SoonerLS

I was seriously starting to wonder if a local Chebbie dealership was out of business until they put up "we're open!" signs. I kid you not, I saw a lot more cars at the Buc-ees in Madisonville, TX, a couple of weeks ago than they've had on their lot over the last several months. It's not the biggest dealership around, but there couldn't have been more than 30 cars on their lot at its lowest ebb. It looked like a high school parking lot at 5pm. I know several people who've been looking for used cars recently, and they're going for insane prices. I can't imagine that dealers are willing to drop their drawers on a car when they know they're dang near impossible to replace...

Well, I guess it's easy to tell s**t from Shinola in this case.

From a business case point of view, IMHO, it makes more sense for the 6.8 to be a baby Godzilla. If you can machine it with the same tooling (or at least on the same line) as the Godzilla, it helps underwrite the Godzilla project as a whole, plus it allows you to eliminate the 6.2 entirely. It doesn't help you with the 5.2, but the 5.2 was developed knowing that it would be a low-volume mill, so it probably makes more sense to keep the dedicated low-volume mill than adapt a high-volume mill to the low-volume niche. The scenario that makes the most sense to me is using the 6.8 as the PowerBoost mill for the SuperDuty line, but that's just wild speculation on my part.

Phonetically speaking, SuperCruise is a lot closer to SuperCrew than BlueCruise.

It does fit the pattern, but 0.6L seems like that a pretty significant increase on its displacement. Does the 6.2 have enough excess in its block to accept that kind of increase? It's the kind of increase you get going from the old 302 to the 347 stroker, but it seems like the 6.2 already has a pretty long stroke, so is that something you want to do for a high-revving hi-po Mustang mill? (I'm not saying it's not, I'm just asking the question.)

Not to mention the Fairlane Skyliners back in the '50s.

Where is that? The phone numbers on the truck's door indicates that it's the Northern Marianas Islands and southern Illinois...

Looking at the Ford Performance crate engines, I can certainly see them making it available, whether it's a baby Godzilla or a performance mill--heck, the Godzilla is first on the crate engine page right now.

OMG, look at all those cut lines in the roof. It's gonna leak, and the wind noise has to be horrendous. And those flat body panels? Door ding city. No, I'm not jealous. Why do you ask? Seriously, congrats! That's a sweet dang ride! I hope she brings you many thousands of miles of trouble-free enjoyment!

Simpler? Possibly; it depends on the jiggery-pokery required for it to meet emissions and fuel economy in the classes where the Coyote is used. The per-unit cost might be cheaper if they were both starting from go, but the Coyote has a decade-long head start in recovering its development and certification costs. The Coyote is also a known quantity, having gone through that decade of production and ongoing refinement. At this late stage in ICE development, I just don't see Ford dropping a bundle to replace the Coyote. If it's a baby Godzilla, it makes a lot of sense in the commercial lineup (I really like the Super Duty Hybrid scenario), and if it's a performance mill it makes sense as a halo vehicle powerplant, but I don't think either of those lend themselves to a mainstream V8 replacement. But hey, I've been wrong before...

Once the courts get involved, lots of things could go sideways. Microsoft and DoD are dealing with this on the JEDI contract that Microsoft won; Amazon has had it tied up with litigation long enough that there's speculation that DoD may just cancel the whole thing.

The Coyote already fits in the Mustang and F-150, so where are you anticipating them using it? I'm pretty sure the engine bay isn't why the Coyote isn't in the F-150-based Expedition/Navigator, which pretty much only leaves Explorer and Aviator. I wouldn't argue against a return of a V8 Explorer/Aviator, but I think their future is pretty solidly electrified, so I wouldn't hold my breath on that. Maybe a V8 PIU makes some sense (give it a blower and really make it the "last of the V8 Interceptors"), but that seems like too tiny of a niche for Ford to make a business case for it. Maybe you could make a case for a V8 Ranger and/or Bronco, but shortening the deck height won't shorten it front-to-back, which is going to be the limiting factor there. There is the Transit, but that's in the commercial lineup, which falls under the "makes a lot of sense for the Super Duty" category (and even then I'm not sure it'd work--Transit's engine bay is kind of shallow). Even if you go to an aluminum block with a shorter deck height, at best you're looking at weight parity with the Coyote, so that just seems like a wash.

