(car engine roaring)
- When you think of Volkswagen,
you probably think of Jettas, Golfs
or maybe even the punch buggy.
(mumbling)
But what you don't think of is
huge power or extreme luxury.
I mean, their name literally
translates to the people's car.
So, why and how did they
create one of the most bonkers,
highly sophisticated, amazing sounding
luxury engines of all time?
Well, today, we're gonna
dive into that incredible
engineering of one of the
coolest, most bizarre engines
ever built, the W12.
It's like two engines in
one, it's crazy, let's go.
(upbeat music)
The W12, the name itself
already sounds pretty nasty.
And everyone knows W is the
nastiest letter out there
unless you put two PP next
to each other and that's PP.
(laughs)
(beep)
So, to explain the W12,
let's look at some other
engines for a second.
So, you got your inline
4s, you got your inline 6s,
and they have all the sounders in a line,
one after the other.
Then you got your V, mainly
in the V configuration.
You have V6s, V8s, V10s and V12s.
And those engines have two lines
or banks of cylinders in a V shape.
So, we got our inlines, we got our V's
and there's some boxer engines too,
but for the sake of this
video, we can skip over those,
which then brings us to the W.
And I'm gonna show you
a little magic trick.
We take two V's and
you slam them together,
(swoosh)
you get a W.
(chuckles)
Like just blow your mind,
I just blew my mind.
Yeah, why is it W, it should
definitely be double V,
double V even sounds cooler than W.
We're changing the alphabet,
one letter at a time, let's go.
And I didn't know this, but
when the first W12 engines
were designed and built,
they were intended for use in planes.
They were built by this
British company called
D. Napier and Son during
the First World War .
And the Napier Lyon, as it was called,
was a 24L W12
that produced 900 HP
making it the most
powerful engine ever built
up into that point, that is insane.
That same engine also power
the Napier-Campbell Blue Bird
to 174.88 miles per hour
in 1927, a land speed record at the time.
Now, these early engines had proven
that the W12 configuration
was capable of producing
excellent torque and horsepower.
So, why was the Napier
W12 the last notable W12
before Volkswagen built
there's 70 years later?
well, unsurprisingly, W12
engines are pretty complex,
so, complex that Volkswagen
needed to make it more complex.
(swoosh)
Typical Volkswagen, in
actuality it was just too big.
So, if they were going to
use it in a modern car,
they had to figure out how
to make the setup smaller.
Fortunately, Volkswagen had
already solved the problem
of making the V engine smaller
and that's with their VR design.
That's right, we're talking VR6.
(upbeat music)
You've probably heard of VR6 before.
VR6 badges are on the backs
of Golf, Passat, Jettas,
they're all up in the VW lineup.
So, you might have seen the badge,
but do you really know what it means?
So, let's talk about it, so, the R in VR6
comes from the German word for inline,
which is (speaking in foreign language).
Nailed it, what's up my German buddies?
So, what we call an I6, for example,
the Germans call an R6.
Of course, the six denotes
that it's a six cylinder,
hence the VR6, it's a V inline 6.
But how can you have a V engine
that's also an inline engine?
It's either one or the other, right?
Well, what the VW engineers
wanted was to keep
all of the benefits of a
V6 in terms of performance,
but package it in a way which
would allow them to fit them
in compact cars without having
to compromise on the size
and the weight and having
to redesign a bunch of stuff
in the engine bay.
The question was, how do you
house all that V6 technology
in a smaller space?
And the solution was simple.
You'd have a papa V make
love to an inline mama
and they have a baby, a V (speaks
in foreign language) baby.
By making the angle between
the two banks of cylinders
incredibly acute, that's this,
okay, you got 90, you got
acute and you got obtuse.
I actually missed my sixth grade
Miss Walker geometry class,
and it took me years to remember that.
I actually had to look this up
because I still can't remember
what acute and obtuse is.
So, just 15 degrees in
staggering the cylinder
so that they were snug
up against one another,
the engine could have a dimension
similar to that of an inline 4.
Aside from size what's
the benefit of having
a narrower angled staggered VR6 layout.
Well, only one cylinder head is needed
for both banks of cylinders,
which means only two total
camshafts are needed.
See, in a dual-overhead-cam
60-degree setup,
which is kinda standard angle for V6,
you need four camshafts, two in each bank,
like the Nissan 300 X for
example, it's a quad-cam.
And regardless of the engineers fitted two
or four valves per cylinder,
a VR6 needed only two cams.
This helped keep the cost down
and probably more importantly, the size
and weight of the engine
compared to a regular old V6.
There's a couple of other
cool things inside the VR6
that allow for it to be smooth,
vibration less, power producing,
you guys know that's kind
of a custom with the VR6,
but we're not gonna get into
that, that's for another day.
Now, the VR6 is only
slightly longer and wider
than a four cylinder engine and
yet it produces considerably
more power with just two extra cylinders.
This all meant that it could
be mounted transversely,
that's this way, transverse.
And they could do that in a
small front wheel drive cars
without having to be redesigned
to allow for a larger engine bay.
Now, one of the compromises
of the VR6 compact design
is in the head.
