Originally Posted By: turtlevette
Is there any end in sight to the March towards suffocating complexity in passenger vehicles.
To be absolutely honest, I have been quite surprised at how comparatively SIMPLE the Ford Ecoboost installations are. At least in a mechanical sense. They are well-designed, but somewhat spartan turbo systems where much of the safeguarding that allows them to work is in software, where it doesn't corrode, wear, and deteriorate. A vast difference from the nest-of-snakes pile of cooling lines, vacuum hoses, calibrated orifices, diaphragms-and-springs, and all sorts of other fragile stuff that was required to keep an 80s-vintage turbo engine happy and safe.
The dual fuel system IS an example of a bit of added complexity to be sure. But if the benefits are there (not just the cleaner intake, but better low-temp fuel vaporization with port injection), then why not? Its not like the port injection fuel rails and injectors are high-tech or prone to frequent failure anymore, and the DI injectors are coming down in complexity and mystery all the time too. By comparison, in the 60s people tolerated dual-point ignitions that had to be re-tweaked every 10,000 miles, multiple carb setups that had to be synchronized just about as often, the Europeans tolerated Bosch mechanical fuel injection systems that were very finicky, and so on. Complexity has ALWAYS been the cost for performance, its just that now a lot of the complexity looks like voodoo from the outside because it isn't something you can put your hand on. But that's also a vast improvement, IMO.
