The New 2.3L EcoBoost Looks Right at Home in the 2015 Mustang Engine

Although Ford has talked about the new 2.3L EcoBoost in the 2015 Mustang at length, the company has been careful not to show off the underhood area of the new EcoBoost Mustang but thanks to an onlooker who was quick with the cell phone camera, we have a video showing the new turbocharged Mustang engine.

I should start by pointing out the fact that the engine shown in the screen shot above and the video below showing the 2.3L EcoBoost mill under the hood of the 2015 Ford Mustang wasn’t meant to be shown off. Even on the media days at the 2014 North American International Auto Show, we didn’t get to check out the engine bay of the newest Mustang, but during the setup process someone from Ford had the hood of a new EcoBoost-powered 2015 Mustang open and it quickly drew a crowd. In that crowd was a member of the Hooniverse team who whipped out the old cell phone and caught 8 seconds of video of the EcoBoost engine in the new Mustang.

The fact that the EcoBoost engine in this 2015 Ford Mustang wasn’t meant to be shown off explains why the engine is particularly “pretty”. I would imagine that when we do get our first official look at the EcoBoost-filled engine bay of the 2015 Mustang, it will feature more aesthetic features to jazz up the engine bay. After all, Mustang owners love showing off their engines and I figure that if nothing else, the production version will have a nice looking valve cover that makes it very clear that there is a high performance 4-cylinder engine under the hood. However, you can see in the video below that there don’t appear to be any dress-up features added to the engine of this early Mustang show car.

Although the 2015 Ford Mustang engine bay is designed to fit the much larger 5.0L V8, the underhood area of this Mustang doesn’t look like it is empty with the EcoBoost 4-cylinder mill. The plastic cladding on either side of the cylinder head (that’s in the middle) stretch down towards the strut towers to cover the intake and exhaust manifolds; features which help will out the engine bay a great deal and help make this engine look like it fills out the V8-sized space.

However, there appears to be plenty of room around the front of the engine for aftermarket tuners to get in there and add high performance components to allow the EcoBoost 2.3L 4-cylinder to make far more than the 300 horsepower and 300lb-ft of torque guaranteed by Ford Motor Company.

While the EcoBoost powered version of the 2015 Ford Mustang is designed to be the most fuel efficient of the bunch, the growth in the popularity of high performance small engines will almost surely lead tuner shops to jump on the new 4-cylinder Mustang. Many shops that have stuck to smaller engine vehicles like the Ford Focus, the Dodge Neon or any of various sporty foreign cars have found ways to get big power from a small engine and we can expect those shops to have a big impact on the performance applications of the new EcoBoost Mustang.

Image captured from The Hooniverse video included here