Should V8 engines be one family regardless of crankshaft?

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1

Hi
I have tried out automation since the update. A lot of changes! One feature is the engine family.
Should V8s and flatplane v8s be the same family? The only thing that separates the two would be the crankshaft.
Not sure how it could be implemented, for the crankshaft type, have
Cast Iron
Forged Steel
Billet Steel
Flat Cast Iron
Flat Forged Steel
Flat Billet Steel

and obviously only the flat options would be available for the V8. This would mean one v8 engine could share the same production line; one cross plane variant for a luxury car tuned for smoothness and a flatplane variant for a sports car that needs responsiveness.

Or is that not how it is like in real life?

2

From what I’ve read on flatplane vs. crossplane engines, the mechanical difference appears to only be the crankshaft, so that sounds pretty reasonable to me. The various performance characteristics are all emergent from that. The devs like to see real-life examples of things before they make decisions, so it might help to find some examples of engine families containing both types!

3

I know personally that the V8 race engines from BMW (Used on the M3 GT2, Z4 GTE/3, etc) that are based upon the S65 E92 M3 production engine are flatplane V8’s, even though the S65 itself is a crossplane V8.

There’s always a reason it’s not implemented though.

4

Ford’s Modular V8s are crossplane with the exception of the nifty new 5.2L ‘Voodoo’.

5

Looking at the Jalopnik article about flat-plane vs. cross-plane V8s, it seems like a cross-plane V8 needs a bigger crank case. So you might be able to replace the base-model cross-plane crankshaft with flat-plane crankshaft for higher performance, but not the other way around.

6

For the reference of less Ford-literate posters:

The regular 2016 Mustang GT is available with a 5.0L crossplane V8. The Shelby GT350 is instead equipped with a 5.2L flatplane V8 of the same family.

Crossplanes and flatplanes sharing the same engine family are rather uncommon, but in theory there’s nothing stopping you from building half of your SuperFast Booscht8 engines as crossplanes and the other half as flatplanes from the same block.

7

There is 2 groups of components that differ between XP and FP engines; the crank (duh!) and the camshaft/s.
These are the ONLY things that are not the same, the rest can be identical.