Stuttgart — What better way to mark the 150th anniversary of Rudolf Diesel's birth than a brand new generation of four-cylinder diesel engines from Mercedes-Benz which outstrip all previous benchmarks for performance, torque, emission properties and, most notably, fuel economy in their segment? In its most powerful variant, the new four-cylinder unit musters up 150 kW/204 PS from its 2143 cubic centimeters, meaning that it delivers around 20 per cent more power than the engine it replaces. At the same time, peak torque has risen from 400 Nm to 500 Nm, equating to an increase of 25 per cent. Despite the 25 kW increase in output, the new four-cylinder diesel burns substantially less fuel than its predecessor, which was itself highly economical. As a consequence, CO₂ emissions are reduced by as much as 13 per cent and the new four-cylinder diesel unit already complies with the future EU5 emissions standard.

The new four-cylinder diesel generation from Mercedes-Benz can be briefly summed up as follows: greater power, greater economy, greater cleanliness. The new power unit from the Untertürkheim plant needs to be explained at greater length to be fully appreciated, however. It really does charter territory from which diesel engines — and four-cylinder units particularly so — have previously been excluded. It redefines standards for power output and torque on the one hand and for fuel consumption and exhaust emissions on the other, setting benchmark figures which no other comparable series-production engine is able to match at the current time.

The technical advance which the design engineers at Mercedes-Benz have achieved with this new four-cylinder diesel is not only evident on paper, its effects can also be experienced to an intense degree behind the wheel. As far as the figures are concerned, the most powerful variant of the new diesel engine extracts 150 kW/204 PS from its displacement of 2143 cubic centimeters. This represents an increase of some 20 per cent compared to its predecessor, despite the displacement being almost identical. Meanwhile, the engine's peak torque has been upped by 25 per cent from 400 Nm to 500 Nm. The power-to-displacement and torque-to-displacement ratios of the new engine from Untertürkheim make just as impressive reading, with figures of 70 kW/95.2 PS and 233.3 Nm per liter respectively (the figures for its predecessor by comparison: 58.2 kW/79.2 PS and 186.2 Nm per liter of displacement).

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Tags: 4-cylinder, common-rail, Daimler, diesel, dual-stage turbo, OM651

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 and is filed under Powertrain News, Sales News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.