News

Ford’s highly successful, fuel-efficient EcoBoost engine technology hit a big milestone recently with its 500,000th engine being produced just three years after its launch in 2009.

More than 130,000 of those engines have been produced for vehicles in Europe; the worldwide 500,000th engine was fitted into a 2013 Ford Escape that rolled off the line at Ford’s Louisville Assembly Plant, in the U.S.

Ford’s global EcoBoost petrol engine family includes the 1.0-litre “International Engine of the Year”, 1.6-litre, 2.0-litre and 3.5-litre powertrains. When EcoBoost launches on Fusion in South America early next year, the fuel-saving engine technology will be available in every region across Ford’s operations.

EcoBoost was introduced in North America in 2009 and made its European debut in the Ford C-MAX and Grand C-MAX a year later. It is also now available in Europe with new Fiesta, all-new B-MAX, Focus, Mondeo, Galaxy and S-MAX. In early 2013 new Kuga will deliver Ford of Europe’s first EcoBoost-equipped all-wheel drive vehicle.

Ford holds more than 125 patents on its EcoBoost engine technology, which uses turbocharging, direct gasoline injection and variable valve timing to boost fuel economy by about 20 per cent without sacrificing performance. Using hundreds of thousands of lines of computer code and related parameters to optimise engine and transmission operation, Ford uses this technology like no other automaker in the world.

In Europe Ford plans to triple the production of its vehicles equipped with EcoBoost engines to approximately 480,000 in 2015, from 141,000 last year. More than 300,000 of that projected yearly output will be vehicles equipped with the new 1.0-litre EcoBoost.

After launching just this year, the Focus 1.0-litre EcoBoost has already achieved nearly 30 per cent of European Focus sales.