The failure of T-Drive, Ford’s 90s dream of putting a Straight-8 in its car sideways

In the same week before the first Gulf War, Ford showed off an innovative engine design for the 1990s, modular in design.and call back to the most luxurious cars ever made. This is the story of “T-Drive“And Ford’s modular straight eight that never went into production.

Welcome back to Auto Archives, the program we dive into in my personal collection of past issues of Car Styling magazine. These topics are full of photos, sketches and interviews never uploaded online. I wish I had time to review each page.

Straight ones are some of the rarest Engines you’ll find practically only under the long hoods of the Cruella DeVille-grade land yachts of the 1920s and 1930s. Why Ford tried to make a modern version is an interesting question, but perhaps even more interesting is the time when Ford gave this idea its chance to revive. It really was the only time a design like this was attempted, and it’s also probably the main reason why it never got past that experimental stage.

Before continuing, let me explain what this engine was. It was a straight eight, so like a six or a four in a line, you have eight cylinders in a (very long) line. However, in Ford’s T-Drive system, there were four cylinders on one side, four on the other, and the transmission cut in the middle of them. You can imagine a kind of “T” shape, hence the name. Instead of a very long hood, with T-Drive you have a kind of short but wide. This is what most modern cars look like anyway, so T-Drive meant Ford could fit a relatively large engine in a relatively small car. In fact, the working prototype for T-Drive was not a Mustang or a Crown Vic. It was the compact Ford Tempo. You probably didn’t have the hope of shoving a 4.0-liter V8 under the hood of a Tempo, but you could get a 4.0-liter T-Drive straight there. You can see how Ford wedged the thing in there our old recap post about this from 2010, linking back to the original source for all this information. That would be DrivingEnthusiast.net.

DrivingEnthusiast.net also unearthed the T-Drive patent. In the video at the top of this post, I saved you from having to listen to me read everything out loud, but since these are words written here, please enjoy this from the United States Patent Office filed in 1991 and published in ’93:

A T-transmission power transmission mechanism comprising a motor with a crankshaft arranged perpendicular to the axis of the transmission gear, the transmission includes a hydrokinetic torque converter and a right angle drive connecting the torque output element Of the cross shaft semi-axle gear, the gear torque input element is operably connected to a crankshaft gear located at the midpoint of the crankshaft.

There are some nice technical drawings of how everything works, so I’ll include them here, including one of the waaaaay crankshaft:

There are a couple of Reasons why T-Drive made it to the show floor of the 1991 Detroit Auto Show, but not the showrooms and entrances. Here is DrivingEnthusiast.net presenting the pros and cons, detailing that this is a system that has a high degree of flexibility. You could make four, six or eight cylinders all engines use the same batch of parts, and you can configure them in cars of similar size, and you can use it with any type of front, rear or all drive wheels:

Advantage:

• Familiar approach to a range of engines
• Due to the engine size and location ahead of the axle centerline, front, all-wheel, or rear-wheel drive configurations can be designed.
• The rear wheel drive could have used variations of the existing existing transmissions (saving money)
• Packaging Advantages for “Forward Cab” Design
• The transmission is in line with the midpoint of the crankshaft. This allows for very low engine placement and consequently a low hood line
• Merchandising – Provide Ford with mid-engine technology, as Subaru has done with its boxer engine family.

Problems:

• Packaging, NVH, durability
• Harmonics, torque pulse and rattle
• Limited orifice size (torque, respiration, valve area) and displacement
• Engine weight above the front axle line, creating weight balance issues like in a front-wheel drive car
• Front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive would have required engineering variations on existing transmissions
• Bulky Transmission Placement Behind Engine – Requires specific design changes to existing front-wheel drive platforms (when one point is to be able to use existing transmissions).

That explains the particular points of T-Drive itself, but it gets lost from two other problems for T-Drive.

The great benefit of T-Drive was that it was modular. We see this not in the renaissance of inline six-cylinder engines as in Mercedes. A modular design allows you to easily build small motors into large motors, such as playing with small Lego blocks. However, one problem was that Ford already It had a modular engine system. Anyone who has heard a 90s Mustang made a burnout at the other end of town you will know. The “Mod Motor” was Ford’s primary V8 throughout the 1990s, and used common parts so that it could be manufactured with various cylinder numbers and various levels of technology.

While we only have V8 and V10 Mod Motors, PopSci reported in the late 1990s that Ford could make Mod Engine V6s drop to 2.0 liters. We never got them in production, but Mod MotorThe s came on all types of travel, with single and double overhead cams, and plenty of flexibility. That was not a huge leap from the norm.

Finally, I can’t stress T-Drive moment enough. In 1991, the world was on the brink of a global recession. Again, the ’91 Detroit show was literally a week before the Gulf War helped scare the world into a financial shitty show. AND The Japanese Bubble era it was about ten seconds from exploding. The country would be sent to what was called the “Lost Decade”, a depression that ended up lasting two. The bubble era had fueled ambitious technological development, particularly in Japan, but it also pressured the rest of the world to catch up. In the 1980s, we saw V12 revivals in BMW and Mercedes, we saw dual chamber motors become the mainstreamand turbo engines and double turbo engines, too. Japan was producing commuter hatchbacks with engines that accelerated to 9,000 RP.M. There were motors like the ones never seen again, like Mazda’s triple rotor design seen in the incredible Eunos Cosmo.

The scale of progress was deranged, and seemed about to continue until that economic collapse of ’91. Almost every player in the automotive world had to cut their budgets to zero. Ford was ststruggling to stay alive completely. I can’t imagine trying an experimental engines reliving the old technology from before World War IIs high on anyone’s priority list.

Then T-Drive died. And that is a nuisance! In the car we saw it in, the Contour concept did go into production, but only as a boring jelly bean with conventional engines. There was no T-Drive. There was no attached aluminum chassis, like the concept, or slim projector headlights like blades, or wheels that only had spokes in one room from the edge.

I often wonder what cars would look like in the 90s if the Bubble never burst. But these are idle dreams that have no end, T-Drive cylinders in line with the horizon.