Quote:
Originally Posted by Suave Devil
Great thread. Thanks Slidefox!
Hopefully one you guys can help me with a question that has been bugging me for a while. As far as I understand, the difference between a turbo and a supercharger is that although both force air into the engine, the turbo gets the air from recycling exhaust gases and the supercharger gets the air from the engine bay (or from outside if it's a musclecar-style roots type). The end results being similar, my question is the following:
What makes OEM companies choose one or the other? What are the engineers that design the engines going after? As far as I can tell, different companies have a preference for certain applications, although Turbos seem to be more popular overall. for example, Porsche - Turbo; VW - Turbo; Nissan - Turbo; GM - Supercharger
Any help you can provide with this would be appreciated
Thanks!
Suave
|
The other guys didn't answer you correctly.
What makes OEM companies choose a turbo design or supercharger design for a specific car... Personally I think it solely depends on what group of consumers the car is for. If the car is for sports enthusiasts who will likely play with the engine, go for turbo. If the car is for upmarket buyers who aren't likely to alter their engines, such AMG MB's, then supercharger is the way to go. We can talk about engine longevity and which platform is responsive or more efficient and all that, but at the end it is the consumer base that the designers will think about. So, a supercharged GT-R or Z would be a hard-sell, a disaster to quarterly reports.
We know that a N/A or a turbo-charged engine design is easy to fiddle with when we try to squeeze more power out from it, and there's a lot of freedom in equipment choices and 'potential of power gains' with stock design, which are not the case with super-charged design.
So, the early 90's we saw Supra, 300ZX, 3000GT, Skyline R33, all were turbo-charged design (also offered in N/A), and those great platforms were easy to go upwards of 400+whp with "stock" turbos. (That's a nice figure back in the 90's)
Based on earlier experiences, car companies knew that owners of these cars WILL modify these 280PS crank horse power cars. So turbo-charge was the only way to go, because they didn't want to make larger than 3 liter engine, and to get that power they must go FI, while in the meantime provide a simple route, with a lot of freedom in engine modification.
A factory supercharged Supra or Z design might have been chaotic, because without changing the whole supercharger system there's very little room of improvement from factory design (only smaller pulleys with ecu reflash result in small gains of power).
Now that's my simple opinion, and one thing I can't understand is that it seems to me Chevy's small block v8's crowd prefers supercharger. I personally think that is probably due to tradition and culture.