10 CRAZIEST ENGINES EVER MADE

Even though the internal combustion engine is a complex machine, it's pretty simple: ignited gas drives a piston, which turns a crank, creating rotational force. This force can be used for lots of things like creating electricity, flying a plane, or in the case of automobiles, shooting them down the road. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen became the first vehicle with an internal combustion engine in 1885, and since then the gas powered powerplant has stuck to the same basic formula.

Then, there have been some really wild engines that challenge everything with thought we knew about internal combustion. Everyone is familiar with inline-fours, V-6s, V-8s, and even super Vs with 10 or 12 cylinders. That's why when someone makes an engine with an odd number of cylinders, in a "W" configuration, or one that doesn't even technically have cylinders, it's pretty mind-blowing. Even pulling obscene amounts of horsepower out of an otherwise tame engine can be a trip to the brain.

We're currently experiencing the EV revolution, and these all-electric cars are considered cutting-edge technology, but the fact is, electric motors pre-date internal combustion engines by decades. The real technological advances are in reinventing the flywheel and everything connected to it, with radical designs, alternate fuels, and off-the-wall concepts. Here's a look at the craziest internal combustion engines that have ever ended up in a motor vehicle.

RELATED: 10 Biggest Engines Ever Put In An American Production Model

Flat-Twin Engine

1905 Ford Model F

Inline pattern engines already existed in 1896 when Karl Benz (yes, from Mercedes-Benz) invented a new type of engine. It wasn't a V-8, which would come two years later, but rather a flat-twin engine that featured two opposing pistons that moved inward and outward at the same time, driving a central crankshaft. It was intended for motorcycle use, but found its way into several cars.

Power and Performance

Many micro-mobiles from BMW, Toyota, and Citroën have utilized a flat-twin engine up until modern times, but it was Ford that first incorporated the weird, but efficient engine. Turn of the century Model As and Models Cs had flat twins, but the 1905 Model F rocked it the best. Billed as Ford's luxury model at the time, it cost a whopping $1,200, which is $41,867 in 2023 money.

Packard Straight-12

1929 Packard Eight

In the 1920s, Packard was a premier engine builder as well as a leader in the luxury car market. The 1929 Packard Eight featured an inline-eight cylinder that produced 145 horsepower, which was impressive for the time. The Packard engineers figured if eight cylinders in a line kicked so much ass, then 12 of them would kick extra ass. For some reason a V-12 never occurred to them, so they built a ridiculous I-12 and put it in a modified '29 Packard Eight.

Power and Performance

Mac's Motor City Garage tells us that the result was a freakishly long car that made a lot of noise and actually twisted every time the accelerator was pressed. The prototype was such a massive failure that Packard destroyed the engine, hoping nobody would remember their folly. Reportedly, the elongated Packard Eight was sold to somebody in Mexico to keep the embarrassment out of the United States.

Chrysler Turbine

1963 Chrysler Turbine Car

A gas turbine engine doesn't have cylinders like a traditional engine, but rather a rotor with blades that spin when ignited fuel flows through it. It's sort of fiery windmill that is capable of producing great amounts of power. It's a fairly efficient engine type that is used in aircraft and marine applications, but when Chrysler tried to put one in a car, it wasn't a roaring success.

Power and Performance

Chrysler developed their turbine engine in the early 1950s and first tested it successfully in the 1956 Plymouth Belvedere. They soon started dropping the engine in everything in their line-up from Dodge Darts to the concept Chrysler Turbine Car. They kept messing with the turbine engine until 1979, never once putting it into a production vehicle, and then suddenly dropped the project. Actually, when the government bailed Chrysler out, one of the conditions was to end the turbine engine program.

RELATED: The Greatest American V-8 Engines Ever Made

Wankel Rotary

1967 Mazda Cosmo L10A

Rotary engines also don't have pistons, but unlike turbines, kind of operate like a piston engine. A spinning off-center triangle (spinning Dorito) separates a vertical chamber into three sections. One chamber is inducted with gas and when it spins, compressing the fuel. When it is ignited, it spins again to expel the exhaust. First invented by German engineer Felix Wankel in the 1920s, Japanese automaker Mazda began developing it in 1960 for an automobile application.

Power and Performance

By 1967 Mazda was ready to put one in a car and chose the Cosmo L10A, which featured a twin-rotor 982cc engine. The Wankel Rotary-powered cars had nice power but were gas guzzlers and bad polluters. Mazda produced these rotary engine vehicles as recently as the 2012 RX-8 before discontinuing it. It however made a comeback in the 2023 hybrid MX-30, which features a single rotor along with an electric motor.

Oldsmobile Turbo-Rocket

1962 Oldsmobile Cutlass Jetfire

A 215ci V-8 isn't necessarily crazy, other than it's on the small end, but Oldsmobile found a way to make it insane in the 1962 Jetfire. As the high-performance package of the Cutlass, it featured a turbocharged engine, which again isn't that out of the ordinary, but this was no regular turbo set up. In order to keep the air intake cool, the turbocharger needed plenty of "rocket fluid."

