Lotus is known for light, simple, and fast cars. But the company’s engineering division has created some of the most innovative automotive technology of the last century. Recently, it helped develop GM’s current superstar economy/performance Ecotec engine, and now it’s building a hyper-efficient, ultra-low-emissions engine codenamed “Omnivore.”
The Omnivore is a direct injection, variable compression, two-stroke engine designed to run on virtually any liquid fuel—gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, alcohol, you name it. It uses a “puck” at the top of the combustion chamber to vary compression ratios all the way up to 40:1, or about four times the compression of a standard four-stroke engine. Those super-high compression ratios mean that the Omnivore can achieve combustion without a spark plug in a similar manner to diesel engines. In Omnivore, the air-fuel mixture is squeezed until it explodes. Combustion takes place throughout the mixture simultaneously, which makes for super-clean and efficient combustion. How much more efficient? So far Lotus has managed a 10 percent gain in efficiency (measured in fuel consumption) over current direct-injection four-stroke engines. That may not sound like a lot, but in the engineering world it’s huge. Plus, Lotus hopes to gain even more efficiency as time goes on.
The Omnivore is still in development stages, but Lotus hopes the technology can be refined and put into production in the next decade. Two-stroke engines have long since been banned from automotive duty due to heavy emissions, but with the Omnivore they might see a resurgence.
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