way back in 2010,
they used a naturally aspirated V8 believing that
this was the most efficient way to create power.
And they thought so because, at the time,
in Formula 1, the engines being used
were naturally aspirated V8's.
That's the whole point of F1.
Build stuff, you build race cars and you put
that technology in your road going cars.
So if the F1 team's doing it you do it.
However, the following year, McLaren,
still a relative newcomer to the road car production scene,
launched the MP4-12C.
Like Ferrari's flagship car, the McLaren was a mid-engine
rear wheel drive supercar.
But while the Ferrari had a high displacement
naturally aspirated V8, the McLaren had a far smaller
3.8-liter V8 with twin turbs.
It produced more horsepower, more torque,
and was more economical five years later. That's a lifetime.
Ferrari took a page out of the McLaren book
and used a smaller displacement
twin turbocharged engine in their 488.
Now what I'm getting at is that this is a pattern
Ferrari have been falling into for the past few decades.
They make amazing cars but sometimes they hold on
to that aging technology for far too long
while their competitors innovate and reinvent
and they take more risk.
And often times, they yield better results
and more future-proofed performance.
And if you look back at the supercars from each decade
that really stand out though, you'll see that
the majority of them are Ferrari's.
Starting in the '50s and the 60's,
the Ferrari V12 250 GTO was, and remains,
the most sought-after car ever built.
You got the 288 GTO, the F40,
the Enzo, the LaFerrari, it's the same story.
Now Ferrari aren't often the pioneers
of new road car technology.
That accolade tends, in more recent times at least,
to be awarded to McLaren or Porsche.
But, when they do decide to do something,
boy oh boy do they do it well.
And this is exactly what they have done
with the SF90 Stradale.
But where do we go from here?
It looks like history will repeat itself.
Ferrari's head of marketing, Enrico Galliera,
basically said that,
"Hey, battery technology, it's not there yet.
"It's not up to the Ferrari standard.
"In order for us to build a Ferrari that's purely electric,
"That technology's gotta be a little bit improved.
"We're not ruling it out, we're saying, hey,
"We're gonna build an all-electric Ferrari. Just not yet."
Guys, there's gonna be a day when only electric Ferrari's
are gonna be zippin around a race track.
And instead of V8's and V12's, all you're gonna hear is,
(hums)
buzzing by, but it doesn't even matter.
Cause the best Ferrari ever has already been built, the F40.
And if you don't think so, go watch
its episode of "Up to Speed" and then come back here
and tell me otherwise.
And then if you can't, I'll give you one of my dirtbikes.
Follow me on Instagram, @jeremiahburton.
Send me your address, I'll ship it to you.
But you're not gonna be able to
cause the F40's the best car ever.
Anyways, thanks for watching, bye for now.