With gasoline prices still low for most Americans at the moment, it’s good to be in the truck business. Take Ford, for example, where the pickup business is booming. In April, the Blue Oval offloaded nearly 71,000 F-series trucks; an additional 70,000 units shifted in March gave the maker its best back-to-back F-150 sales months in nearly a decade. All those F-series pickups?which may end up equaling 1 percent of all new vehicles sold this year if the numbers hold up?are 2016 models, however. Now we’ve been given a tiny taste of what Ford has up its sleeve to help maintain momentum for the F-150 pickup 2017: a new powertrain that combines a redesigned twin-turbo V-6 and a 10-speed automatic.
Ford’s marketing department calls the combination of direct fuel injection and turbocharging “EcoBoost,” and the automaker applies this branding to all engines that fit this criteria, whether they be V-6s or inline three- or four-cylinders. Ford launched its first EcoBoost engine, a 3.5-liter twin-turbocharged V-6, in 2009. While Ford waited an additional two years to install it in the F-150, the company’s second-generation 3.5-liter twin-turbo V-6 will be offered in the truck from the get-go, this time working with that all-new 10-speed automatic transmission.
Ford says the V-6’s block is all-new but admits that the engine shares bore centers and cylinder dimensions with the outgoing engine to avoid costly changes to the assembly...