Lean-burning engine... (what vehicles have them?)

[ChopsQube]

This may be a silly question, but how do you know if a car has a lean burning technology engine? I've looked all around and really can't find anything about the engine in the Cube.

Any ideas?

[Daox]

Its not lean burn. Its very rare to find a lean burn engine. The Civic VX, HX, 1st gen Civic hybrid (manual trans), and 1st gen Insight hybrid (manual trans) were probably the most popular. Other mfgs have made lean burn variants, but nothing that works as well. I believe gascort said his early 90s escort may have had a mild lean burn mode... All diesels run lean. Toyota has had lean burn engines, but nothing ever sold in the US. Other than that though, I'm not aware of any lean burn engines (I'm sure there are a couple, but not many). No vehicles being sold today have lean burn capability due to NOx emissions problems.

[ChopsQube]

Well that stinks. Thanks for the reply though. It's much appreciated.

[Phantom]

I know that some of the corvets and silverados have the feature programed in the PCM but the switch for it is set to 0=disable some programmers can change the switch to turn it on.

[texanidiot25]

Originally Posted by Daox

Its not lean burn. Its very rare to find a lean burn engine. The Civic VX, HX, 1st gen Civic hybrid (manual trans), and 1st gen Insight hybrid (manual trans) were probably the most popular. Other mfgs have made lean burn variants, but nothing that works as well. I believe gascort said his early 90s escort may have had a mild lean burn mode... All diesels run lean. Toyota has had lean burn engines, but nothing ever sold in the US. Other than that though, I'm not aware of any lean burn engines (I'm sure there are a couple, but not many). No vehicles being sold today have lean burn capability due to NOx emissions problems.

And CRX HF and older CVCC-head Hondas were a lean burning carb setup.

[RobertSmalls]

Ford messed around with lean burn V8's in the 1970's. The Ford Proco Engine Update . They had direction injection, stratified charge, two plugs per cylinder, and EGR to reduce NOx. AFAIK, the engines never made it into any production vehicles.

http://www.blueovalforums.com/forums...-proco-engine/

Just like Toyota, Nissan dabbled in lean burn, but never sold any such cars in America.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The QG engine is a 1.3 L, 1.5 L, 1.6 L, 1.8 L, and 2.0 L straight-4 piston engine from Nissan. It is a lean-burn aluminum DOHC 4-valve design with variable valve timing and optional NEO Di direct injection. The QG engines were designed for Nissan by Aichi Machine Industry.

Nissan QG engine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I don't know how lean these engines burned or how much gas they saved.

[PowerHaus930]

i believe there were some early 80s to early 90s chrysler engines that used lean burn technology

[JeepNmpg2]

I seem to remember my old 89 Plymouth getting strangely good MPG for it's time at 35+ MPG on the highway as a "midsize" for it's time with a 3.0 V6. It wasn't a very attractive car inside or out, but it ran like a champ, and I saw it on the road a few months ago, still not smoking or anything! I should've kept the thing...... :X but I needed something bigger (my minivan)

[sid]

When I worked for Chrysler as a design engineer back in the late 1970's, we were working on lean burn engines. But we were having a lot of problems getting them to pass emissions tests. Nitrogen oxides (NOXs) were the big problem. They also tended to burn up catalytic converters if we tried to add them to cars. They may have fixed those problems after I left. But I also think the Feds tightened pollution standards since then, too, which effectively killed all lean burn vehicles in the US.

One reason the same cars in the US get poorer fuel economy than in other countries is that we have different pollution standards. Our standards are optimized to reduce smog and carcinogens. Other countries tend to optimize for minimum greenhouse gases. Optimizing for minimum greenhouse gases usually gets much better fuel economy than optimizing for minimum smog. It is hard to get the EPA to reconsider their pollution requirements, especially since some places in the US still have occasional smog problems.

[gascort]

It seems strange that vehicles had trouble passing NOx regulations using lean burn. In St. Louis we used to have sniffer - style smog testing, and there's no way most of the lean burn vehicles would enter lean burn mode during that test from what I remember; it was a steady acceleration and then sustained load on the engine at some speed (I don't remember).
Perhaps to get a specific model released by the EPA they did more extensive tests than what they do to individual vehicles???
I have all the previous owner's emissions tests on my escort and the tests for CO2, CO, and NOx are all WAY below the standards. But my car only runs lean at real light load on the highway, like 50-65 mph on flat roads (with my aero stuff strapped on).