The Most Overengineered Engine Ever Put Into a Production Car - Cadillac (1981)

Описание: What happens when you give a 1981 computer the job of deciding how many cylinders your engine needs — 300,000 times per second?

In 1981, Cadillac did something no automaker had ever attempted: they put a computer inside a big-block V8 and told it to shut off cylinders on the fly. The V8-6-4 was supposed to deliver the power of eight cylinders when you needed it and the fuel economy of four when you didn't. It was brilliant in theory, catastrophic in practice, and about twenty years ahead of the technology required to make it work. This is the full story of how Cadillac's most ambitious engine nearly destroyed the most prestigious name in American luxury — and why the same idea is now standard on almost every car you can buy.

🔴 Key Topics Covered:

• How the 1979 oil crisis and CAFE regulations forced Cadillac to choose between its big-block V8 heritage and federal fuel economy mandates
• The Eaton Corporation's solenoid-based rocker arm deactivation system — the first electronically controlled cylinder deactivation in a production car
• Why the Computer Command Module's 300,000 operations per second wasn't even close to enough processing power for real-world driving conditions
• The 13 PROM chip software updates Cadillac issued in a single model year — and the one-wire fix that dealers used instead
• How the V8-6-4 was always a planned one-year stopgap, and why its replacement (the HT4100) was arguably even worse
• Why modern cylinder deactivation systems like GM's Active Fuel Management work flawlessly using the same concept Cadillac pioneered in 1981

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