(car engine roaring)
- When you think of Volkswagen,
you probably think of Jettas, Golfs
or maybe even the punch buggy.
(mumbling)
But what you don't think of is huge power or extreme luxury.
I mean, their name literally translates to the people's car.
So, why and how did they create one of the most bonkers,
highly sophisticated, amazing sounding
luxury engines of all time?
Well, today, we're gonna dive into that incredible
engineering of one of the coolest, most bizarre engines
ever built, the W12.
It's like two engines in one, it's crazy, let's go.
(upbeat music)
The W12, the name itself already sounds pretty nasty.
And everyone knows W is the nastiest letter out there
unless you put two PP next to each other and that's PP.
(laughs) (beep)
So, to explain the W12,
let's look at some other engines for a second.
So, you got your inline 4s, you got your inline 6s,
and they have all the sounders in a line,
one after the other.
Then you got your V, mainly in the V configuration.
You have V6s, V8s, V10s and V12s.
And those engines have two lines
or banks of cylinders in a V shape.
So, we got our inlines, we got our V's
and there's some boxer engines too,
but for the sake of this video, we can skip over those,
which then brings us to the W.
And I'm gonna show you a little magic trick.
We take two V's and you slam them together,
(swoosh)
you get a W.
(chuckles)
Like just blow your mind, I just blew my mind.
Yeah, why is it W, it should definitely be double V,
double V even sounds cooler than W.
We're changing the alphabet, one letter at a time, let's go.
And I didn't know this, but when the first W12 engines
were designed and built,
they were intended for use in planes.
They were built by this British company called
D. Napier and Son during the First World War .
And the Napier Lyon, as it was called,
was a 24L W12
that produced 900 HP
making it the most powerful engine ever built
up into that point, that is insane.
That same engine also power the Napier-Campbell Blue Bird
to 174.88 miles per hour
in 1927, a land speed record at the time.
Now, these early engines had proven
that the W12 configuration was capable of producing
excellent torque and horsepower.
So, why was the Napier W12 the last notable W12
before Volkswagen built there's 70 years later?
well, unsurprisingly, W12 engines are pretty complex,
so, complex that Volkswagen needed to make it more complex.
(swoosh)
Typical Volkswagen, in actuality it was just too big.
So, if they were going to use it in a modern car,
they had to figure out how to make the setup smaller.
Fortunately, Volkswagen had already solved the problem
of making the V engine smaller
and that's with their VR design.
That's right, we're talking VR6.
(upbeat music)
You've probably heard of VR6 before.
VR6 badges are on the backs of Golf, Passat, Jettas,
they're all up in the VW lineup.
So, you might have seen the badge,
but do you really know what it means?
So, let's talk about it, so, the R in VR6
comes from the German word for inline,
which is (speaking in foreign language).
Nailed it, what's up my German buddies?
So, what we call an I6, for example,
the Germans call an R6.
Of course, the six denotes that it's a six cylinder,
hence the VR6, it's a V inline 6.
But how can you have a V engine
that's also an inline engine?
It's either one or the other, right?
Well, what the VW engineers wanted was to keep
all of the benefits of a V6 in terms of performance,
but package it in a way which would allow them to fit them
in compact cars without having to compromise on the size
and the weight and having to redesign a bunch of stuff
in the engine bay.
The question was, how do you house all that V6 technology
in a smaller space?
And the solution was simple.
You'd have a papa V make love to an inline mama
and they have a baby, a V (speaks in foreign language) baby.
By making the angle between the two banks of cylinders
incredibly acute, that's this,
okay, you got 90, you got acute and you got obtuse.
I actually missed my sixth grade Miss Walker geometry class,
and it took me years to remember that.
I actually had to look this up
because I still can't remember what acute and obtuse is.
So, just 15 degrees in staggering the cylinder
so that they were snug up against one another,
the engine could have a dimension
similar to that of an inline 4.
Aside from size what's the benefit of having
a narrower angled staggered VR6 layout.
Well, only one cylinder head is needed
for both banks of cylinders,
which means only two total camshafts are needed.
See, in a dual-overhead-cam 60-degree setup,
which is kinda standard angle for V6,
you need four camshafts, two in each bank,
like the Nissan 300 X for example, it's a quad-cam.
And regardless of the engineers fitted two
or four valves per cylinder, a VR6 needed only two cams.
This helped keep the cost down
and probably more importantly, the size
and weight of the engine compared to a regular old V6.
There's a couple of other cool things inside the VR6
that allow for it to be smooth,
vibration less, power producing,
you guys know that's kind of a custom with the VR6,
but we're not gonna get into that, that's for another day.
Now, the VR6 is only slightly longer and wider
than a four cylinder engine and yet it produces considerably
more power with just two extra cylinders.
This all meant that it could be mounted transversely,
that's this way, transverse.
And they could do that in a small front wheel drive cars
without having to be redesigned
to allow for a larger engine bay.
Now, one of the compromises of the VR6 compact design
is in the head.
