Over the past few months, I’ve been talking about run your car on water supplementary systems as a method to boost performance, gas savings and emissions reductions in gasoline-powered engines. Now, it seems that Ford has gone a different route in boosting their gasoline engine with ethanol.
That’s correct, the Ford Bobcat is a direct ethanol injection system that is being paired with the Ford Ecoboost system to give a combined mileage increase of 30-percent over the standard gasoline-powered engines.
Ford introduced the Ecoboost system in January 2008 that uses turbocharging and direct injection to increase fuel economy 20 percent and decrease CO2 emissions by 15-percent. Now, add on top of this the Ford Bobcat, which directly injects ethanol, at a higher compression ratio, cooling the air / fuel mixture to increase mileage and torque and the Detroit automaker has ventured into the field of supplementing gasoline engines with add-on technology.
The Bobcat is being geared as a replacement for some diesel engines in Ford trucks where fuel economy is one of the top concerns along with power and torque. One drawback of the Ford Bobcat, however, will be that the ethanol will require a separate tank from the gasoline tank that will also need to be filled.
According to Ford, however, the ethanol tank will only need to be filled every couple of months as the ethanol will merely supplement the gasoline that is being used as the main fuel. One has to wonder, though, that if Ford is going to the trouble to supplement a gasoline engine with ethanol, why not just use an HHO generator that runs on water instead? Of course, this would open up a whole new debate that I don’t have space to cover here.
But, the positive that is coming out of this is that one of the major six automakers has finally decided to develop supplementary technology for its gasoline engines. This many not be a giant leap for mankind, but it is one small step in the right direction.