I bet you’ve found yourself in this position: you’re sitting at an outdoor cafe, a hoagie in one hand and a sock puppet in the other, because you hate eating alone. As you’re happily feeding your puppet friend finger-bites of hoagie, a man frantically approaches you, knocking over chairs and children and climbing onto your table. He seizes your face in both his hands, brings his face nose-to-nose with yours, and demands, loudly, “Tell me what the biggest three-cylinder car is!”
Now, usually when this happens, most of us will mutter something like “a Wartburg?” and then pepper-spray ourselves to freedom, taking off running in the opposite direction of the three-cylinder weirdo before he can recover to ask you again.
I may take issue with the methods, but the three-cylinder questioning vigilante brings up a good, and, let’s be honest, important question: what is the largest passenger car ever to rock a three-banger?
I wasn’t really kidding about the Wartburg guess there; the Wartburg 353 Tourist wasn’t exactly a small car, especially by the standards of three-cylinder cars. I think by far the most common three-cylinder engine type used in passenger cars – there are likely some large, weird diesel three-cylinder engines, so I’m not counting those – were two-stroke threes, the kind pioneered by DKW.
DKW’s two-stroke three was a very clever engine design, with minimal moving parts and good fuel economy, with the added plus of being smoky enough to give everywhere you idle a certain moody, noir-film-like feel. A number of other cars adopted this engine design, like the aforementioned East German Wartburgs, and companies like Saab, which adapted the design for most of their early cars.
But none of these cars was especially large. It wasn’t until the advent of the modern re-emergence of three-cylinder engines that we actually saw some larger vehicles using them. I think the two best candidates for Largest Three-Cylinder Gasoline-Powered Passenger Car are the Chevy Trax and the Ford Bronco Sport.
Here’s a Trax:
…and here’s a Bronco Sport:
Between the two, the Bronco Sport is a good bit larger: about 3 inches wider, nine inches taller, 500 pounds heavier, all that. And it’s still definitely a three-cylinder engine under the hood! I counted, even:
I’m pretty sure the Bronco Sport has to be the largest mass-produced passenger vehicle ever to rock a gas-powered three-pot engine. Everything else is Suzuki Swifts or Festivas or Mirages or whatever, all small city cars.
But I could be wrong. The BMW i8, for example, has a three-cylinder engine as part of its hybrid drivetrain; it’s smaller than the Bronco Sport, but by some metrics, just barely. The Bronco Sport weighs 3,458 pounds, while the i8 is 3,455 pounds – only 3 pounds lighter! I’ve made sandwiches bigger than that!
So maybe there is some other unit of a three-banger I’m forgetting? Or does the Bronco Sport deserve the prize here? Please, help me think this through in the comments so I can finally get some sleep!
Top graphic image: Jason Torchinsky
Ugh! When will we learn? The evils of odd cylinder counts are numerous and vile. Sometimes I still feel like my penance for the one I owned is ongoing. Mark my words, odd cylinder count engines are the end of civilization as we know it.
I’ve had rental 3-cyl cars. They’re adquate.
I have, however, had a 1L VW Skoda rental with a crew of guys for work. It was awesome, we all thought it was a little diesel until I popped open the fuel door to fill it.
Even if we said only in the USA the Escape is bigger and had the same 1.5L i3 as the Bronco sport and is still available new on the lots even though production stopped last year
I often forget to check by-lines before I begin an article. In this case I got one sentence in, read the words “sock puppet” and my brain said, “Ah. Torch.”
There are very few writers I can identify, Autopian or otherwise, within 2 sentences. Jason is definitely one of them.
Would something that had a Detroit diesel 3 cylinder count? Was used in a variety of medium duty and heavy duty trucks.
One trip to the UK about a year or two ago I drove a Peugeot 5008 with a tiny 1.2l three-cylinder turbo. It was… adequate. Getting around the midlands doesn’t require a 300hp V6.