http://www…during-de/
During the Detroit auto show, Ford will be tearing down it’s Ecoboost engine out of an F-150 they used in a series of challenges.
It towed 11,300 pounds for 24 hours straight, raced in a baja race, pulled logs, and many other things a truck would normally be used for. The kicker is, it’s a factory engine, no special racing setup for it, and it’s racked up the equivalent of 160,000 miles and 10 years of abuse, and it still churns out some pretty stout numbers on their dyno.
Like the article says, it’s a stunt. First of all, you can ascertain the health of an engine without a teardown. Secondly, if it never exceeded the performance envelope that it was qualification tested for, it should be fine…as should any engine. Thirdly, what is “the equivalent of 160,000 miles and 100 years of abuse”? The conditions described do not from a reliability engineering standpoint equate to “accelerated life testing”.
It’s a stunt, a gimmick. A good one, I’ll grant you, but a stunt nonetheless.
Not to object merely to object, I do think that different data and different data types will be obtained from a teardown that would merely be infered with assesment procedures without the teardown