I want you to picture this scenario in your head: It’s a Sunday morning, and you wake up excited to go on your usual Sunday morning ride. You head to your garage, all geared up for the ride. You put the key in your bike’s ignition, switch it on, hear the fuel pump prime, and thumb the starter.
After a few clicks, your bike springs to life, idling higher than usual as the engine warms up. The smell of gasoline and exhaust vapor wafts through your garage, further amping you up to go on that ride. Now, all this seems pretty normal, and we experience it so regularly that we take it for granted. But in the not-too-distant future, all this could very well become a thing of the past as electrification tightens its grasp on all of us.
Thankfully, the genius minds at Porsche seem to have found a way to keep the internal combustion engine firing on all cylinders. I’m sure you’ve seen it by now, and it’s Porsche recently patented six-stroke engine. It’s nothing short of a revolutionary feat of engineering, not just for Porsche, but for the entire automotive, motorcycle, and powersports industries as a whole.
I’d go as far as saying that Porsche may just have found the elixir of youth, at least as far as internal combustion is concerned. Let’s take a look at why this is the case.
It all starts with the internals of the engine. Instead of a traditional crankshaft, Porsche’s six-stroke engine makes use of an outer ring gear and an inner planet gear. The inner planet gear has an eccentric element on it, where the connecting rod is attached. And while the inner planet gear’s rotation is a perfect circle as it would be in a four-stroke engine, thanks to the eccentric element, the connecting rod, and subsequently the piston, has what’s known as a hypocycloidal path. And this is what allows for the six-stroke movement.
