Motorheads of the world rejoice. Yet another car manufacturer has announced plans to keep building newer and more advanced big displacement V8 engines.
The death of the dinosaur internal combustion engine has been postponed once again. This time by Toyota. Now, personally, I’m more of a rotary guy myself. Not that I can afford one, but you’ve got to respect a good V8 no matter which kind of car you’re into. When Toyota dropped the V8 option on their Land Cruisers with turbo 6s now being the largest capacity option, many said that it was the end of the road for V8s in what used to be the staple of Australian off-road motoring, the V8 Land Cruiser. But Toyota have now announced that the V8 is back, baby, with plans for a high-powered twin turbo 4.4 4 L V8 Donk, which will first appear in high performance Lexus machines, but will be retuned as a workhorse motor for, among other things, future Land Cruisers.
And this matters, or at least it does to someone like me, because I consider the internal combustion engine to be one of the modern wonders of the world. And putting aside my weird personal fetish for spinning triangles, I consider a turbo V8 to be one of the greatest triumphs of mankind. We literally took fire and compressed it into tiny little boxes that go up and down and boom boom go fast. It’s incredible. And the V8s are not dead yet. Now, to be fair, Toyota are not the first to announce new big displacement V8s or even V12s. Mercedes-Benz had been downsizing their engines for a decade or so, putting these tiny little, highly strung four-cylinder engines into their AMG C63, among others. Now, I’m old enough to remember when an AMG meant it was a V8 or bust. Well, Mercedes have finally found their balls, and they’ve announced that they’re working on a new replacement for the now 11-year-old M1784 L V8 engine that they have.
The new one will incorporate hybrid electrification, which is pretty much inevitable so they can meet the upcoming Euro7 emissions standards.
But even so, this new V8 is no shrinking violet. With the engine it’s replacing having already achieved over 700 horsepower in AMG cars and 800 horsepower in partnership with Aston Martin, they’re promising that this all new engine will pack even more punch than the existing one. And speaking of Aston Martin, even V12s have life left in them with last year’s refresh of their 5.2 L turbo V12 with over 800 horsepower and no electrification in sight, just a clever anti-lag system so that you get instant throttle response when you hit the shouty pedal. Sadly, Aston Martin don’t believe that they’ll be able to make their V12 compliant with the emissions regulations expected to come into force in 2028.
But don’t cry into your wallets just yet because I predict that the world’s attitude towards CO2 emissions will be very different by 2028 and that once again when we get there, the death of the big displacement dinosaur burners will have been greatly exaggerated once again. Why do I think that? Well, because of what’s happening with all of the car makers’ electrification targets and of course because Trump. We’ll get into the details in a sec, but first, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project. And yeah, I’m a bit of a closet petrol head. So, when a story like Toyota announcing a new V8 comes along, yeah, you’d better believe I’m going to grab that story with both hands. Now, I help busy Australians to keep up with the world as it changes around us. And as today’s video proves, not all of the changes are bad.
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Now, why am I confident that not only will we see the new engines that have been announced by Toyota and Mercedes and others, but that even after that big displacement internal combustion engines won’t be disappearing anytime in my lifetime? Why? Well, I could prove my point by talking about all the car manufacturers who have abandoned or delayed, which is like abandoning in small steps, their EV sales targets. These examples would include Ford, who won applause for promising to be all EV in Europe by 2030, and now they are scaling back their EV plans everywhere. Same story at General Motors, who’d planned to build 1 million EVs this year if everything had gone to plan, but it didn’t, and they’ve had to write off 1.6 6 billion that’s with a B dollars worth of EV related assets in 2025 which is essentially an admission by the company that their investment in EV infrastructure has been nearly a complete waste of money.
Or I could mention Toyota whose V8 announcement was the catalyst for this video and who are in many ways the godfathers of hybrids with their Prius and yet they are struggling to get traction for their pure EVs. It must be said though that their hybrids are performing very well, punfully intended. Mercedes played the game too, winning plaudits for promising to sell 50% EVs by 2025. Well, that’s this year. And they’ve pushed that target back to 2030. And given that US sales are just 9% EVs, I think it’s only a matter of time before Mercedes have to push that target back as well. Then there’s Volvo, the world’s most progressive car company, who promised to be 100% EV by 2030. Thing is the owners of Volvo, well, they also own Polestar, which are a 100% EV car company. And Polestar, well, they’re at risk of being deregistered off the NASDAQ because their shares are now down at 24 US cents each when they used to be nearly 5.5 US each 4 years ago.
So, yeah, that pure EV experiment will not be filling Volvo with confidence.
