One engine, three badges: BMW, Toyota, and a British 4x4

Good morning. Today's issue ended up with a theme I didn't plan: one engine. BMW's B58 inline-six powers the truck on the Auction Desk, the fifth-generation Toyota Supra, and two cars I own.

The rest is about what engines and factories cost. GM published the numbers on its first new small-block V8s in more than a decade, and the chemicals billionaire behind the Grenadier is a few billion dollars into learning the car business.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Auction Desk: a 1,200-mile INEOS Grenadier that stickered at $84,380 and closes this afternoon.

One Big Story: GM's all-new truck V8s, and the two famous displacements they bring back.

Engineer's Corner: why the BMW B58 keeps getting called the new 2JZ.

Garage Economics: Jim Ratcliffe, INEOS, and what it costs to start a car company.

Let’s roll.

This 2024 INEOS Grenadier is live on Bring a Trailer and closes this afternoon at 4:23 PM Eastern. It's in Wisconsin, offered by a dealer on consignment for the original owner, and it shows 1,200 miles. The window sticker in the listing totals $84,380. As of Thursday night the high bid was $48,000.

The spec is Gun Metal Grey over black and grey leather with heated Recaro front seats and Brembo brakes. The owner added a mild lift (1.7 inches front, 1.2 inches rear) and 18-inch Black Rhino wheels on Goodyear Wranglers, with a matching spare on the tailgate. The oil was changed in July and the Carfax is clean.

The hardware underneath is deliberately old-fashioned: a ladder frame developed with Magna Steyr, solid axles at both ends on five-link suspension, a two-speed transfer case, and a locking center differential. The engine is BMW's B58 3.0-liter turbo inline-six, rated here at 281 hp and 331 lb-ft, driving a ZF eight-speed automatic. Engineer's Corner covers that engine in detail.

The math is what makes this one worth watching. Two years after the Grenadier reached US customers, a truck with delivery-level mileage is bidding at 57% of its sticker. If it hammers at $60,000, the first owner will have paid about $20 for every mile driven. Low-mile Grenadiers are easy to find on the used market, and Garage Economics gets into why that's a problem for the company that builds them.

My take: I think this sells between $60,000 and $64,000. The mileage is the asset. The lift and wheels shouldn't cost it any bidders, but I don't expect anyone to pay extra for them. At $62,000 the buyer's total with the 5% fee is $65,100, which is the national retail average for trucks with ten times the miles. If there's a reserve above that range, I'd expect a no-sale.

GM released full specs this week for the two V8s going into the redesigned 2027 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500. They're the truck versions of the sixth-generation small block, only the sixth ground-up redesign of that engine since 1955.

The smaller engine is a 5.7-liter making 402 hp and 428 lb-ft. It replaces the 5.3 and beats it by 47 hp and 45 lb-ft. The larger one is a 6.6-liter making 481 hp and 501 lb-ft, replacing the 6.2 with a gain of 61 hp. Convert those displacements to cubic inches and you get 350 and 400, the two numbers most people associate with a Chevrolet V8. GM got there by lengthening the stroke 6 mm.

The basic layout hasn't changed. These are still pushrod engines with one camshaft in the block, two valves per cylinder, and the same 4.4-inch bore spacing Chevrolet has used for 70 years. The new parts are direct and port fuel injection working together, a 12.5:1 compression ratio on the 6.6 (the old 6.2 ran 11.5:1), a tuned-runner intake, and a variable-displacement oil pump. Cylinder deactivation stays. The dipstick does not. An oil level sensor replaces it, and owners will check their oil on a screen.

On paper, the 5.7 edges out Ford's 5.0 (400 hp) and Ram's 5.7 Hemi (395 hp), and the 6.6 is the most powerful naturally aspirated V8 in a half-ton, though Ram's twin-turbo inline-six still beats it at 540 hp. The top tow rating, 13,700 pounds in the Silverado, goes to the 5.7 rather than the 6.6.

The spending is the part to watch. The engines will be built in Flint, in Tonawanda, New York (an $888 million investment), and in St. Catharines, Ontario (about $500 million). On Monday this section covered Ford's $1 billion paint shop as capital that can't be quietly reversed, and engine plants are the same kind of commitment. A few years ago the working assumption was that the half-ton V8 had one generation left. Toyota no longer sells a V8 pickup, and Ram dropped the Hemi before bringing it back. Trucks reach dealers later this year.

The B58 arrived in 2015 in the BMW 340i, rated at 320 hp and 330 lb-ft from 1,380 rpm. It now powers most of what BMW sells with six cylinders, plus the fifth-generation Toyota Supra and the Grenadier on today's Auction Desk. Output ranges from 281 hp in the INEOS to 382 hp in the Supra and M340i.

Toyota's 2JZ-GTE, from the fourth-generation Supra, became famous because tuners found that the stock bottom end would survive roughly double its factory output. The recipe was a 3.0-liter inline-six with a closed-deck block, a forged steel crankshaft, and a conservative factory tune. The B58 uses the same recipe in aluminum instead of cast iron. When Toyota needed a six for the new Supra, it chose this engine, and the comparison made itself.

Start with the block. In an open-deck design, which BMW's earlier N54 and N55 turbo sixes used, the tops of the cylinders stand free inside the water jacket. That's cheap to cast and cools well, but at high cylinder pressure the walls move and the head gasket seal suffers. A closed-deck block ties the top of every cylinder into the outer walls. BMW had mostly reserved that design for diesels, which need the rigidity to survive much higher combustion pressures.

