2011 Ford F-150 Ecoboost: Tour De Forced Induction

Ford F-150 Lariat Ecoboost Road Test

I make no attempts to hide my attitude towards the Ford F-series pickup truck… to be true; it is indeed fanaticism bordering on idolatry. I own them, I drive them, and I can’t think of a better truck for nearly any situation. That being said, I’m not so blind as to think them perfect. Oh no, quite on the contrary. First off, this latest crop isn’t exactly my pick when it comes to looks. Boxy, bland, and a bit too boring for my tastes, I can’t help but wonder why Ford didn’t bring a bit of the F-series’ illustrious history to bear on their recent redesign, since they don’t seem to mind putting a healthy dose of retro into the rest of their lineup. But even more problematic than the body itself was the powertrain it housed.

Lord Almighty, was it bad. Downright terrible, in fact. An heir to the throne once inhabited by the long-departed Mustang King Cobra, it was a bygone from a forgotten era that produced just enough horsepower to justify its existence, and not a drop more. Oh, sure, the 5.4L Triton will go down in history alongside the 351 and 460 as one of the most venerable and longest-serving powerplants to live behind Ford’s Blue Oval, but much like the King Cobra’s 302, it definitely went out with a whimper… if it ever came in with a bang. 

But thankfully, that’s all changed with the single best thing to happen to the F-150 since saddleblanket seat covers: the new twin-turbocharged, 3.5-litre, V6 EcoBoost engine. And yes, I can already hear the groans… and trust me, I know where you’re coming from. As a longtime believer in the old adage that there’s no replacement for displacement, I have stoically swallowed the gas-guzzling pill that has been the Ford big block for more than a few years now, as my own truck has the old 460 under the hood. I, young and impressionable at the time, listened to my father quote everything from total revolutions to piston speeds to cylinder pressures in an effort to qualify his belief that bigger always meant more reliable; that a bigger engine span slower, requiring less revs and slower piston speeds to exert the same amount of force on the driveshafts, hereby essentially reducing the amount of wear on an engine. Now, I’m not an engineer, but that made sense to me. But this is also knowledge coming from an era in which turbocharged cars were expected to blow blue, and Ford Pinto’s were expected to blow up. 

And something tells me that the idea of bigger engines being more reliable may not be as true as it might have once been. After all, according to Ford, this new engine’s capable of being excruciatingly dyno tested, skidding logs, towing forever and a day, and then running Baja with nary a single thing falling out of spec. And after driving it, crawling all over it, pulling parts off to crawl over even more of it, examining the engine’s blueprints, and attempting to beat as much snot out of it as I could, there never appeared to be a single chink in its defenses. The block itself is ridiculously overbuilt and the parallel twin turbochargers are almost undersized by comparison. The hypereutectic pistons, gorgeous enough that they’d look at home occupying shelf space in your man-cave, are coated for reduced friction and sculpted for perfect combustion. The connecting rods, although artfully made from less-than-exotic powdered metal, encase surprisingly wide bearings to reduce wear. The crank is, of course, forged for strength. But if you thought that was the heart of this engine, you’d be wrong. Because while all that stuff sounds great, it’s the direct injection system that gives this engine life… and would destroy it, if it were absent. Feeding fuel into the combustion chambers at anything from 200 to 2,200 psi, the system squirts fuel directly into the path rush on air coming from the intake valve, serving double duty to both fuel the engine and cool the incoming air. By avoiding the standard EFI problems of imprecise metering and wetting the interior walls of the intake manifold, this system precludes any chance of droplets forming, hereby reducing the chances of pre-ignition, knocking, or pinging. And it can do this multiple times on each engine stroke; essentially squirting it’s fine mist of fuel into each combustion chamber a few times for each engine rotation, every time varying the duration and pressure. This allows for was what Ford refers to as “stratification” of the fuel/air mixture. In situations in which the engine experiences less of a load, the system injects the fuel in such a manner that the main charge remains located near the spark plug, with the remainder of the cylinder being filled with a relatively lean air/fuel mixture. This allows the overall-lean mixture to still ignite properly during the compression stroke and increases fuel economy by up to 40 percent, without incurring the engine damage that such a lean air/fuel ratio would typically represent. Conversely, under heavier engine loads, the system meters the fuel in a much more homogenous manner; filling the entire cylinder with a richer mixture to avoid any risk of knocking while also maximizing engine performance. Combine this with the ignition system that’s capable of retarding the timing by up to 20 degrees, and you’ve got a truck engine that produces 365 horsepower and 420 pound-feet of torque on 12 pounds of boost and 87 octane fuel… and apparently does so seemingly forever. 

But if its technical wizardry doesn’t impress you, its driving manners definitely will. All of the same comfort and spaciousness you’d expect from a Ford F-150 are still there, but now those nasty delays between depressions of the skinny pedal and actual forward movement are entirely gone. At the slower speeds you typically encounter around town, its ridiculously accessible torque is easily exploited by the new six-speed automatic transmission. In fact, according to Ford, 90% of the engine’s torque is available at just 1,700 rpm. That means that you have 378 pound-feet of torque, or more than the old 5.4 litre Triton ever made, on tap before you even pass through the first quarter of the tachometer. And you can really feel it too, especially when towing. With the opportunity to test the new engine in front of an enclosed trailer wrapped around 7,000 pounds of stuff, it’s performance was head and shoulders above any other truck in this class. And why wouldn’t it be? To put it in even better perspective, that figure of 378 pound feet of torque at just 1,700 rpm is just over 20 pound-feet shy of the Hemi Ram’s peak torque figure, and 30 pound-feet higher than the Silverado’s, when equipped with the 5.4L. 

Out on the highway, it’s even better, where the twin-turbos simply hum away and the truck’s nifty LCD gauge clusters display fuel economy figures that would have minivan and family sedan drivers green with envy. It’s dead silent until called upon, when it becomes a veritable symphony of turbocharger whine and well-tuned V6 combustion, and doesn’t struggle to find its legs regardless of your speed. In fact, if it weren’t for the wind noise coming from around the mirrors, you’d never know you were pushing a barn door through the air, there’s still so much power on tap. 

Take my word for it when I say that this new engine will be to the truck world what the iPod was to MP3 players; it’s that revolutionary. And although Ford themselves know they’ll be fighting a bit of an uphill battle with some buyers, the reality is that, much like the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, the EcoBoost isn’t the first engine ever created… it’s just the one that does its job the best. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about it, and trust me, I’m trying.  Transforming the F-150 from a great truck saddled with a laggardly, asthmatic drive train into an eager-to-please work horse that’s seemingly inexhaustible, it’s simply amazing, and if you’re in the market for a pickup truck, you’d be downright stupid not to give an EcoBoost-equipped F-150 a fair lick.