SINGAPORE — WHAT DO THE new Mercedes C-Class and the Infiniti Q30 have in common? They both have the same 2.0-litre engine, built in the same factory in Tennessee, down in the good’ol US of A.

Don’t be surprised: sharing is now the key to building powerful but low-emission engines at a reasonable cost, which is why cars as disparate as the BMW i8 (above) and Mini Cooper have 1.5-litre three-cylinder engines from the same powerplant family.

It’s all part of a strategy by carmakers to manage costs in a hideously expensive game: European carmakers in particular have set themselves ambitious targets to lower carbon emissions, and the research to do so costs billions.

Why give themselves the headache of such a challenge in the first place? It’s good for your corporate image, fuel is expensive in Europe (so lower carbon emissions from fuel-sipping cars are hot sellers), and on a more cynical note, it stymies Chinese carmakers who don’t have the technological muscle to keep up.

Engine plants aren’t cheap, either. The Tennessee plant that makes all those engines for Infiniti and Mercedes cost US$319 million ($398m) to set up. It will churn out 250,000 engines a year once production ramps up fully, but it wouldn’t have made sense for a small player like Infiniti to have built it on its own — the brand sold fewer than 200,000 cars last year.

Parts-sharing is nothing new. If you think of the automotive industry as a gigantic Lego set of sorts, if someone is willing to sell you that Technics motor you need to make your kit move, why not? They get money out of it, you get a complete(r) car. 

But the collaboration between Mercedes and Infiniti is just one example of one trend that is shaping tomorrow’s engines, which is...

Broad alliances
Daimler (which owns Mercedes-Benz and Smart) and the Nissan-Renault Alliance (Dacia, Nissan, Infiniti, Renault, Autovaz) are not only sharing engines, but have declared that they will co-develop vehicles.

The two are building a $1.67 billion factory in Mexico that will churn out compact Infiniti and Mercedes models, most likely developed on the A-Class platform (which also supports the B-Class, CLA-Class and GLA-Class).

Meanwhile, the new Renault Twingo and Smart ForTwo (above left and right, respectively) are heavily related under the skin; in a world where Volkswagen can build millions of cars off the same platform, it simply wouldn’t have made sense for either car company to have developed each car by themselves. Remember, Smart has never made a profit before, analysts believe.

Some fruit of the Daimler-Nissan-Renault collaboration is already up and running: the latest C-Class has a turbodiesel engine from Renault that isn’t available here, while the Mercedes-Benz Citan and Renault Kangoo are mechanical siblings built in France by a Renault subsidiary. Could you tell?

Technical collaboration
In Europe the Toyota Verso’s 1.6-litre diesel engine might not bear any signs of its origin, but it’s a BMW engine. The two carmakers don’t operate any plants together, but Toyota is free to buy 1.6-litre and 2.0-litre turbodiesel engines from BMW, saving it the need to develop its own.

It’s part of a three-year-old technical partnership between the two, as they collaborate on things like fuel cells, lithium-air batteries and lightweight construction. Frankly, some of that costs billions to research but could end up going nowhere, so it makes sense to share the financial pain.

In the Verso, Toyota will offer the engine as a 1.6 D4-D model, and that gives it a much-needed diesel variant in a market where fewer than half the sales are for petrol versions.

The engine comes from the Mini Cooper D, incidentally, and shows how Toyota is willing to adapt itself to a ready solution: it already has its own 1.4-litre diesel but didn’t waste money developing a 1.6.

It’s a narrow alliance between the two carmakers, but a fruitful one.

The “perfect cylinder”
500 seems to be the new magic number when it comes to engine capacity. BMW has worked hard on perfecting a half-litre cylinder design for both petrol and diesels, and then will simply scale up its engines by adding cylinders.

Hence, its three, four and six cylinder engines will be 1.5, 2.0 and 3.0 litres in capacity. BMW hasn’t said anything about it, but we’re guessing a 4.0-litre V8 is also on the cards.

Volvo is doing the same. The Swedish carmaker has introduced powerplants from its new Volvo Engine Architecture (VEA) family that comprise, you guessed it, turbo petrol and diesel motors based on a 500cc cylinder. There will be 2.0-litre in-line fours and 1.5-litre in-line threes.

The first engine from Jaguar’s new ‘Ingenium’ family is, what else, a 2.0-litre turbodiesel with four cylinders. Jaguar says that smaller or larger engines can be “quickly and efficiently” designed around its 500cc architecture.

As with the BMW and Volvo units, there’s a high degree of modularity here, which brings us to the next trend of…


Internal streamlining
The Ingenium engines may be petrol and diesel, but they’ve been designed to share a lot of parts. That saves money and lowers costs, of course.

BMW is no stranger to this, either; one intake manifold pressure sensor (BMW part number 13627599042 is used on nearly 300 different vehicles between BMW, Alpina and Rolls-Royce models.

Meanwhile, Volvo’s VEA family streamlines things another way: the new design replaces eight different engines. Instead of having five, six or eight cylinder engines for more powerful models, Volvo will simply think in modules.

“It’s time to stop counting cylinders," says Peter Mertens, a senior vice president for R&D at Volvo Cars. "We're aiming to develop four-cylinder engines with higher performance than today's six-cylinder units, along with lower fuel consumption than the current generation of four-cylinder engines."

A basic VEA engine might be a 2.0-litre turbo, but to add power (and sidestep the need to build a six-cylinder) Volvo adds a supercharger to give it instant low-rev response. To mimic the grunt of a V8, Volvo will add a hybrid system and make use of an electric motor’s torque.

It might sound like a cheapskate way to do things, and indeed the point of it is to save money, but Volvo’s approach is a good example of just how much is at stake when it comes to engine development: the VEA project is part of a tech reboot for Volvo that is reputed to cost more than S$13 billion.

All that streamlining and collaboration between carmakers seems worthwhile now, doesn't it?