Quote:
Originally Posted by LibLoather
...out of a 5.0 liter engine in the 2011 Mustang and it took GM 6.2 liters to do the same?
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hp/L is probably the most useless 'performance' stat in existence. People always find two similarly powerful engines and wonder why the big one 'needs' to be so big. Accusations of incompetence or wastefulness often spring up. But this ignores a much bigger picture. There are more design considerations made than just 'how much power can we get out of X.X L?"
hp/$, hp/lb (for car
or engine), and torque/L are all a lot more significant than hp/L. I don't know how much a 5.0 costs, but I can gaurentee it won't be less than the ~$6500 for an LS3. It won't be lighter either, dispite being 'smaller' (externally, a DOHC is actually bigger than a OHV design). It does generate more torque/L, but the gap there is much less than the hp/L difference. Speaking of torque, the LS3's advantage is across the entire rpm range. From idle to redline, it is always making more torque.
If I was building a car from the ground up, and I had a choice of 410-430 hp V8's from Chevy, Ford, and BMW I'd take a 5.0L Ford over a 4.0L BMW , but I'd rather have an LS3 over either of them. A car doesn't care how many hp/L the engine cranks out. The total output matters. The engines weight matters. The torque curve matters. The cost matters. In all 4 of those categories, the LS3 is superior.