EricM- I am VERY familiar with the "replacement for displacement" discussion, and was famous for using that very same argument ("apply the turbo to the bigger motor and you make more power") back in the days of heavy import modding. I hear you as well on the normal operating conditions of my daily driver, and again, I say that unless accelerating from a dead stop, you won't see the 300 ft/lb at 1k RPM of the 6.2L... because that torque is only achieved at WOT... and at WOT, the transmission will downshift and blow right past the 2100 RPM "equilibrium" (between the two motors) point. In other words, the
only time you'll find yourself taking advantage of the area of the power curve where the 6.2L shines over the HO 3.5L is WOT from a dead stop... and even at that, I'm betting that most (if not all) of that part of the power curve is gone by the time the converter stalls and moves the truck. I can, though, see your point that at, say, 1500 RPM, the 6.2L will produce more torque than the HO 3.5L, given similar throttle openings (say, 25%). True. However, based on my experience with a 3.55 geared 2011 4WD 1st gen 3.5 EB (which I drove for three years), it doesn't render the vehicle undriveable by any stretch of the imagination. I was REALLY fastidious about watching the instant fuel consumption meter in that truck, and when I sold it, the lifetime MPG was 17.2, and that truck spent nearly its whole life in mixed suburban driving (read: VERY few road trips to run up the MPG). I rarely exceeded @2200 RPM in that truck, and never felt as though I was having a problem keeping up with traffic.
Regarding the shifting of the 10 speed, I am fine with that... a good friend of mine used to do transmission calibration for Ford, and he was in town one time, and we were driving somewhere in my truck (at that time, I was driving a '05 4WD single cab F150 with the 24V 5.4L)... I had been bitching at him, saying that the transmission didn't downshift enough... for instance, at 50 mph and ~40% throttle on an uphill highway ramp. He told me that while I might think it doesn't downshift often enough, someone else might think that it downshifts too much. My response was something that you can probably imagine ("**** them,
I'm right."). He laughed and said that the way that his team knows that they have a transmission calibration right is when half the people say it shifts too much, and half the people say that it doesn't shift enough... to which I replied, "So you consider the calibration to be right when no one is happy?" Again, he laughed, and admitted that that was pretty much the case. The point that I am making here is that generally speaking, I am fine with trading high(er) throttle position for high(er) RPM (read: I tend to prefer lighter throttle at a higher RPM to heavier throttle at a lower RPM) when wanting mild/moderate acceleration, as that seems to get me the acceleration that I am after more quickly, and get me back into steady-state cruising that much sooner. So, in the on-ramp scenario above, I left the throttle where it was, tapped the brakes to unlock the converter, and voila... got the mild acceleration that I wanted without having to boot the throttle enough to provoke a downshift.
Jeff-Ohio- if you look at the torque curve, the HO 3.5L IS generating its torque lower in the rev range... the peak is 1k RPM below the 6.2L. Even if you look at the bigger turbo diesels, they don't really make too much torque (proportionally) below 1000 RPM:
