AUTO INDUSTRY Americans' demand for power leads to resurgence of the V-8

Nearly a third of all passenger vehicles sold last year had V-8 engines.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
We're power-mad. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Fuel-sipping hybrid gasoline-electric cars may get plenty of hype at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, but when they vote with their wallets, more Americans elected a big, powerful V-8 engine last year than any time since 1985.
V-8 engines went into 29.1 percent of all passenger vehicles -- everything from the Ford F-150 pickup to the Cadillac DeVille -- built in North America for U.S. sale last year, the highest proportion for any year since 1985, according to data from Ward's Automotive Reports, a Southfield, Mich.-based industry publication.
Fueled by inexpensive gasoline, surging truck sales and improving energy efficiency, U.S. buyers' demand for V-8s has risen every year since 1994, according to Ward's data.
Who can blame them? Gasoline prices vary, but don't seem to affect V-8 sales, and fuel economy is rising.
The rip-snorting Hemi is the poster child for the current generation of V-8s: powerful, technically sophisticated and alluring enough that demand has surpassed even DaimlerChrysler's most optimistic hopes.
Reasons for demand
Horsepower isn't just for showoffs drag racing their Hemi-powered pickups. It's what lets you and little Joey in the child seat accelerate onto I-75 without having an 18-wheeler run you down.
In Germany, they call this active safety, which sounds much more socially responsible and clinical, but the bottom line is the same the world over: People want the most powerful car or truck they can afford to buy and operate.
Listen to 24-year-old Christian Seethaler, who is in Michigan on an internship from Germany. He'd buy a V-8 if he could.
"It gives you a different feeling when you drive," he said in mid-January as he admired Ford's engine display at the auto show in Detroit. "You feel more powerful."
Ford Motor Co. has built more than 300 million vehicles worldwide in its 101-year history, and better than a third -- more than 100 million -- had V-8s under the hood.
"Since we paved our first road, Americans have wanted to go fast," said Joe Veltri, Dodge truck marketing boss. Think of Veltri as the godfather to the Hemi yokels, the two likable knuckleheads from the TV commercials who begin every conversation by asking, "That thing got a Hemi?"
'Golden age of power'
The boom in V-8s owes to factors ranging from rising truck sales to fuel-saving new technologies and the advent of new cars such as the Hemi-powered Chrysler 300C and Dodge Magnum, said Csaba Csere, editor in chief of Car and Driver magazine.
"Customers are demanding more power across the board, and the manufacturers are delivering," he said. "It's the golden age of power."
And V-8s may be the only place where the price of power is cheap. It costs just $600 to upgrade from a V-6 to a V-8 on a Dodge Durango, and an additional $895 to move all the way up to the Hemi.
By comparison, the original Hemi was a $720 option on a late-1960s Dodge. The whole car only cost $3,000, so the added cost was like paying $7,500 for a Hemi on a 2004 Durango SUV, Veltri said.
V-8s produce more power -- and use more fuel -- than smaller engines, but this is not an earth-hating phenomenon sparked by tree-hating, gas-guzzling wastrels.
Upgrading from a V-6 to a Hemi reduces the Dodge Durango's fuel economy by about two miles a gallon, Veltri said.
Better fuel efficiency
General Motors Corp.'s V-8s have improved their fuel efficiency by 75 percent since the early '70s, said Bob Purcell, the company's director of powertrain planning. The engines have also doubled their power since the '80s, he said.
"In the 1980s, a Chevy Blazer got eight to 10 miles per gallon," he said. "Today, a Tahoe on the highway can get over 20 mpg."
GM and DaimlerChrysler will roll out the next step this year as they both launch V-8s including the Chevy TrailBlazer EXT SUV that shuts off one of the cylinder banks -- making them effectively four-cylinder engines when they aren't towing or accelerating. The system -- GM calls it displacement on demand -- will improve fuel economy an additional 6 percent to 8 percent in GM's SUVs and pickups. Chrysler claims its version will boost fuel economy as much as 20 percent.
GM and DaimlerChrysler could build as many as 3 million vehicles with these V-8s annually. That means displacement on demand could reduce U.S. fuel consumption far more than selling a few thousand chic hyper-efficient gasoline-electric hybrids would.
You might ask, why not just build more four-cylinder engines in the first place? They cost less, and burn less fuel.
The answer is that you can't give a four-cylinder away in a big pickup, SUV or large car. That's why V-8 demand has grown more than 50 percent since bottoming out at 19.2 percent in 1993.
"We expect V-8 sales to continue to grow," Purcell said. "The customer likes them. You can do a lot of things with that much power under the hood."