Getting to drive as many new cars as I do, the turbocharger is as common on new stuff as pistons are inside the engine. It’s the way of the world. In so many ways the turbo has likely extended the life of piston powered cars and trucks for cars because of the ability to take small displacement engines and make them think and act like larger ones. In the case of the modern pickup truck and their diesel engines, they take big engines and make them completely beastly.
The turbocharger has been around for more than 100 years and while it has been employed in various ways since that time (mostly in planes) the automobile industry has really only been leaning on them hard (in lockstep) for little more than a decade. Yes, there were turbocharged cars here and there but by and large they were failures. There were examples that weren’t failures, they were just niche cars that never got a lot of traction. Turbocharged Supras of the late 1990s did some real damage to the pony car set of that period for sure.
Back in 1962 Olds dropped the Jetfire Turbo Rocket 215ci V8 engine on the world. It came with special fluid! The water and meth mix was designed to keep knocking to a minimum and while the little engine was an engineering marvel at the time it was not exactly widely adopted and it rather quickly escaped back into the wild from whence it came. The ad below is great.
It would be the 1970s that brought the second wave of turbochargers from domestic manufacturers and it was Buick using them to make more hay out of their 3.8L V6. It would be this little seed that would ultimately blossom into the turbocharged G-bodies of the 1980s that we still revere today. They were bad ass and the process had to start somewhere. Anyone else think that the LeSabre Sport Coupe is cool?!
Finally in 1980 we all know that Pontiac had a 4.9L turbocharged V8 that powered its Firebird. Again, short-lived, it was an experiment in trying anything to recapture the past glories of a decade before. The Pontiac experiment kind of dead ended and we did not see another turbocharged Pontiac until the Buick powered turbo Trans-Am a few years later and then the weirdo McLaren turbocharged Grand Prix that existed quietly as well.
Fun stuff in these ads below!
“Turbocharged Supras of the late 1990s did some real damage to the pony car set of that period for sure.” Yes, but they also never got a lot of traction.
Sorry, couldn’t resist. I know some tuners have figured out how to make the IRS hook up on those cars recently, but there have been running jokes about Supras and traction for so long.