Return of the Big Block: 2020 Ford F-250 Super Duty 7.3 Gas V-8

From Car and Driver

This is deliberate. Ford could've designed its new big-bore gasoline truck engine to any size it wanted, but it chose to give each cylinder a 4.22-inch bore and a 3.98-inch stroke. Cylinder volume multiplied by eight gives you 445 cubic inches of displacement or, more to the point, 7.3 liters. Which happens to be the displacement of Ford's first direct-injected and turbocharged diesel V-8, the filthy and indestructible 7.3 Powerstroke from the 1990s and early 2000s. Those torque ogres were basically Navistar bus engines that laughed sooty smoke rings at the burdens presented by mere pickup trucks. Plenty of them racked up round-trip-to-the-moon mileage, and the phrase "seven point three" remains an incantation that fills F-series Super Duty fans with the warm and fuzzies. Ford is sorry not sorry if truck buyers develop a deep and inexplicable belief that its new V-8 is similarly immortal. You know, another eight cubic centimeters per cylinder and it would've been a 7.4. But it's not.

This new pushrod 7.3-liter V-8 replaces Ford's overhead-cam 6.8-liter V-10, an engine that sounded like a sick hippo and was even less fun to be around. With a 90-degree V, a forged steel crank, a cast-iron block, and aluminum heads, the 7.3 isn't exactly a radical design. But it does embrace hot-rodding best practices. Check out those exhaust manifolds, which look an awful lot like headers. On the intake side, you can see straight into the air filter, above our F-250 example's passenger-side headlight, and from there it's a short trip to the bundle-of-snakes intake manifold. This thing looks like it's got a healthy set of lungs, an impression confirmed by a surprisingly zingy (for a gigantic truck engine) 5800-rpm fuel cutoff. Horsepower is 430 at 5500 rpm, with 475 pound-feet of torque cresting at 4000 rpm.

Don't let that latter figure lead you to think the 7.3 needs a lot of revs to do its job. Fortified by variable valve timing, this big V-8 heaves out more than 400 pound-feet of torque from 1500 rpm until the threshold of the fuel cutoff—as distinct from the indicated redline, which begins at a fanciful 6000 rpm. We towed two different trailers ranging from 4000 to 5000 pounds, and the 7.3 was supremely unbothered by either, loafing at less than 2000 rpm with Ford's 10-speed automatic transmission in top gear as if the truck wasn't lugging five or six tons of gross combined vehicle weight. Maybe if you were approaching the 7.3's max tow rating (21,200 pounds for a dual-rear-wheel F-350 pulling a gooseneck trailer), you might not get into 10th gear quite as often.