Infinity is the first to produce this engine . Do you think it is to late as to the push towards electric engines and the surging electrical rates. Or the answer
Cadillac was playing with this technology back in the early 80's and came out with a variable that cut out cylinders depending on power required, they didn't do very well and I have seen other companies over the years playing with variable compression as well as the cut out cylinder system and they all seem to fade away. Now that Volvo has announced they will no longer produce internal combustion engines and only sell electric cars in the future, it will be interesting to see what comes from all of this.
Yes, yes it is and Cadillac was doing it back in the 80's and it didn't work out so well, the 8-6-4 was not only variable cylinder use, it was changing compression based on demand.
Cadillac used displacement on demand by dropping cylinders with solenoids on the valve train for the L62 motor that disabled the rockers. it did not vary compression, it simply disabled the operation of the valves.
GM currently does the same thing with the current 5.3L by controlling the lifters of certain cylinders. But like the Cadillac, they are doing this to just turn off cylinders completely.They also have issues with oil consumption because of this. If I bought a new 5.3L I would disable the "feature".
It does not control compression unless you think changing compression from normal to 0 is compression control!
The Infiniti design is actually changing the stroke of the piston on the fly but is not turning off the cylinders.
We will see if it actually makes it into cars. Sounds like it is not in production yet.
I used to drag race years ago and back around 1990 I was at a swap meet and had a set of 12.5:1 pistons for a 454 on the table for sale. A guy walks up and says those look like what's in my RV. Me being the cocky 21 year old said I doubt it. He says again, yes they are. I informed him they were 12.5:1 and would require race fuel. He says 'obviously you don't know who I am'. So I said well enlighten me. He informed me he was an engineer for GM back in the late 70's early 80's and was working on increased fuel economy. He said they took a junkyard 350 and was running it at a 28:1 A/F ratio. He told me that GM cut the funding for this but the group continued with their own funds until that ran out. He said they were using variable compression using camshaft design and valve overlap. I don't see how it could have been variable back then but what I'm thinking is they had high compression but with lots of overlap there would be alot of bleed-off. I had a 327 with 11:1 that I ran on pump gas but I had a 104* lobe center on my cam and lots of overlap so I could get away with it. So he proceeds to tell me that the group started getting death threats that he thinks came from oil producing companies. Never did get the guys name and not sure how true his story was but it made sense and he knew what he was talking about.