It depends on what the 6.8 turns out to be. If, as some here have speculated, it's going to be a performance mill, yeah, it's a no-brainer. If, however, it's just an "economy" 7.3 to replace the 6.2 in the Super Duties, that's not really going to be an improvement over the Coyote (or the 5.2), so there'd be no point to it as a "big v8 choice."

Yeah, file this all under "how to lie with statistics." It's just there to make people feel OK about buying foreign makes.

I could've sworn the E-Series had the 6.2 listed when I looked the other day, but I just checked, and sure enough, it's just the two 7.3 variants. I must've been looking at the Chassis Cab specs, which still show the 6.2. Funny thing, though--if you look at the Specifications for the F-450 Chassis Cab, it lists the 6.2, but with a note that says "F-350 only." "Sure, you can get a 6.2 in an F-450, as long as it's an F-350."

Yeah, this "smart" editor isn't exactly "smart" on this iPad. It's easy enough to accidentally erase more than you want, but God help you if you want to get rid of the attribution because you just want to quote something in a post that the poster was quoting. Try saying that three times fast. I miss the old not-quite-so-smart editor, where you could at least turn off the WYSIWYG editing and fix the raw BBCode...

He's got a point. USPS delivery routes aren't usually that long, and the delivery vehicles are parked at the barn overnight, so they should be a prime candidate for an almost entirely BEV delivery fleet. I just wonder how much the infrastructure costs will be; they shouldn't be all that much, but remember that an elephant is simply a mouse built to gov't spec...

Sounds like they've found a use for Romeo after they drop the 6.2.

If you pair the “baby Godzilla” with a hybrid powertrain, you might even have a game-changer in the Super Duty lineup. ETA: Although I had read that the 6.2 was exclusive to the F-250, it's not, and it's really not that far from the 7.3's numbers. It seems to me that a 6.8's major advantages would be that its design progenitor is built around the medium duty cycle and it's going to be cheaper than the 6.2.

Why? The 7.3's numbers aren't a quantum leap over the Coyote, and they're not quite on par with the EB35, so if it's a Godzilla offshoot, even accounting for the different testing standards, tuning, etc, for the Super Duties, the 6.8 is going to be smack in the middle of no man's land.

In the long run, maybe, but the 6.8 will still have to earn back its development costs. I just don't see it replacing the Coyote in the F-150 or Mustang, which pretty much "relegates" it to the Super Duties or special edition vehicles.

My recollection is that a Godzilla doesn't weigh much more than a Coyote, so going to a 'loomnum block in a smaller displacement would dang near make it a featherweight. I'm not sure what it would actually gain you in an F-150 (possibly excluding the Raptor). On paper, the numbers for the F-150's 5.0 and Super Duty's 7.3 are not that far apart; obviously, they're not exactly apples to apples, but a NA 6.8 in F-150 trim would still probably come in somewhere between the Coyote and EB35, which seems like a non-starter in that lineup--Mustang needs the volume of the F-150 to keep the V8 viable, and they're all-in on EcoBoost, so reducing either one seems highly unlikely. The 6.8 would have to outperform the EB35 to make sense in the F-150, IMHO, which means it would effectively have to outperform the 7.3, which would seem unlikely if it is based on the 7.3. Now, if the 6.8 is a Coyote derivative rather than a Godzilla derivative, that could all change. If it's a Godzilla derivative, it makes a heck of a lot of sense in the Super Duties, though. If you replace the "old" workhorse 6.2 and consolidate its manufacturing with Godzilla, you simplify both production of the mill and the logistics of producing its host truck, and it doesn't have to fit into a gap between the other engines in the lineup.

I used to own a '68 F100 Ranger. The Ranger was the top of the line in the F100s at the time. Not sure where it landed in the Edsel lineup, though. The guy who sold my dad and me a '37 Ford pickup also had a '68 F100 Ranger with a 427 and four on the floor, black with a vinyl roof. Holy cats, I had it bad for that truck, but being a broke high school student kept me from buying it. Considering how much trouble I managed to find with the gutless wonder I was driving at the time, being broke probably saved my life...

Steve Lehto covered this recently. He thinks it'll get settled out of court because nobody wants to see it settled once and for all by the courts. If Ford fights it and loses, automakers stand to get hammered by it, and if Ford wins, the Feds lose a hammer with which to hammer the automakers.

I don't know about that one, but about 20 years ago they built a Mustang show car (called the Blue Stallion, or maybe Green Stallion, or some variation on the Stallion theme) that ran on gasohol. The higher the percentage of ethanol the higher the power ramped up, with max power coming from either E85 or straight ethanol.