You may associate a Turbo-assisted engine with boy racers and erratic driving, the kind the burns through gallons of petrol, wasting your money and doing the environment no good. If this is your view then you are grossly mistaken. The truth is more and manufactures are moving towards fitting turbos to their cars, not with a view to increasing performance, but instead, to decrease emissions. How is this so you may wonder, surely turbos make cars go faster and burn more fuel, this is true to an extent but it does not tell the whole story.
Turbos are essentially a way of assisting an engine to achieve its task of propelling a motor vehicle along at speed, but this is missing the point. Take a 2000CC block that produces a given amount of power, the engine is taking in the air/fuel mixture as the sole source of power for the engine, burning all waste products as exhaust gases. To achieve a similar level of performance you could take a 1600CC engine and attatch a turbo, no big deal you might think, but herein lies the beauty, the 1.6 turbo engine will actually burn less fuel while delivering the same or similar performance because the turbo is assisting. Turbos are used in all kinds of vehicles from people carriers to vans.
This means that you are getting 2 litre naturally aspirated performance from a 1.6 unit because the turbo is working away happily doing its job. The turbo assists but sucking in exhaust waste gases produced by the engine, these spin up a turbine which drives fresh, clean air back into the engine, increasing performance and not using any fuel. It is as close as Jeremy Clarkson will ever get to recycling! More and more manufacturers are now using this method for their cars purchased on contract hire because they realise that customers will be paying more attention to MPG figures amid ever rising fuel costs. Turbos can also be added as aftermarket car accessories.
