The year of the three. (126 hp per liter)

[botsapper]

Hope 'Muricans get to know, it is OK to have a three cylinder. Hope they market them not a high school kid's car but an ultra-efficient hipster ecomobile. Prepare for an onslaught of three-cylinder cars | CTV News | Autos - Automotive News - Blogs & Columns

[jakobnev]

Linky needed more letters:
Prepare for an onslaught of three-cylinder cars | CTV News | Autos - Automotive News - Blogs & Columns

[botsapper]

...good catch!

[tjts1]

LOL yeah good luck with that.

[ksa8907]

For small cars less than 3000 pounds a 3 cylinder is fine, not likely to go in anything but a compact, maybe a sub-compact.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by ksa8907

For small cars less than 3000 pounds a 3 cylinder is fine...

I don't think you'll find many small cars in the 3000 lb weight class. I've been doing just fine driving a 3 cylinder, sub-2000 lb fairly small car for close to a decade now.

[ksa8907]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

I don't think you'll find many small cars in the 3000 lb weight class. I've been doing just fine driving a 3 cylinder, sub-2000 lb fairly small car for close to a decade now.

Ok, how does that compare safety wise to todays standards?

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by ksa8907

Ok, how does that compare safety wise to todays standards?

Who cares?

Or to elaborate, if meeting today's safety standards pushes a car's weight to the 3000 lb range, the result is not a small car that weighs 3000 lbs, because if it weighs that much, it's not a small car any longer.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by botsapper

Hope 'Muricans get to know, it is OK to have a three cylinder.

Altough the amount of cylinders is seen back there as a prestige feature, a 3-banger has the advantage of lower internal frictions comparing to a 4-banger in the same displacement range. BTW in Europe the 1.0L Ecoboost is gonna be used even in the Mondeo/Fusion, altough probably only in the hatchback.

Hope they market them not a high school kid's car but an ultra-efficient hipster ecomobile.

I hope they don't market it as a hipster-ish vehicle, or it could ruin its success possibilities among some budget-oriented buyers with more conservative views, such as Latinos (not intending to brag about race, but being myself Latino I know that many of us were already used to smaller engines due to many reasons, from the higher cost of gasoline to fiscal benefits for cars with smaller engines) or a few Christian right-wingers.

[niky]

I'd question whether 40 mpg city is possible. In the real world, that's hybrid and 800cc territory. But then again, our traffic out here is worse than yours, so it may be possible if the engine is efficient enough.

Given how careless some mass-market consumers can be with their cars, though, I hope to hell Ford installs a turbo-timer as standard and inserts a code into the ECU to not allow full boost when the engine is cold.