GDi History

Contrary to what is generally written, Mercedes was not the first company to use fuel injection, or direct injection, on a production gasoline powered car. Both the 1952 Goliath GP700, and Gotbrud Superior 600, used Bosch direct fuel injection. The 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL, the first sports car to use fuel injection, used direct injection. The Bosch fuel injectors were placed into the bores on the cylinder wall used by the spark plugs in other Mercedes-Benz six-cylinder engines (the spark plugs were relocated to the cylinder head). Later, more mainstream applications of fuel injection favoured less expensive indirect injection methods.

It was not until 1996 that gasoline direct injection reappeared on the market. Mitsubishi Motors was the first with a GDI engine in the Japanese market Galant/Legnum's 4G93 1.8 L straight-4, which it subsequently brought to Europe in 1997 in the Mitsubishi Carisma, although Europe's high-sulphur fuel led to emissions problems, and fuel efficiency was less than expected. It also developed the first six cylinder GDI powerplant, the 6G74 3.5 L V6, in 1997. Mitsubishi applied this technology widely, producing over one million GDI engines in four families by 2001, PSA Peugeot Citroën and Hyundai Motors both licensed Mitsubishi's GDI technology in 1999, the latter using the first GDI V8. DaimlerChrysler produced a special engine for 2000, offered only in markets with low sulphur fuel.

Although other companies have since developed gasoline direct injection engines, GDI (with a capitalised letter "I") remains a registered trademark of Mitsubishi Motors.

Later GDi engines have been tuned and marketed for their high performance. Volkswagen/Audi led the trend with their 2001 GDi engine, under the product name Fuel Stratified Injection (FSI). The technology, adapted from Audi's Le Mans racecars.

BMW followed with a GDi V12. This initial BMW system used low-pressure injectors and could not enter lean-burn mode, but the company introduced its second-generation High Precision Injection system on the updated N52 straight-6 in 2006. This system surpasses many others with a wider envelope of lean-burn time, increasing overall efficiency. PSA is cooperating with BMW on a new line of engines which will make its first appearance in the 2007 MINI Cooper S.

General Motors had planned to produce a full range of GDi engines by 2002, but so far only two such engines have been introduced — in 2004, a version of the 2.2 L Ecotec used by the Opel Vectra and in 2005, a 2.0 L Ecotec with VVT technology for the Pontiac Solstice GXP.

In 2004 Isuzu Motors produced the first GDi engine sold in a mainstream American vehicle. Standard on the 2004 Axiom and optional on the 2004 Rodeo. Isuzu claimed the benefit of GDi is that the vaporizing fuel has a cooling effect, allowing a higher compression ratio (10.3 to 1 versus 9.1 to 1) that boosts output by 20 horsepower and that 0-to-60 times drop from 8.9 to just 7.5 seconds, with the quarter-mile being cut from 16.5 seconds to 15.8 ticks.

Toyota's 2GR-FSE V6 will use a combination of direct and indirect injection in 2006. It uses two injectors per cylinder, a traditional port injector and a new direct injector.

Mazda uses their own version of direct injection in the Mazdaspeed 6 / Mazda 6 MPS, the CX-7 sport-ute, and the new Mazdaspeed 3. It is referred to as Direct Injection Spark Ignition.

EnviroFit, a non-profit corporation sponsored by Colorado State University, has developed direct injection retrofit kits for heavily polluting two-stroke motorcycles in a project to reduce sometimes deadly air pollution in Southeast Asia. The kits use a technology invented and developed by Orbital Corporation Limited of Australia. Orbital's technology injects a mixture of fuel and compressed air into the combustion chamber instead of injecting fuel only, the most common system in automobiles. The compressed mixture rapidly expands as it enters the combustion chamber, and this breaks up the fuel into very small droplets which are more completely and efficiently burned, compared to carburetor and other fuel systems. The Orbital Combustion Process reduces two-stroke fuel consumption by 35 percent, according to EnviroFit. The organization, composed mostly of present and former CSU students and staff, has begun installing the kits on the millions of two-stroke taxis (motorcycles with big sidecars) in The Philippines. EnviroFit says its OCP kits reduce carbon monoxide emissions by 76 percent, carbon dioxide by 26 percent, and hydrocarbon emissions by 89 percent. Orbital's OCP two-stroke system is used in Mercury's Optimax DFI outboard engines, in Tohatsu's TLDI DFI outboard engines, in Bombardier's SeaDoo personal watercraft, and in motorscooters manufactured by Aprilia, Piaggio, Peugeot, and Kymco. Research on using the OCP system in four-stroke engines is underway.