So, even Volvo have had to moderate their ambitions. Now they’re aiming for 100% hybridization instead of 100% pure EV. And to be clear, hybrid tech does make a lot of sense in a lot of contexts. I’m not a lite. I’m not against any new or better tech in cars. I just think that markets and consumers should decide what they want, not bureaucrats with quotas and emissions standards that no one asked for. I could go on about Stellantis and Volkswagen and Renault and Jaguar, but actually all that’s beside the point because these companies walking back their EV ambitions, well, that’s just the symptom. It’s not the cause.
So, what is the cause? Well, the cause, you’ll be pleased to know, is us. We did this. Around the world, we are seeing people rejecting the fearmongering of the climate change doomsayers, refusing to spend their hard-earned money on nonsense vanity items like EVs in anything like the numbers we were told that we had to. And in just the last 18 months, we’ve finally begun to see people speaking up in enough numbers that it is shifting the political polls and changing the political incentives. And now even our politicians are being forced to follow us. Yes, locally in Australia, we just saw the Nationals Party abandon their net zero by 2050 target, and I expect the Liberals will do the same very soon. But actually, that’s small beer compared to what Trump is doing in the good old US of A.
And no, I’m not just talking about his drill baby drill energy policies, although they are pretty great. I’m talking about the fact that the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, under Donald Trump’s leadership, with Lee Zeldin at the helm, well, they are working on repealing the so-called endangerment finding that is the basis of all the vehicle emissions restrictions in the USA. Now, I covered some of this in an earlier video. It’s all a bit technical, so I’m not going to dive into the nitty-gritty of it all here. You can check out Topher Project episode 136 if you want all the details, but it’s worth touching on the big news here in this video because what’s happening with this endangerment finding is literally going to change the world for everyone, but especially for petrol heads like me, and if you’re still watching, then I suspect petrol heads like you too.
In a nutshell, the EPA in 2009 decided that rising levels of CO2 were a danger to human health, which then meant that it could be regulated by the EPA,
which is the entire basis of all of the CO2 emissions standards in the USA. The EPA under Lee Zeldin are working to reverse that endangerment finding, and they are likely to achieve that milestone in probably the first half of 2026. There’s a bit of a process that has to be gone through, but they’re already well underway through that process. Now, if they do that, it will instantly kill every CO2 emissions related regulation in the USA.
Now, you may say, “Who cares? That’s just the USA.” And that’s true. And the vehicle markets in the EU, Asia, and emerging in China, India, and even Africa are absolutely massive, or at least they will be. But for now, the US car market moves 50% more cars than the EU market does every year. And the US is the EU’s largest export market for obvious reasons. The EU cannot afford to ignore what happens in the US car market. And if lowered emissions standards, thanks to the reversing of the EPA’s endangerment finding, suddenly mean that other car manufacturers have an advantage because they can make their cars cheaper or make them more powerful or just better in any way, then the EU manufacturers and the EU itself will have to carefully consider how they plan to respond to that challenge because they cannot afford to do nothing and miss out on the US market entirely.
So, if the US walks away from CO2 reductions and China’s CO2 output keeps skyrocketing and consumers all over the world are watching this and saying, “Hey, well, if they’re allowed to raise their CO2 emissions, why are we over here suffering?” Well, then what starts in America? Well, that will quickly spread to the rest of the world. Now, if Lee Zeldin does get this reversal of the EPA’s endangerment finding done in the first half of next year, which I genuinely expect he will, that will allow two full years before the 2028 emissions targets that are widely expected to kill Aston Martin’s V12. And I personally think that 2 years is probably long enough to save the V12. I think the ripple effect of Trump’s actions will have reached the regulators in every car market by then.
And whilst I don’t expect the EU, for example, to remove their Euro emissions standards, in fact, I doubt they even know how to remove a regulation. They’ve never done that before. But I do believe that whilst they won’t remove the existing regulations, there is a high probability that they will freeze their regulations at that Euro7 level, which is the one that comes out next year. And thanks to Trump and Lee Zeldin, petrol heads like you and me will be able to enjoy absurdly powerful, joyously loud V8 and V12 engines. Yes, probably partnered with turbos and with hybrid systems, but nevertheless still very much red-blooded, big displacement, multi-cylinder, dinosaur burning, earthquake inducing, grin producing engines that would have made our ancestors proud.
So enjoy the good news. Toyota are returning to the V8 Club in style, but also enjoy the fact that as of now, I predict that the death of the V8 engine is dead.
Now, if it could just bring that rotary back to life, well, then I’d die happy. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to not only keep up with the news, but to actually understand what’s going on. If you’ve appreciated this dive into some motoring news, then please help me to keep the Topher Project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you should definitely check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
Thank you for watching all the way to the end. Please like, comment what you think is going to happen. Am I right that these big engines are here to stay, or am I wrong? Tell me what you think in the comments, and make sure that you’ve subscribed. Check out this recommended video that YouTube thinks you will like.
