Why?

[stevebutler]

Ive never really thought about it before but i have recently noticed that you always see anything about a Falcon 6 always mentions "turbo". For example, "ED Falcon turbo burnout" or "turbo EL Falcon sliding".

Now, i dont wish to make a Holden vs Ford, Commy vs Falcon thread, as i like Falcons as well, had a difficult time looking through ED, EL and BA Falcons before buying my VT.

I'm just wondering why is this so? you never hear of a turbo commodore, why did they build turbo Falcons and not turbo commodores? was the stock commodore motor always better/faster, than the falcon motor? Always hear about people says their falcons are faster than the equivelant commodores which may ne the case, but 80% of the time the falcon is a turbo where the commy is not.

 

[STEEV888]

commodores did come out supercharged. an entire 17kw gain woah...
also the full iron ford motor can handle the extra power of the turbo without any drastic modifications. if they wanted to gain say 300 kw from a 3.8 or 3.6 commy engine there would be alot of refurbished bits in there that would outweigh the cost of the car being produced.
room could possibly be an issue also ? i know the fords have a lot of space on the exhaust side.

also ford are cop outs.
err my 6's are to slow, TURBO
err my v8's cannot pass fuel emissions and keep up with the competition, SUPERCHARGER

 

[ephect]

first turbo commo was the vl calais

 

[Krisp]

commodores did come out supercharged. an entire 17kw gain woah...
also the full iron ford motor can handle the extra power of the turbo without any drastic modifications. if they wanted to gain say 300 kw from a 3.8 or 3.6 commy engine there would be alot of refurbished bits in there that would outweigh the cost of the car being produced.
room could possibly be an issue also ? i know the fords have a lot of space on the exhaust side.

also ford are cop outs.
err my 6's are to slow, TURBO
err my v8's cannot pass fuel emissions and keep up with the competition, SUPERCHARGER

forget about the 3.8 v6 buicks coming out as turbo in america and able to handle bulk power. very early series one vn v6's were built for turbo

 

[05 Senator]

arent fords straight sixes rather than "v" like commys?

 

[bogan_vk]

i thought the first turbo commodore was the vh cdt (country dealer team) starfire 4cyl turbo

 

[bogan_vk]

arent fords straight sixes rather than "v" like commys?

yep straight sixes.

 

[Krisp]

i thought the first turbo commodore was the vh cdt (country dealer team) starfire 4cyl turbo

the hand built ones were built for turbo, but didnt run a turbo

 

[bogan_vk]

i thought they did because there was one for sale up the road from me with a suck through turbo setup on it and was told it was a factory setup i know for sure the 6 cylinder cdt commodores are all turbos just googled it to confirm it and theres quite a few original turbo cdt commodores come up.

 

[Calaber]

I suspect one reason why Ford has developed the turbo'd engines and Holden hasn't is that Ford has stuck with the same basic 6 cylinder in-line engine formula from the very first XK Falcons, whereas Holden has switched from the old in-line OHV grey motors then red motors, to the OHC Nissans, back to OHV Buicks and Ecotecs and finally the quad OHC Alloytecs over the same period. That's a lot of changes in engine configurations and goes against continued development of any single design.

The Falcon engine is still manufactured on the same production line and uses the same bore centres as the earliest engines, and they have developed the engine through the alloy head, single OHC then twin OHC to get to today's engine. This sort of continuity has enabled Ford to spend more time upgrading and perfecting the basic design, hence the Turbo with its incredible output.

If Holden had gone down that same road, perhaps they might have developed a factory turbo model too, rather than just releasing the RB30 as a one-off model.