Originally Posted By lowebird
An interesting thread. Do we really care whose engine is under the bonnet of our cars?
Is a Bentley any less of a car because it has a VW engine or an Aston Martin which has ( basically ) 2 Ford V6's joined together or indeed that Fiat built the beautiful V6 engine for the Ferrari Dino?
Whilst I love the purity of say a Jaguar XK engine or an Alfa Twin Cam, the global market now requires a whole different set of requirements with emissions being top of the list.
I for one think that the latest Ford Duratec in the Plus 4 is brilliant and, as we all know, Morgan have always bought in the best engines to suit their needs and we still love them.
I will now go and hide and await the flak !!

Reg hide


Well yes we do care and thats why the manufacturers use different brand names on what are very similar if not identical cars under the skin. VW are a good example of this with the same platform being used for Skoda, VW Audi and Seat but priced very differently and marketed differently, the aim being to get higher volumes and to maximise revenue. But it doesnt stop there as you can see from the common emissions fiddling that applies to the same base engine across all brands including Audi. This link will show you which platforms the cars are on.

In the end you price a product according to what you can sell it for and if inventing a name like Audi allows you to sell for more money than thats what you do. Sure you dress it up on the surface - you wouldnt get far changing just the name badge though BLMC got pretty close to doing just that.

Its always been the case that small manufacturers like Morgan have used outside engine suppliers and its now becoming common with big manufacturers. For example Toyota and Citroen.