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.
It’s all really crazy engineering, and I really recommend you watch YouTube channel Driving 4 Answers’ video on this thing. D4A does an incredibly good job of explaining how it all works in a way that even non-tech-minded folks can grasp the principles behind Porsche’s six-stroke engine. Go ahead and watch the video below. I’ll wait.
Essentially, the insane witchcraft inside this engine means that each piston has two top dead-center positions and two bottom dead-center positions. Additionally, the engine features ports situated between the first and second bottom dead center positions which allow fuel and air to enter the combustion chamber. As the piston moves up and down at varying lengths, it’s able to perform two compression strokes and two combustion strokes, all while retaining just one intake stroke and one exhaust stroke.
As such, the effective sequence would be intake, compression (at first TDC), combustion (at first BDC), compression again (at second TDC), combustion again (at second BDC), and finally, exhaust. Pretty wild, isn’t it? But the real question here is why. Why would Porsche go through all the trouble to create such a complicated engine, especially now that we’re well and truly approaching the twilight of the internal combustion engine?
Well, for starters, Porsche’s always been an advocate of keeping ICE alive, despite it having a few EVs in its lineup. It’s mainly because of their desire to keep the 911 as pure as it can be, with reports suggesting that the 911 will be Porsche’s very last car to ever go electric, if it ever does.
But if we look at things from a bigger perspective, Porsche’s six-stroke engine just might have the potential to extend the life of the internal combustion engine. Now that there are extra compression and combustion strokes in the engine, all while retaining just one exhaust stroke, in theory, this engine should have much fewer emissions than a four-stroke engine. And if we pair this to the growing advancements in alternative fuels, well, the internal combustion engine might not be facing extinction after all.
And given how this technology seems very much scalable and adaptable to a wide range of configurations, it’s more than likely that six-stroke motorcycles, UTVs, ATVs, and even PWCs are well within the realm of possibility.
So yeah, thank you, Porsche for coming up with this genius idea. You’re the real MVP. And we can’t wait to see this thing put into practice in the real world.
Sources: Motor1, Driving 4 Answers