Power and Performance

There was a special tank that was filled with a mixture of methyl alcohol and water that fed the air intake stream. While this weird turbo system added around 30 horsepower over the normal 251, it still wasn't all that fast and Oldsmobile discontinued it by 1964. Still, it was a pretty damn cool name for a car and an engine.

Cadillac V8-6-4 Engine

1981 Cadillac Eldorado

The Cadillac 368 is another engine that doesn't seem particularly zany, but the V-8 used for their early 1980's luxury cars was straight-up bonkers. Rather than develop an efficient engine that would meet miles-per-gallon and emission standards, Cadillac took one of their already detuned engines and rigged it up so that once the vehicle was in motion, two to four of the cylinders would shut down. The 1981 Eldorado was just one of the many Cadillacs to get this funky engine.

Power and Performance

Known as the V8-6-4 Cadillac High Technology Engine, it was anything but high technology. The basic problem was that the cylinder deactivation system was pretty random and drivers could be in four-cylinder mode when they needed eight. It was apparently really easy to bypass the system by simply disconnecting a single wire and having a permanent V-8. Cadillac also disconnected the V8-6-4 after just one disastrous year.

RELATED: The 10 Best Chevy Crate Engines

Volkswagen VR6

2004 Volkswagen Touareg

Going crazy with a traditional internal combustion engines almost always leads to failure, but sometimes that insanity is pure genius. That is the case with the Volkswagen VR6, also known as the "staggered six." Unlike a standard V-6 that has the cylinder banks at a 45-degree angle, the VW engine is super-compact with a 10.5-degree angle. Because the cylinders are so close, the engine only requires one cylinder head.

Power and Performance

Volkswagen has featured the VR6 in their cars from 1991 until the present, and it proved more than capable as the standard engine in the 2004 Touareg. The Porsche Cayenne is the same basic crossover SUV as the Touareg and also comes standard with the VR6. The only real difference between the two vehicles is the Touareg is one of the cooler VWs, while the Cayenne is definitely one of the dorkier Porsches.

Cizeta-Moroder/Cizeta V16T

1991 Cizeta-Moroder 16T

Cizeta-Moroder isn't exactly a household name nor is it a name that most households could pronounce, but they made one hell of a supercar with one hell of a wacky engine. The 1991 Cizeta-Moroder V16T had a 16-cylinder engine mounted transversely in the rear center of the car, but that's not necessarily the weird part. The engine was basically two V-8s smushed together.

Power and Performance

With 64 valves, eight overhead camshafts, and four-cylinder heads, this really was a twin V-8. It was also a horsepower machine, rivaling McLarens, Lamborghinis, and Ferraris of the time. Between 1991 and 2003 a total of just 13 cars were produced because while it is fast, building them is a slow process. Weirdly enough the Cizeta Automobile website is still active and has an order page, where you can purchase one for $800,000.

W-16

2005 Bugatti Veyron

Have you ever looked at something mechanical and thought that there is no way it could possibly work? That's the vibe Bugatti Veyron's W-16 engine gives off. Unlike a traditional V-pattern engine that has a nice orderly symmetric distribution of cylinders, W engines have cylinders willy nilly all over the place. Actually it's four rows of four cylinders, but it definitely seems wrong.

Power and Performance

When it comes to performance however, the W-12 is nothing but right. The 2005 Veyron has horsepower and pound-feet of torque numbers in the high 900s, and it does it with another wacky feature of the engine. There are turbocharged engines and twin turbos, but the Veyron has four turbochargers, because everything about this engine is extreme.

RELATED: Top 10 Production Cars With The Most Horsepower

HEMI SRT Demon V8

2023 Dodge Challenger Demon 170

The Dodge Challenger Demon 170 "Last Call" car has a 6.2-liter engine, which doesn't sound all that nuts, but the insanity lies in the fact that it pulls 1,025 horsepower out of it. To put that into perspective, 6.2-liters is 378 cubic inches and the classic Mopar 383 Magnum, which is slightly larger, only made 335 ponies. Some modern technology and a 3.0-liter supercharger basically triples the power of the engine, which again is crazy.

Power and Performance

The Demon 170's engine is often mistakenly referred to as a Hellephant, but that's a similarly powered 426ci crate engine that hasn't been put into a production car. The engine is actually based on the impressive Hellcat, but the SRT team amped up the horsepower, and blew a bunch of them up trying to achieve that massive output. The HEMI SRT Demon V-8 isn't a rotary turbine, inline-12, flat-W that needs rocket juice, but it's the craziest engine ever put in a production vehicle because of the insane horsepower it generates.

2023-09-20T15:06:21Z dg43tfdfdgfd