Koenigsegg stole the show at Geneva this year with the mega car – Regera, following that we have news from a source that the company is building a camshaft-less engine. The source also mentions that a team of eight engineers have been on it since the last few years.
It seems like Christian von Koenigsegg has been wanting to develop one since the last 14 years. Koenigsegg now claims that the project will be ready “within the next couple of years.”
“The way I see it, if you view the engine as a piano, and the valves as keys, with a camshaft, you're playing the piano with a broomstick”, he told a publication at the 2015 Geneva Motor Show. “The reason you have a four-valve cylinder head instead of a two-valve is so it can breathe freely on high rpm for more power, but that's counteracting your efforts at low rpm, because you get less speed through bigger ports and less turbulence and poorer distribution.”
“The first thing is to shut off two valves," he added. “Then if you get rid of the throttle body - because you can throttle with the valves - you can open them a little or a lot, you get better response than butterflies on an intake tract, because you're in the combustion engine. Thirdly you can shut off cylinders completely like Audi is doing, but you don't have to choose just two to do it. And fourth, you can have any valve timing you want - a diesel-like character, or an F1-type character because you have no restriction whatsoever in cam profile.”
The idea of a camshaft-less engine has been tried by many car manufacturers in the past. However, this type of engine has its share of negatives too, they are expensive to develop, accuracy at high speed is a question etc. But, with the stated manufacturer in question cost shouldn’t be an issue as they don’t make mass market cars and with the years of development in place they must have ironed out the irregularities too.
Source: WCF