The B58 got it because of how BMW organized the engine family. The gasoline six and its diesel sibling, the B57, start from the same raw block casting, so the gas engine inherited a block built to diesel requirements. The forged steel crankshaft shares its flange geometry and bearing widths with the diesel crank, and the connecting rods are drop-forged. Outside North America the Grenadier is sold with that same B57 diesel, so INEOS buys both halves of the family.

The cylinder walls have no liners. They're an iron-based coating about 0.3 mm thick, sprayed onto the aluminum as molten wire. It's light, hard-wearing, and low in friction. The tradeoff is that a block with damaged cylinder walls can't be machined oversize.

The inline-six layout does some of the work for free. A straight six is naturally balanced in both primary and secondary forces, so it needs no balance shafts, and less vibration means less fatigue on everything bolted to it. Last Friday this section covered BMW's hot-vee V8 and the heat it traps between the cylinder banks. The B58 is the opposite case: one head, one twin-scroll turbo fed by a six-into-two manifold, exhaust on one side, intake on the other, and the heat has somewhere to go.

The intercooler is an air-to-water unit built into the intake plenum, on its own low-temperature coolant circuit with an electric pump and a separate radiator. The path from turbo to intake valves is very short, so there's less air volume to pressurize, and that let BMW fit a smaller turbocharger for sharper response. Its limit shows up under sustained abuse, which is why high-power builds upgrade it.

BMW put the timing chain at the back of the engine, on the transmission side, where the transmission's inertia damps the crankshaft's rotational oscillations and lowers the load on the chain. The tradeoff is access: if the chain ever needs replacing, the engine or transmission has to come out. The original two-piece chain was another inheritance from the diesel, which uses the intermediate shaft to drive its high-pressure fuel pump. A 2018 update brought a one-piece chain, fuel pressure raised from 200 to 350 bar, and separate cooling circuits for the head and block.

The reliability case comes down to margin and volume. Even the rod bearings carry a polymer coating with embedded solid lubricant, there to protect them in the moment after an auto start-stop restart, before oil pressure recovers. The block that makes 382 hp in a Supra is asked for 281 hp in the Grenadier, so in the truck it works at about three-quarters of its mainstream rating. The long stroke (94.6 mm against an 82 mm bore) favors low-rpm torque, which suits a heavy truck. The pistons and fuel injection hardware are shared with or adapted from BMW's four-cylinder engine, so the parts are built in the millions and weak points got found early. The known-issues list is short: coolant loss on early cars, oil filter housing gaskets, PCV valves, and VANOS solenoids around 80,000 to 100,000 miles. None of those is a bottom-end problem. With upgraded pistons, rods, and a much larger turbo, the factory block has been documented past 1,000 hp.

I own two cars with this engine, an X3 M40i and an X7. I've put more than 90,000 miles on one and more than 60,000 on the other, and they're the two favorites of everything I've owned. Both are heavy SUVs, which is closer to the Grenadier's job than the Supra's.

Jim Ratcliffe was born in 1952 near Manchester, the son of a joiner. He trained as a chemical engineer, earned an MBA, and spent a few years in private equity. At 40 he mortgaged his house to help fund the buyout of a BP chemicals business. In 1998 he bought that company's plant in Antwerp for about $140 million and named the new company INEOS.

The playbook after that was consistent. Big oil and chemical companies wanted commodity plants off their balance sheets, and INEOS bought them with high-yield debt, cut fixed costs, and ran them for cash. The largest deal came in 2005, when it paid $9 billion for BP's Innovene division and became one of the world's biggest chemical producers in one transaction. INEOS today has about 24,500 employees at 154 sites in 27 countries. It's still private, and Ratcliffe still controls it.

For two decades, then, INEOS bought existing plants with existing customers. The Grenadier was its first attempt at starting something from zero. Land Rover ended production of the original Defender in 2016, and Ratcliffe, an owner, reportedly offered to buy the tooling and was turned down. In 2017, over drinks at The Grenadier pub in London, he decided to build a successor. The approach was to buy every hard part from a company that already made it well: engineering from Magna Steyr, engines from BMW, transmissions from ZF, axles from Carraro, brakes from Brembo, seats from Recaro. For the factory, INEOS dropped plans for a new plant in Wales and in 2020 bought Mercedes' Smart factory in Hambach, France, with a trained workforce and room for about 30,000 vehicles a year. That part, at least, was the old playbook.

The bill so far: more than $330 million in losses before the first customer truck was built, a reported loss of about $500 million in a single year after launch, and about $2.8 billion borrowed from the rest of the INEOS group. Production started in October 2022.

Then came the problems money doesn't prevent. In September 2024 the line, which had been building about 110 trucks a day, stopped for four months because one supplier failed. INEOS never named it, but the part was widely reported to be the seats, after Recaro's automotive business filed for insolvency. In 2025, INEOS recalled about 7,000 US trucks because door latch parts had been assembled with too little grease. Then US tariffs landed on its largest market, which it supplies entirely from France. Last November the company said it would cut several hundred of roughly 1,700 jobs, and its electric second model is on hold. The parent has its own pressure, with credit downgrades and heavy debt in a weak chemicals market.

There's a real business in there too. INEOS says more than 35,000 trucks have been delivered across 50 markets, first-quarter 2026 orders were a record, and fleets such as the Kenyan Red Cross and several European fire services have started buying.

The arithmetic is still hard. About 35,000 trucks in a little over three and a half years works out to roughly 10,000 a year through a plant sized for 30,000, so fixed costs are spread over a third of the planned volume. Today's Auction Desk truck shows the other half of the problem. Every 1,200-mile Grenadier selling in the low $60,000s competes directly with a new one at $85,000 or more.

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