Now, since the cylinders aren't mounted centrally
against the cylinder head, this means that the distance
to the valves and every other cylinder bank
would be different, and if Volkswagen didn't do anything
to compensate for this, it would have meant that
each cylinder would have been producing vastly
different horsepower compared to one another.
So, the engineers had to be clever in how they arranged
the valves in order to feed the intake
and draw the exhaust gases away.
This meant that each cylinder
had to had different length intakes, pretty cool.
The way Volkswagen accounted for that was to compensate
for the cylinders which had longer intakes
by increasing the length of the runners
to the manifold as well as the cam profile
in the lift of those particular cylinders.
And that's pretty unique, they're like,
there are no weak links in a VR6 motor.
One cylinders online like, "Hey you six bro,
"why don't you pull your way?"
So, I'm like, " six shut up, Volkswagen made me this way."
Although you would probably have a German accent,
you wouldn't sound like Joe exotic.
The VR6 made its debut in the Passat, but it's probably
best known as the engine found in the Corrado.
From there, it was fitted in other compact Volkswagens
including the Jetta and the GTI, and a bunch of others.
But more importantly, it's got a reputation
for its super smooth power delivery
and its sweet, sweet sound, just go ahead and take a listen.
(car engine roaring)
So, how do we go from a VR6 to a W12?
Well, way back in the olden times, the 90s,
Volkswagen chief Ferdinand Piech, had a little pet project,
he wanted a car to battle sales
from the top of the food chain Mercedes S Class.
The only problem Volkswagen didn't have
the right engine for the job.
So, what did they do?
Hold on, don't get ahead of yourself, let me say it,
I wanna be the one to say it, I'm talking here, okay?
Yep, they essentially just put two VR6s together
into the WR12 48 valve, it had four rows of three cylinder.
So, yeah, essentially 215-degree VR engines
married in a W formation, which is what makes the W shape.
And they kept the stroke the same as the VR6,
and that's this part, boom, boom, boom.
But each cylinder was bold out slightly from 81 mm to 84 mm.
And this allowed a tiny bit more air into each cylinder,
which meant a little bit bigger boom and of course,
more power that extra bit of board diameter gave the engine
a displacement of six liters and the cylinder block was cast
from an aluminum silicon alloy which would allow
for greater torsional rigidity, but also, more importantly,
greater heat dispersion than one made from steel.
'Cause you got those two banks of six cylinders
packed in so tightly you gotta be able to remove the heat
from block which was a critical,
critical engineering challenge.
Plus this aluminum silicon alloy
also made the block far lighter than it would have been
if it were made out of steel.
Steel weighs more than aluminum silicon, you guys get it.
And each of the two cylinder banks
has its own air filter and throttle body,
the intake manifold, they're even made out
of magnesium alloy.
Volkswagen really wanted to keep as much of the weight
in the base of the engine, hence the use of magnesium
and aluminum at the engine's top side.
Okay, you're like, "Jeremiah, cool, whatever,
"but what are the numbers?"
Alright, geez, chill, we're getting there, okay?
I have a degree in mechanical engineering
that I'm doing nothing with.
So, I like to nerd out a little bit, just join me.
So, the naturally aspirated Volkswagen WR12 produces 444HP.
That might not sound like a ton,
but this was also an ancient year of the 1990s.
And here's the real kicker with it,
It make 430 FT-LBS from 2750 to 5000 RPM.
That is a wide range to have that much torque.
And really that's a big part
with a 12 sound design in the first place.
Smooth, consistent torque across the power band.
Pretty damn freakin wild, right?
It's wild engine.
So, to showcase this thing, Volkswagen plopped
a special 600 HP version and a concept car,
they literally just called the W12.
You want another eargasm, we'll close the door,
put on some headphones and tell your mom you're taking a nap
'cause you're gonna need some alone time,
just Listen to this.
(car engine roaring)
This car smashed a bunch of records in 2002
where they were ripping around the Nardo Ring in Italy
for 24 hours straight with an average speed of 200.6 MPH.
That is so crazy.
Now, obviously you don't see these W12 cars
driving around the concept ones
but you do see WR12s driving around.
A Volkswagen drop this engine in versions of the Audi A8
which Volkswagen owns, they own Audi, you know that?
And the Volkswagen Phaeton, the giant looking Passat thing,
which is a car so weird, we should probably give it
an episode at some point, that thing is completely wild.
Plus the W12 Tuareg, I love that these fairly standard
looking cars have W12s in them.
If you didn't know what you were looking for,
there's no way you would know a W12 would be
in some of those cars, it's just pretty, pretty insane.
There are now twin-turbo versions of the W12,
powering the Bentley Continental GT
and the Bentley Flying Spur.
And the same basic engine principles and layout
are what's used in Bugatti's W16 engine and the Veyron,
the Chiron, the Divo and the Centodieci and Pasta Pazure,
I frickin' love all of Bugatti.
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Thanks for watching, bye for now.