Lotus Teases With a Fuel-Agnostic Two-Stroke Engine

JohnnyBGod writes "Lotus claim to have invented a new, more efficient engine design. The two-stroke, flex-fuel engine can achieve, according to the surprisingly technical press release, 'approximately 10% better [fuel consumption] than current spray-guided direct injection, spark ignition engines.' The engine has a sliding puck arrangement to control its compression ratio, and has direct injection and a wet sump, to eliminate fuel leakage to the exhaust and the need to mix oil with the fuel, two common problems with two-stroke engines. Lotus engineering have released a video explaining the engine's operation."

Comments

Re:What took it all so long??

[_merlin]

So where is this magical Ford engine at now? A one-off prototype car is no better than a single experimental engine.

Re:Uh huh. Just add to the Copenhagen free promoti

[rufty_tufty]

Dude, Chill!

Let's assume you're right and it could have been done 30 years ago (it couldn't but I'll get to that later). It's newsworthy because no-one has done this before, in fact it's more newsworthy if someone has a really obvious idea that no-one has done before. I'm sure the first person to stick an internal combustion or steam engine on a cart was told it was a really obvious idea, but the first horseless carriage still deserved to be big news. I'd certainly class a major engine development as being as newsworthy as the latest revision of the Linux kernel being released.

As I understand the article they're using direct injection similar to that used in modern performance diesels. This is a relatively new technology that requires very high pressure fuel injectors which are still a developing technology and weren't available 10 years ago never mind 30. Don't forget mechanical engineering is a much slower moving field than software - they have to design and test things in their field before they release them ;-)

Re:10% improvement isn't that much

[paiute]

You are assuming that ethanol is a green fuel. I'm not so sure about corn-based ethanol. Future technology may change that, but I am uneasy using a subsidized food crop to make fuel for cars.

Re:10% improvement isn't that much

[TheRaven64]

No one outside the USA uses corn for ethanol. It's only grown in the USA because it gets stupidly high government subsidies making it cheaper than everything else. If you drive across France, you'll see lots of bright yellow fields growing rapeseed, which is used to produce fuel.