This Ambitious Chrysler Engine Never Made It To Showrooms

Towards the second half of the 20th century, the quest to create an engine with more power, long-term reliability, and higher efficiency was something akin to the search for El Dorado. In their efforts to find the city of gold, so to speak, automakers explored various powertrain designs, including two-stroke engines. A forbidden fruit in the United States due to their high emissions, two-stroke engines were rather common in European passenger cars.

Saab, for example, sold passenger cars powered by two-stroke engines for years, while General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler developed their own systems. Chrysler's research and development began in 1989, and they did indeed create a two-stroke engine suitable for passenger cars, but it never went into production.

Two-stroke engines

Traditional four-stroke engines remain the standard among passenger vehicles to this day. In order to operate, a four-stroke engine, as the name implies, requires four piston strokes: intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust. Two-stroke engines aimed to produce a power stroke every crankshaft revolution rather than every other revolution. As such, a two-stroke engine could make smaller cars more powerful and efficient.

Two-stroke engines lacked a camshaft, among some 200 other parts, resulting in a smaller, lighter footprint under the hood of a car. They were also cheaper to produce and featured a higher power-to-weight ratio. On paper, a two-stroke engine sounds ideal, especially for smaller cars, but in practice, they had their shortcomings.

Prior to Chrysler's research and development into two-stroke engines, the powerplant was heavily utilized in motorcycles and marine applications. Unfortunately, while they worked in one arena, making the jump to passenger cars was an entirely different beast. Traditional two-stroke engines mixed oil with gasoline at a defined ratio, 50:1, for example. As the fuel-air mixture made its way through the engine, the oil lubricating the cylinder walls burned.

Two-stroke engines also faced several challenges that would make them unviable for passenger cars, especially with emissions regulations growing stricter with each passing decade. While a traditional four-stroke engine can vary its intake and exhaust timing via the camshaft, two-stroke engine timing is fixed by the pistons. As a result, emissions, performance, and fuel efficiency would be tough to optimize, if they could be managed at all.

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Chrysler's approach

In 1989, Chrysler entered a joint venture with Mercury Marine to develop and produce a two-stroke engine suitable for roadworthy passenger cars. The goal was to optimize the intake of air and release of exhaust without the pitfalls faced by these same engines in other fields. While European automakers utilized two-stroke engines in their cars until the 1960s, or late 1980s in the case of East Germany, their poor fuel economy and emissions kept them out of the United States.

Led by Joseph Goulart, Chrysler's 20-person team set out to solve the two-stroke engine puzzle. Notably, Chrysler and Mercury Marine each funded their own end of the project, with information shared via committee. The American automaker moved forward by applying features common in four-stroke engines to address the two-stroke engine's issues.

Chrysler engineers used a pressure-fed lubrication system to solve the oil mixing with fuel and smoking issues. Improved loop scavenging helps reduce fuel loss, and automotive-grade bearings were added to the engine's design to improve reliability.

Unfortunately, the two-stroke engine's problems proved too vast for Chrysler's engineers to definitively solve. For starters, some of the excess fuel that hadn't burned up in the combustion process continued to escape during scavenging, resulting in high levels of hydrocarbon emissions. Fuel economy was also worse compared to four-stroke engines, and controlling oil usage remained a major issue. All these issues combined resulted in reliability and environmental concerns.

Despite these problems, Chrysler still planned to move forward with their two-stroke engine project. The automaker announced plans to launch the Dodge Neon with a 1.1-liter three-cylinder version of its direct-injection two-stroke engine under the hood. The plans suggested that the Neon and its two-stroke engine would debut for the 1997 model year. In the end, the Neon made its way to market for the 1995 model year, two years ahead of schedule, but the two-stroke engine was nowhere to be found.

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The aftermath

In 1996, after seven years of research and development, Chrysler pulled the plug on its two-stroke engine project. Tightening emissions regulations meant that the powerplant, with its nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbon emissions, wouldn't be viable in the near future. While the engine itself could head to production on a mechanical level, it wouldn't be able to displace the four-stroke engines that powered, and continue to power, most American vehicles.

Chrysler's seven years of research and development into their two-stroke engine project wasn't for naught, though. It bore fruit in the form of several innovations that could be applied to the existing four-stroke engines of the day, including a direct-injection fuel system and high-pressure fuel pump. It also resulted in a 10% improvement in city fuel economy over comparable four-stroke engines.

Final thoughts

While the seven-year project ultimately never saw the inside of a showroom, Chrysler's two-stroke engine project served as a crucial stepping stone in the development of modern four-stroke engines. In the end, Floyd Allen, Chrysler executive engineer, core powertrain at the time, believed it was worth the time and money.

"It was a great investment," Allen said in a press release. "Seven years ago, two-strokes were an unknown quantity to us. Now, it's one more piece of the technology puzzle we understand. Would we do it again? In a New York minute!"

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This story was originally published June 30, 2026 at 6:45 PM.