Five years ago, General Motors wasn’t quite in the business of selling turbocharged vehicles. Today, that’s an opposite in an utmost manner.
Automakers have turned to turbocharging to meet increasing fuel economy standards without sacrificing performance found in traditional V6 engines. GM has expanded turbochargers to multiple segments and sold 712,000 vehicles equipped with the form of forced induction. 23 percent of U.S. sales are of turbocharged vehicles, according to Automotive News.
“Turbocharging is really an important technology,” Dan Nicholson, GM vice president of global propulsion systems, told Automotive News. “It’s enabling smaller, really smaller engines, without sacrificing peak power or peak torque.”
GM has no plans to slow, either. The 2018 Chevrolet Equinox and 2o18 GMC Terrain are the latest vehicles to go turbo-only. No V6 option is offered on either compact crossover.
The question is this: will we see GM follow in other automakers’ footsteps by turbocharging some of its largest offerings? GM’s full-size trucks and SUVs are exclusively naturally aspirated—for now.
Nicholson said GM will “continue to look at customer acceptance” and apply turbos “segment by segment.”
Comments
Fine by me! ?
the turbo engines do well on the EPA MPG test on the dyno but in the real world when the turbo spins up the MPG suffer.
Adding an electric motor (hybrid) is better than a turbocharger to augment power with a smaller engine, since it allows low speed driving using less or no gasoline, and regeneration of electrical energy back to the battery when reducing. You can never run a “turbo” at low speeds, and it will never regenerate gasoline!
^ smartness ^
once they go to 48 volt electrical systems they will use electric motor driven superchargers to boost bottom end and supplement the turbo lack of bottom end performance. years ago a friend had a H/D motorcycle with a electric supercharger.
my guess is in lux models only, (like a high end cruze or impala) they will move away from turbos for gas consumption and reliability reasons in their bread and butter cars. Where this will come into play is cutting the number of engines they produce, AKA, instead of a 3.6L v6, we could see that offered as the 2.5Lturbo with the 2.5L naturally aspirated as the base motor (Base impala, crossover, Malibu motor) and then turbo that for the LTZ editions. Likewise they could do the same for the 1.8 (Sonic, trax, cruze) and turbo it for a sportier appeal. the could cut the number of engines they make by 30%. My guess is the bigger V8 will rest, as chevy needs to pour all they got into their sport cars and pickups, the segments which bring in the most dough and were engines are everything.