Model years 1985–2026.

The year each brand gave up on breathing normally

There is a particular kind of person who will tell you, unprompted, at a barbecue, that turbochargers are a modern fad for people who cannot cope with a proper engine. He is wrong in an interesting way, because the fad he is complaining about is older than his shed. We tried all of this in the eighties, decided we hated it, spent fifteen years pretending it never happened, and then quietly did the whole thing again on a scale that makes the first attempt look like a rehearsal.

The line opens at 8.5% in 1985 and climbs to 11.0% by 1987, which is the eighties turbo boom you half remember: the bonnet scoop, the boost gauge bolted somewhere it could be admired, the two-second pause between asking for acceleration and receiving any. Then it falls off a cliff. By 1996 forced induction is down to 3.2%, spread across just 25 model entries, and it took until 2009 to get back to where it had been in 1987.

The first turbo era was a party trick attached to an engine that was otherwise unimproved, and it drove like one: laggy, thirsty, and with a reputation for fragility that its owners will happily talk you through. Then engines got better on their own — multi-valve heads, proper injection, variable timing — and for a decade the sensible way to get more power was to build a better naturally aspirated engine. Turbocharging did not lose an argument. It lost its job.

Forced induction by model year

What brought it back was not enthusiasm. It was arithmetic, conducted in an office. A small blown engine can pass a fuel-economy test like a small engine and still drive like a large one, and the test is the thing that has to be passed. Everything else — the badge that says some number of litres it plainly is not, the exhaust note piped through the stereo, the phrase "engineered for efficiency" — is decoration applied afterwards.

By 2026 it is 1,329 of 2,707 versions, 49.1%, across 400 model entries. And it is specifically turbocharging that won: superchargers, which were the connoisseur's answer because they do their work instantly and make a noise like a distant argument, have dwindled to 5 versions from 75 at their own peak in 2014. The blower lost because it steals power from the crankshaft to make power, which is fine in a hot rod and unforgivable in a fuel-economy test.

The year each brand crossed over

The average hides the interesting part, which is that brands did not drift across together. They went one at a time, in a queue that runs 1985 to 2026, and the order is the part worth reading. 15 of the 33 brands we track across the whole record have had a model year where most of what they offered was blown. Volvo got there first; Mitsubishi only managed it in 2026.

Every brand is a row; every model year is a cell; the darker the cell, the more of that brand's range came with a compressor bolted to it. Read down the left-hand edge and the three waves are impossible to miss, because the block of colour arrives in three separate shoves rather than one tide.

That list arrives in clumps rather than a trickle, and the clumps are not random: the eighties crossings are brands that were then selling turbocharging as a performance option, and the run of crossings after 2010 lines up with the decade in which fuel-economy targets tightened hardest. The badges at the bottom of the column are the ones that spent the intervening years getting frankly indecent outputs from engines that breathed through nothing but their own good manners.

One brand spoils the tidy version of this story, and it is the best row in the table: Chrysler crossed over in 1987 and has since walked all the way back out again, down to 0.0% of its recent versions. Crossing over is not a ratchet. A brand that swaps a blown four for a hybrid system, or simply stops selling the sporting end of its range, walks back across the line without anyone writing a press release about it.

Who is still breathing normally

12 brands still sold here have never had a majority-blown model year. The largest by versions tracked is Ford, at 39.0% of its recent versions — a long way from nothing, and a long way from the near-total conversions above it.

A further 6 badges in this record never had one either. They stopped being offered here between 2004 and 2013, which is to say they left before the argument was settled. They are listed separately because a brand that is no longer sold here is not declining to fit turbochargers.

The peak so far is 49.1% in 2026. Whether it goes higher depends on a question nobody in this table controls: an electric car does not need a turbocharger either, so a brand that goes electric quickly will slide down this list while looking, on paper, like it changed its mind about boost. It did not. It changed the subject.

Sources

• Federal fuel-economy datasets
• EPA Automotive Trends Report, which tracks the same technology shift across the fleet
• NHTSA Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards

Explore the blown cars behind this page

The cars here are live. See the turbocharged cars that still gave you a clutch pedal, the supercharged V8s, which are the ones making the noise, or turbocharged six-cylinders with all-wheel drive. Related: where the V8 peaks in our record, which is the engine all this boost was brought in to replace, and horsepower has never been cheaper, which is what the swap did to the price of speed. For what all this boost actually bought at the pump, see the trade-off that stopped being one.