Gear

An obituary for the internal combustion engine

We asked a confirmed petrolhead to say goodbye to the ICE. It’s a fond farewell, but it’s time to call it a day
Getty Images / WIRED

The deceptively relaxed drone of the flat-six Porsche 962 at Le Mans, the warble and chatter of the Audi Quattro’s turbocharged in-line five in the forests, and the 17,000rpm scream of a Ferrari 412 T2’s V12 at Silverstone. Three reasons why fossil fuel enthusiasts love the internal combustion engine, or ICE, and an insight into the variety of cylinder arrangements that have been made during the past 130 years of development. It’s an era that may now come to an abrupt end as the ICE gives way to the electric motor. 

Some 136 years ago, German engineer Carl Benz built the first motor car with an internal combustion engine. The ‘Benz Patent Motor Car’ – actually a trike, a three-wheeler – was powered by a single cylinder, four-stroke engine producing 0.74bhp. Today, you can buy a Bugatti Chiron, a fully homologated road car with a 16-cylinder, quad-turbo engine that produces 1,480bhp, which is a 199,900 per cent increase. 

The advances in computer processors over the last 50 years are perhaps more impressive, but this is for a mechanical device with reciprocating parts; a piston inside a cylinder attached to a crank that stops at the top and the bottom of each stroke. A four-stroke engine is so named because for every four strokes of the piston there is one power stroke. On the first down stroke, the piston sucks in air and fuel, which it then compresses on the up stroke, a spark ignites the mixture which burns and expands pushing the piston down, and on the final up-stroke the spent gases are pushed out. Suck. Squeeze. Bang. Blow. 

The engine in Benz’s car ran at 200rpm (revolutions per minute), which is roughly a power stroke every second and a half. “Suck-squeeze-bang-blow”, almost as fast as you can say it. Now consider that at 17,000rpm, each piston of the Ferrari 412 T2’s V12 manages to suck-squeeze-bang-blow more than 140 times per second.

Why did the four-stroke engine win the early evolutionary race? Compared with the compression ignition (diesel) and two-stroke, which were invented around the same time, the four-stroke was quieter, more reliable and relatively efficient. The patronage of a certain Henry Ford surely helped, too. He used it for his early cars and for the Model T. 

It’s estimated that when the Model T went into production in 1908, there were only around 200,000 cars in the world. When the final example rolled off the line in 1927, Ford had built 15 million Model Ts. It helped motorise and mobilise America, changing the lives, prospects and ambitions of millions of middle-earning folk.

Ford was philanthropic and was uncomfortable with the profits made from ever-soaring sales, doubling the wages of his workers while the price of the Model T gradually dropped from $850 to as little as $260 thanks to economies of scale and refinement of production. The car was here to stay. 

The high energy density of liquid fuels that made the internal combustion engine possible also held back early development. Initially, any volatile oil derivative was used – early Model Ts could be specified to run on hemp oil – and until the early 1920s octane ratings were poor, restricting power. 

The outbreak of the First World War put the combustion process under greater scrutiny, and after much experimentation an American chemist, Thomas Midgley Jr., discovered a petrol additive called tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) that allowed much higher compression ratios and thus power. At the time health concerns were raised – workers at the TEL factory got ill and died, and Midgley himself got sick – but it wasn’t until the mid-70s that is started to be banned. Midgley later invented Freon, the refrigerant.

Other countries keen to mobilise their populations created their own affordable cars. In France, Citroen began development of the 2CV in the 1930s with farmers in mind, hence the simple, hammock seats, minimal features but long-legged suspension which enabled it to transport a basket of eggs across a freshly ploughed field without breakages. The outbreak of the Second World War delayed it going into production until 1948. In Germany, Volkswagen (literally ‘people’s car’) was developing the Beetle, its own mass-produced car.

While others perfected scale, it was the artistic, expressive and passionate Italians, who fashioned the first supercar. Enzo Ferrari created V12-engined beauties from the start. But it’s upstart rival, Lamborghini, made the first true supercar when it turned its own V12 through 90 degrees and installed it behind the seats into the mid-engined Miura.

However, no country was quite so wedded to the car as America. Its population grew with the car, which became an integral part of daily life, promoting suburban living and the commute, out-of-town shopping malls, fast-food chains, drive-in movies, the road trip. 

American cars evolved to suit their environment, being large, comfortable, effortless and not so bothered about taking corners. They were thirsty, too, but petrol was cheap; the US was the largest oil producer in the world, though in the late 1960s demand exceeded its production and it began importing from Arab states. 

The impact of the America’s addiction to the ICE became apparent when smog began to form over cities such as Los Angeles. The result was legislation like the Clean Air Act leading to the mandatory fitment of catalytic converters which converted carbon monoxide, unburnt hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen into less harmful substances. They also hit power outputs of American cars hard, driving efficiency improvements. 

Motorsport wasn’t immune to environmental concerns, either. The CanAm (Canada-America) series for sports cars saw some of the biggest engines ever built for circuit racing, the turbocharged flat-12 of Porsche’s dominant 917/30 had a reputed 1,500bhp. It took a couple of years off in 1974-75 due to the oil crisis and never again saw the same outputs. It seems astonishing that you can now buy a road car with this much power.

Perhaps even more amazing than the CanAm Porsche is the engine BMW built for the first turbocharged era in Formula 1. It took the 1,500cc cylinder block from one of its 1960 road cars and, with a single turbocharger, managed to get up to 1,400bhp from it in qualifying trim (if it didn’t go bang). It had massive turbo lag – the delay between pressing the throttle and the engine responding – but Nelson Piquet managed to win the World Championship with it in 1983. 

But for the ultimate internal combustion engine experience you need to go to a drag strip and see a top fuel dragster. You won’t believe your eyes as it accelerates from a standing start to 100mph in under a second, but more than that, you won’t believe how it feels: the energy of one of these 10,000bhp engines on full throttle sends sound and shock waves through you. In a single run, from burn-out to deploying the braking chute, the supercharged, 8-litre V8 of one of these monsters consumes about 65 litres of nitromethane and methanol, the equivalent of a full tank of a big saloon car. 

In many ways, road car engines are even more impressive. They have never been more sophisticated, more efficient, more refined or more powerful. All but the smallest petrol engines and a few high-performance engines are now turbocharged because it improves efficiency and lowers CO2 emissions, and they are fabulously driveable, responsive and consistent in delivery. The ICE is most definitely going out at the top of its game. 

Ironically, the ICE may well go the same way as the horse; no longer an everyday means of transport, instead a plaything of the rich, paraded at special events and raced. In just a few decades, children will look at them, wonder at the smell of oils and fuels, and jump back when an open-piped V12 barks into life. 

Then we will remind them that back in 2020, in the UK and the US, transport was responsible for more greenhouse gases than any other sector, accounting for a quarter of global CO2 emissions. What's more, nearly three quarters of those emissions came from ICE road vehicles – cars, trucks, buses and motorbikes. Thank heavens things changed. Yet, even so, it's impossible not to marvel at the engineering endeavour of the ICE, and the freedoms and opportunities it fuelled.

More great stories from WIRED

This article was originally published by WIRED UK