Back in Spring of 2015 Christian von Koenigsegg told reporters that Freevalve technology is "getting ready for fruition".
In November 2016, Chinese automobile manufacturer Qoros Auto displayed the Qoros 3 hatchback at the 2016 Guangzhou Motor Show. This car featured a camless “Qamfreee” engine using freevalve technology. The Qoros3 never left the concept stage and never became a mass production reality.
In 2020 The Koenigsegg Gemera was unveiled. It featured a 2.0 liter inline three cylinder engine with freevalve that makes 600 horsepower. Production of the Gemera was supposed to begin in 2021. The date has since been moved to 2024.
So it has been 8 years since the announcement of Freevalve but it seems that today in 2023 we are no closer to this technology being reality than we were back in 2015. Why is that? Well, that’s exactly what I will attempt to answer in this video and more importantly I will also explain why freevalve isn’t as big of a deal as it initially seems and why it’s possible that this technology will never become mainstream mass production reality.
Don’t get me wrong. Freevalve is incredibly cool and I would love to see it become reality and I would love to own a vehicle with freevalve, but unfortunately the common sense realist inside me is skeptical and to explain the reasons behind my skepticism we first have to understand why freevalve is touted as a revolutionary technology that can dramatically improve engines.
As you probably know valves let fresh air in and exhaust out of the engine. And the camshaft is the physical metal “programing” of those valves. The camshaft determines when, how much and how long the valves open. The problem with a traditional fixed valve timing is that our “programing” always stay the same. Once the camshaft is ground everything is 100% fixed throughout the entire rpm range of the engine.
So let’s imagine that we have to choose a camshaft for an engine and let’s imagine that we want to extract maximum performance from our engine. So we choose a camshaft with very high lift and very high duration. This let’s in a lot of air into the engine we then add lots of fuel and produce powerful and fast combustion and make big power. But we pay a very high price for this. At low rpm our vehicle feels sluggish and unresponsive and our idle is unstable and produces high emissions.
The reason behind this is that low rpm means low piston speeds. And low piston speeds means low air velocity. Low air velocity means poor air and fuel mixing. Poor air and fuel mixing means poor combustion. Poor combustion means reduced torque.
Now the key thing here is that air velocity and air quantity sort of work against each other. If you have a large opening or cross-section you can have high air flow quantity but the larger your cross section the lower your air velocity. So at low rpm what we actually want to do is open the valve less in order to reduce our cross-section and increase air velocity in order to improve air fuel mixing and restore some low torque rpm. But of course if we reduce lift we reduce our maximum potential performance. For now we will ignore the fact that high lift creates added strain on the valve train and can cause valve float.
So how do we fix this? It’s actually pretty easy and straightforward. Get rid of the fixed metal programming and introduce infinitely variable programming. Get rid of the camshaft and instead create an individual high-tech solenoid for each valve. No longer is the valve opening speed a slave to the piston speed and the camshaft lobe shape. The valve now opens near instantly. It remains open as much and as long as you want whenever you want. Your only real constraint now is to avoid hitting the piston. Everything else is infinitely variable and more importantly it’s variable completely independently from each other. The end result is that you can have it all. Dramatic high rpm performance as well as low emissions and high torque and responsiveness at low rpm and low throttle openings. Throttle? What am I saying, if we can infinitely vary the valve opening we can use the valves to decide how much air comes into the engine, we don’t even need a throttle anymore. By getting rid of the throttle we improve efficiency by getting rid of the pumping losses. What are pumping losses? Try breathing through a straw. That’s exactly what the engine is doing when it’s trying to ingest air through a tiny orifice provided by a throttle butterfly that is only slightly open.
So Freevalve is obviously amazing. Why then am I saying how it’s not a big deal? It’s not a big deal because what I just did is compare freevalve to a fixed valve timing engine. And this is also what freevalve has been doing themselves.
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