BMW N55: Turbo, Valvetronic, and Direct Injection in ONE!
You surely must remember the ad wars between Audi and BMW from a couple of years ago! Either that or you probably came by this article opening your older brother's laptop. Either way, the outcome was somewhat unsatisfying due to Subaru's spin on the matters, when they took advantage of their International Engine of the Year 2006 Award to rub it in the face of the Bavarian teasers. Needless to say, this caused a mass sleeping disorder in the otherwise peaceful beer-loving town of Munich. Obviously, all of the sleepless nights were spent on activities different from lager-drinking, as BMW won the award the next two years, in big part thanks to one special engine: the N54 Bi-Turbo.
Being the bearers of 47 awards from the above-mentioned contest, BMW have exactly 24 more than the second best in the 11-year history of the competition - Honda. Ironically, the latter has also been branded by some as "the Japanese BMW. "Ze Germans are so far ahead, in fact, that they already have the replacement for the N54 Bi-Turbo engine, which is an inline-6 with 3.0 liters of displacement, and makes 306 horsepower in its original guise. So that's it: they are changing a basically three-year old engine, which has won the International Engine Awards consecutively in ‘08 and '09 and is being used with great success in most of their models? Was?*
Well, it would be strange if the reason was anything less than the new N55 turbo engine, which is going to make its serial debut in the BMW GT 5 series, a 2010 model. It is an engine, which is an inline-6 with 3.0 liters of displacement, and makes… uuugh… 306 horsepower in its original guise. Wirklich? **
BMW N55 engine
Make no mistake, however, this is a new engine, which breathes through a single turbo, to name one of the major differences. Its prominent advantages over the previous engine is being more efficient, and having quicker throttle response, as well as flatter torque curve. The peak torque is available a whole 1,000 RPM earlier than before (now at 1,200 RPM)!!! This is but a sneeze over idle!!! In real life it makes it even easier and more pleasant behind the wheel of an N55-engined BMW; be it trying to impress your lady with one of these unnecessary streetlight drags or to scare her with a highway pass, as tight as her clenched fists and closed eyes when you are doing it. All of this comes with lower CO2 emissions and fuel consumption, to top it off, although we will need to see it in currently N54-engined models in order to be able to measure the differences precisely. What we do know at this point is that the N55 is projected to use about 9 l/100 km on average in the GT 5, which is a 2-ton car gasoline-powered 300-hp car. Ausgezeichnet!***
