It's funny how we have to wait for real and serious competition before we can get nice things. It took AMD, then Apple, to trounce Intel before we finally started seeing Intel take things seriously, and only now that the electric car trend is really taking off do we start to see real innovations in internal combustion engines.
I have a 1981 Diesel Chevette which can get 50 miles to the gallon when driven at a steady highway speed. If that forty year old fully iron engine can get 50 miles to the gallon in a car that's as aerodynamic as a brick, then why aren't new cars getting 80 miles to the gallon? Is our technology really that shitty? Or is it that the carmakers have marketed performance and "sportiness" to us over efficiency?
They certainly don't want to make engines that can last forty years and 750,000 miles, but that's another issue.
So the real question is this: if we can have 80, 100, 150, perhaps even 200 mile-per-gallon combustion engines, and if we can grow biodiesel from algae and even produce it using processes which pull CO2 from the air, then how much energy and carbon output could we save by not building limited life batteries and by not suffering the waste of electricity transmission and storage?
It's not all one thing or the other, and it never should be, but we've been milking the old internal combustion cash cow for so long we've virtually guaranteed her death, even though evolution of the internal combustion engine would be a net benefit.
The problem is big oil and other huge corporations are paying off the politicans, and looking to exhaust the resources before moving on. The companies that destroy the enviroment want be the same companie's that own the next innovation. We know this from our own history. They know that if they make the best perduct today, one that there is no need to upgrade, they lose out on the revenue the constant upgrades produce. They live on the top of the hill looking down on the mess they make not having to deal with the pain and clean up. That is relagated to the poor. I say it's time for a corporate revolution. Break up all these companies, send the owners, (Stock holders) to a penal colony and let them fight for the same scraps they thought was enough for the rest of us. Time to take back our lives, if not all we will have to look foward to is death.
I have a 1981 Diesel Chevette which can get 50 miles to the gallon when driven at a steady highway speed. If that forty year old fully iron engine can get 50 miles to the gallon in a car that's as aerodynamic as a brick, then why aren't new cars getting 80 miles to the gallon? Is our technology really that shitty? Or is it that the carmakers have marketed performance and "sportiness" to us over efficiency?
They certainly don't want to make engines that can last forty years and 750,000 miles, but that's another issue.
So the real question is this: if we can have 80, 100, 150, perhaps even 200 mile-per-gallon combustion engines, and if we can grow biodiesel from algae and even produce it using processes which pull CO2 from the air, then how much energy and carbon output could we save by not building limited life batteries and by not suffering the waste of electricity transmission and storage?
It's not all one thing or the other, and it never should be, but we've been milking the old internal combustion cash cow for so long we've virtually guaranteed her death, even though evolution of the internal combustion engine would be a net benefit.