4 Things You Didn’t Know About the Ford GT
Ford stole the show at Detroit back in January, unveiling an audaciously styled Ford GT that stole the show. While the company is keeping a tight lid on details like exact horsepower figures or weight, it gave some insight on the tech of the car at the Ford Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto. Here are four highlights:
It will have hydraulic steering. To my surprise, Jamal Hameedi, chief engineer at SVT, said it will use the more traditional hydraulic steering, as opposed to electronic power steering (EPS)—bucking the trend that even automakers like Porsche have adopted.
The Ford GT has more lines of code to run the car than an F-22 fighter jet. Ford already had purists frothing at the mouth by merely mentioning the word “V-6” in the same sentence with its halo car. But this is no retro V8 as its predecessor was—28 processors manage over 10 million lines of code, processing 300 megabytes of data a second. To put that into perspective, an F-22 fighter uses 1.7 million lines to manage its avionics. The twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter EcoBoost is optimized by software to eliminate turbo lag, and software also manages how the rear spoiler pops up to brake, similar to a LaFerrari. The goal of its high-tech, according to Hameedi, is to be quick around the corners—a reason why the GT doesn’t use hybrid technology like the Porsche 918, which would hurt its power-to-weight ratio. It also means they’re gunning for this to be a serious LeMans contender, like the original GT40.
They used virtual reality to develop the car. No longer a Hollywood trope, augmented reality has advanced enough to where it helped design the GT. One of the perks is that engineers can remotely evaluate the car, ensuring that the outward visibility isn’t that of a pillbox bunker.
GT tech will trickle down to production cars. While we can all gape at the striking lines, the sad reality is most of us won’t have $400,000 burning a hole in our pocket for of these supercars. Regular folks will still reap the benefits though, mainly through its engine management tech (lag-less turbo), and a smarter traction control system that can toggle between sport, track or wet modes.
