OM605

From July 1993 the OM605 took over from the OM602 as the five-cylinder, adding twin camshafts and four valves per cylinder to the familiar iron block on six main caps. Fuelling varied by application in a way that still matters to owners: the naturally aspirated 605.911 in the W124 E 250 D kept a mechanically governed Bosch M inline pump with an RSF governor, while everywhere else the same inline pump was placed under electronic control — the ERE in the engine designations. Prechamber combustion carried over unchanged.

The turbocharged 605.960 of 1995 was the one that justified the redesign. Its predecessor had run without an intercooler; this engine did not, and the difference showed as 150 PS and 280 N·m from 1,800 rpm in the C 250 Turbodiesel, against 125 PS from the blown OM602. It saw out the W124, the W202 and the W210 in both aspirations before finishing in 2001, by which time common rail had made prechamber injection an anachronism and the OM612 had taken its place.