The ugliest cars...?

[The Beard]

I like in-line 6s. They have perfect primary balance. Admittedly this means they sound less sporting than a V6, but if you're in the market for a luxury car that's the way it had to be.

If you think of cars since say, 1960, the vast majority of large cars below "Plutocrat" level had I-6 engines:

Jaguar XJ6 2.8, 3.4, 4.2.
Mercedes E250, 280, 300, 320.
BMW 320, 323, 325, 328, 330, 335. 2500S, 2800S, 3.0S, 3.0Si, 3.3L, 520, 525, 528, 530, 535, 728, 730, 733, 735.
If you go back to the '50s then you could include the Austin Westminster and A90. The Westminster 110 even had the engine from the.....
Bentley R-Type, Continental Mk1, S1 and Rolls Royce Silver Shadow 1.
Rootes had successive Super Snipes and Imperials with the straight 6. Even
Ford who are renowned for their V6 engines used in line 6s in Mk 1, 2 and 3 Zephyrs and Zodiacs.
Which brings me rather (at last....get on with it yer doddering old fool!!!) to Vauxhall who used the straight 6 design from (at least) the end of WW2 in various Velox, Cresta, Viscount, Ventora and Royale saloons and coupes ending up with the first of the Senators which was an attempt to bring in a common naming policy for Vauxhall and Opel products.

 

[maddogmorg]

Admittedly this means they sound less sporting than a V6,.

I'm inclined to disagree.

The sound of a straight six, whether it's from BMC or Triumph, or from a Jaguar or Aston Martin sound much sportier than the vast majority of V6s of a similar age.

 

[The Beard]

I'm inclined to disagree.

The sound of a straight six, whether it's from BMC or Triumph, or from a Jaguar or Aston Martin sound much sportier than the vast majority of V6s of a similar age.

I think it will depend on the car, both make and type. The 3 litre straight 6 in the Austin 3 litre was smooth and subdued, whereas in the Healey 3000 it sounded really rorty but in the MGC I always thought it sounded "fruity". I know rorty & fruity sound a bit subjective, but bear with me. Again, in the Triumph 2500S, once again, I always thought it had a refined hum but in the TR5 & 6 it really did come across as a sports car. You also have to accept that Jaguar and Aston Martin were exceptions, as were Maserati as they all had twin cam heads as opposed to ohv with single cams in the block.

The Ford V6 on the other hand always had a bit of an uneven beat, even in the Granada, whereas if you listen to a TVR 3000S or Tamar it really did sound as if it was the proper out and out sports car it was, while in the 3 litre Capri it was a kind of halfway house.

One thing about 6 cylinder engines of either type, the smaller they are, the smoother they sound. A Consul 2.5 I had for a while felt like a much nicer beast than the 3 litre. The Ford motors took a leap forward when they switched from the Essex 3 litre to the Cologne 2.8/2.9 which also coincided with the adoption of EFI.

Vauxhall/Opel straight 6 engines right from my earliest detailed recollections, 1967 were smooth but relatively underpowered, until the Opel cam-in-head units came into the country in any real numbers. The smoothest 6 I can remember was the 2.2 found in the land crab and the later much maligned Princess.

The move to V6s has been most successful because of the use of balance shafts which make the bent engines as smooth as the straight ones. Personally I think it was the roughness of the V that made it sound sportier than the in-line versions.

More recently fancy exhausts can make the difference between luxo-barges and sports cars with the same engine. The 3 litre V6 in the Jag XF sounds very different from the new F-Type.