Imagine this year’s 10 Best Engines nominees on stage at the Met or Hollywood Bowl. A hush comes over the packed house as maestro Senior Technical Editor Bill Visnic picks up his baton and, with a majestic wave, ignition systems stir. What...
Retired auto technician Pete Wright had been working on rotary engines for a few years when, in 1978, Mazda Motor Corp. put one in its new RX-7 sports car. Soon Wright was fixing a lot of clutches. “People were burning them out right and...
When Ward's named Toyota Motor Corp.’s original hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV) powertrain as a 10 Best winner in 2001, nobody was sure if the thing even qualified as a competitor to standard internal-combustion engines. After all, HEV...
Nissan Motor Co. Ltd.’s sublime 3.5L “VQ” V-6 needs no introduction, being that it’s won a 10 Best Engines award each and every year since the competition’s inception in 1995. That the VQ has cemented itself as the...
There’s probably no better measure of engine-development progress than a contemporary automotive V-6. When Ward's launched the 10 Best Engines competition a decade ago, V-6s were only beginning to account for a meaningful portion of sales in...
With DaimlerChrysler AG’s “Cummins 600” 5.9L turbodiesel earning a win in this year’s Ward's 10 Best Engines competition, it’s official: in each of the last three years, there’s been an all-new or significantly...
The first time Vortec 4200 chief engineer Ron Kociba showed his creation to the press almost three years ago, his face had an expression, if you can conjure the image, combining cat-that-ate-the-canary satisfaction with the cautious optimism of a...
The fullsize-pickup portion of this year’s Best Engines competition promised to be tough, but in the end it was no contest. We were fortunate to have the new Ford F-150, Nissan Titan and Dodge Ram pickups for testing at the same time. Some...