Ford Essex V6 Engine (Canadian)

Ford Essex V6 Engine (Canadian)

The Ford Essex V6 engine was a 90° V6 engine family built by Ford Motor Company at the Essex Engine Plant in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Unlike the British Essex V6, the Canadian Essex used a 90° V configuration, in addition to having different displacements and valvetrains. With Ford's Essex Engine Plant idled as of November 2007, this engine was succeeded by the Ford Duratec 35.

The Canadian Essex is an overhead valve (OHV, or pushrod) design featuring aluminum heads, which reduced its weight considerably and made it a very powerful engine for its size. The engine was initially offered in only a 3.8-liter displacement, being used in a variety of subcompact through large cars, minivans, and some pickup trucks. A 4.2-liter version was introduced in the mid-1990s for use in the F-150 and Ford E-Series, later, the Freestar and Monterey. The 3.8 L V6 was replaced by a 3.9 L version in 2004, though changes were minimal. The Essex and the smaller Vulcan V6 were the last traditional overhead valve engines built by Ford.

The Canadian Essex's origins are somewhat controversial. A common, but erroneous, belief is that the Essex was based on the 5.0 L Windsor V8 engine, because they both have a 90° vee configuration, are OHV, and that a 5.0 L V8 less two cylinders would make a V6 displacing around 3.8 liters. Though the practice of deriving a V6 from a V8 was not unheard of (auto manufacturers have derived V6s from V8 designs before, such as GM making the 1978-‘79 Chevrolet 200 cid (3.3 L) V6/90° from the lowly 267 cid (4.4L) SBC V8, the 1980-'84 Chevrolet 229 cid (3.8L) V6/90° from the 305 cid (5.0L) SBC V8 and the 1985-up Chevrolet 262 cid (4.3L) V6/90° Vortec 4300 from the SBC Vortec 5700 and Chrysler making the Magnum 3.9 from the 5.2), several important differences between the Windsor's design and the Essex's, such as their considerably different bore and stroke, made a common design lineage implausible.

One source states that the Essex is instead a reverse engineered Buick V6 engine. Toward the end of the 1970s, Ford needed a new six-cylinder engine that was powerful and compact enough to be used in a mid-size car while meeting increasingly stricter emissions and fuel efficiency standards. Since Ford did not have an engine available that could be readily made to meet these requirements, one needed to be developed. The quickest and least expensive approach in accomplishing this was to copy an existing engine from a competitor, which ended up being the Buick V6 from General Motors. Ford's resulting V6 was very similar to that of the original Buick engine — down to an unusual external oil pump design that was common in Buick engines and without precedent in modern Fords — and had a nearly identical displacement. In fact, one of the only major differences between the two engines early on was Ford's use of aluminum heads as opposed to the cast-iron ones used in the original Buick design. However, in the years since the Essex V6's debut, design revisions from both Ford and GM to their respective V6 designs have differentiated their engines from each other to a point that any relationship between the two designs is not as obvious as it once was.