Now, since the cylinders
aren't mounted centrally
against the cylinder head,
this means that the distance
to the valves and every
other cylinder bank
would be different, and if
Volkswagen didn't do anything
to compensate for this,
it would have meant that
each cylinder would have
been producing vastly
different horsepower
compared to one another.
So, the engineers had to be
clever in how they arranged
the valves in order to feed the intake
and draw the exhaust gases away.
This meant that each cylinder
had to had different length
intakes, pretty cool.
The way Volkswagen accounted
for that was to compensate
for the cylinders which had longer intakes
by increasing the length of the runners
to the manifold as well as the cam profile
in the lift of those particular cylinders.
And that's pretty unique, they're like,
there are no weak links in a VR6 motor.
One cylinders online
like, "Hey you six bro,
"why don't you pull your way?"
So, I'm like, " six shut up,
Volkswagen made me this way."
Although you would probably
have a German accent,
you wouldn't sound like Joe exotic.
The VR6 made its debut in
the Passat, but it's probably
best known as the engine
found in the Corrado.
From there, it was fitted
in other compact Volkswagens
including the Jetta and the
GTI, and a bunch of others.
But more importantly,
it's got a reputation
for its super smooth power delivery
and its sweet, sweet sound,
just go ahead and take a listen.
(car engine roaring)
So, how do we go from a VR6 to a W12?
Well, way back in the
olden times, the 90s,
Volkswagen chief Ferdinand
Piech, had a little pet project,
he wanted a car to battle sales
from the top of the food
chain Mercedes S Class.
The only problem Volkswagen didn't have
the right engine for the job.
So, what did they do?
Hold on, don't get ahead
of yourself, let me say it,
I wanna be the one to say
it, I'm talking here, okay?
Yep, they essentially
just put two VR6s together
into the WR12 48 valve, it had
four rows of three cylinder.
So, yeah, essentially
215-degree VR engines
married in a W formation, which
is what makes the W shape.
And they kept the stroke
the same as the VR6,
and that's this part, boom, boom, boom.
But each cylinder was bold out
slightly from 81 mm to 84 mm.
And this allowed a tiny bit
more air into each cylinder,
which meant a little bit
bigger boom and of course,
more power that extra bit of
board diameter gave the engine
a displacement of six liters
and the cylinder block was cast
from an aluminum silicon
alloy which would allow
for greater torsional rigidity,
but also, more importantly,
greater heat dispersion
than one made from steel.
'Cause you got those two
banks of six cylinders
packed in so tightly you gotta
be able to remove the heat
from block which was a critical,
critical engineering challenge.
Plus this aluminum silicon alloy
also made the block far
lighter than it would have been
if it were made out of steel.
Steel weighs more than aluminum
silicon, you guys get it.
And each of the two cylinder banks
has its own air filter and throttle body,
the intake manifold, they're even made out
of magnesium alloy.
Volkswagen really wanted to
keep as much of the weight
in the base of the engine,
hence the use of magnesium
and aluminum at the engine's top side.
Okay, you're like,
"Jeremiah, cool, whatever,
"but what are the numbers?"
Alright, geez, chill,
we're getting there, okay?
I have a degree in mechanical engineering
that I'm doing nothing with.
So, I like to nerd out a
little bit, just join me.
So, the naturally aspirated
Volkswagen WR12 produces 444HP.
That might not sound like a ton,
but this was also an
ancient year of the 1990s.
And here's the real kicker with it,
It make 430 FT-LBS from 2750 to 5000 RPM.
That is a wide range to
have that much torque.
And really that's a big part
with a 12 sound design in the first place.
Smooth, consistent torque
across the power band.
Pretty damn freakin wild, right?
It's wild engine.
So, to showcase this
thing, Volkswagen plopped
a special 600 HP version
and a concept car,
they literally just called the W12.
You want another eargasm,
we'll close the door,
put on some headphones and tell
your mom you're taking a nap
'cause you're gonna need some alone time,
just Listen to this.
(car engine roaring)
This car smashed a
bunch of records in 2002
where they were ripping
around the Nardo Ring in Italy
for 24 hours straight with an
average speed of 200.6 MPH.
That is so crazy.
Now, obviously you
don't see these W12 cars
driving around the concept ones
but you do see WR12s driving around.
A Volkswagen drop this engine
in versions of the Audi A8
which Volkswagen owns, they
own Audi, you know that?
And the Volkswagen Phaeton,
the giant looking Passat thing,
which is a car so weird,
we should probably give it
an episode at some point,
that thing is completely wild.
Plus the W12 Tuareg, I love
that these fairly standard
looking cars have W12s in them.
If you didn't know what
you were looking for,
there's no way you would
know a W12 would be
in some of those cars, it's
just pretty, pretty insane.
There are now twin-turbo
versions of the W12,
powering the Bentley Continental GT
and the Bentley Flying Spur.
And the same basic engine
principles and layout
are what's used in Bugatti's
W16 engine and the Veyron,
the Chiron, the Divo and the
Centodieci and Pasta Pazure,
I frickin' love all of Bugatti.
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Thanks for watching, bye for now.
