I'm a fan of weird engine designs, much to the chagrin of my wife. I say this, as I once played host to a Volkswagen Passat W8, which was powered by a halved Bugatti Veyron engine and stuck into a pedestrian sedan by the madman that was Ferdinand Piech. That car cost me $10,000 to buy, and then another $9,000 in fixes over the roughly eight months of ownership.
It's also the only thing that ever caused my wife to threaten divorce, a sticking point she continually threatens whenever anyone mentions a W8 or sends me a listing for one for sale. Because while the car was a lemon, I still sorta loved it. At least when it worked, which was maybe a week out of those eight months.
Why am I pontificating on the oddity that was the Passat W8? Well, because MV Agusta just quietly debuted a new concept engine at EICMA, and it's one of the wildest things that the show's produced, even if MV Agusta doesn't yet want to give us any details. But what I can tell you is that it's a 5-cylinder engine that's shaped like a square.
Or rather, it's shaped like a trapezoid, and that's so much weirder and cool than Piech's W8.
First and foremost, MV Agusta's "Cinque Cilindri" does not resemble Volkswagen's VR6, nor Audi's legendary 5-cylinder. Well, sorta. There's a bit of VR6 in there, but the layout more closely resembles that of Ariel's old square 4-cylinder from back in the day, as our friends at The Autopian pointed out linking back to our own coverage of Ariel's old engine design. Inception? Unclear.
But while MV Agusta calls it a square, like Ariel, the setup is actually three cylinders in a line, and two in the second, which is more like a trapezoid than anything else. Again, wild.
As for hard facts on the engine, or its future, we're left with little more than what a company representative told some folks on the EICMA floor, as when I reached out to MV Agusta last week, all I got were crickets, and it seems that no one else has received any offical press information either.
The Autopian actually went to the lengths of using YouTube's auto-translating function on one video with the rep talking about the engine, to which they state, "Obviously, an engine will be developed as a platform that can have multiple displacements, from 850cc up to 1150cc. We are talking about an engine that is capable. It will be capable of delivering more than 240 horsepower and more than 130 newton-meters [95 pound-feet] of torque. So something truly new. We are MV Agusta, we wanted to differentiate ourselves from the others, we wanted to continue to be unique, and this is what we have thought for our near future."
If those numbers are to be believed, that'd be one hell of a motor. I mean, for context, that spicy W8 in my Passat only made 280 horsepower from the factory, though a considerable amount more torque. Still, a high-revving, 5-cylinder motorcycle engine is insane, and I'd love to hear what it sounds like. I suspect somewhere between a VR6 and Audi's 5-cylinder, but who knows? Maybe it'd sound even more bananas than anything I can congure?
Yet, nothing has been confirmed for this engine's future, nor even that it really exists outside some photos and videos from the EICMA floor. Hell, in the age of OpenAI's Sora, along with all the other LLMs masquerading as AI generators, and the hellscape that is Facebook and all its AI scams, maybe this is one big fake-out ploy? Maybe the Cinque Cilindri doesn't actually exist? Maybe, unlike bigfoot, it's all in our heads?
But if MV Agusta wants to confirm or deny something, they have my email and phone number.
