End of the road for Leyland SOO?
Page 29
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IT WOULD appear that Leyland is to gradually phase out the 500 series engine over the next three years.
The engine — now available in turbocharged form only — is currently listed for the Lynx, Bison, Buffalo and Octopus on the truck side and, of course, the Leyland National in the psv sector.
At the Earls Court show last year, the naturally aspirated version of Marathon's TLI2 engine, the L12, was offered for the first time as an option to the 511 in the Buffalo.
This was followed up, three weeks ago, by a similar option listed for the Octopus eightwheeler.
So for these two trucks at least, there is already an alternative power unit.
Not so for the Lynx and Bison models, although the long serving 680 is a likely choice.
Sources at Leyland would not confirm or deny the report. The offical statement was: "Development of the 500 is continuing but owing to production constraints the L12 is being offered as an alternative. "The 500 engine remains in production at least to the eighties, and this is as far as our current engine strategy goes."
However, "at least. to the eighties" does not exactly refute the report that the engine will be phased out over the next three years.
Introduced in August 1968, the 500 is a fixed head engine returning to a design concept which Leyland had originally discarded 40 years earlier.
At first it was available in naturally aspirated form only, producing 127kW (170bhp) at 2,60Orpm.
The engine was designed with pressure charging in mind however, and currently all the 500 series variants listed by Leyland are turbocharged, with the 511 being the most powerful at 172kW (230bhp). The "headless wonder" as it quickly became known, has often been a problem to Leyland, but the signs are that the engine, particularly in 511 form for the Buffalo, has recently been performing extremely well.
The Leyland drawing office is evidently now very busy working on a replacement, and it would appear that this will be based on the 680 type.
Code-named the "L11" the new engine is being designed from scratch, although certain features from the 680 such as bore, stroke and cylinder centres are being retained so that much of the existing tooling can be used for production.
This gradual phasing out of the 500 engine will obviously pose problems for the National bus which was designed around the horizontal version of the engine in the first place (see CM, page 24).