Ah! Dave from Dave's Garage! One of my favorite YouTubers. He and his two sons are among the best mechanics I have ever known. Dave is an excellent technician and teacher. It's no wonder that their rebuilt engines are sold around the world! 😉

On 5/9/2024 at 8:04 AM, martin-w said:

We won't be burning stuff in the future

Sure we will!  Mostly we'll be burning coal (and natural gas) to produce the electricity to run all these electric vehicles. 😄 

 

On 5/9/2024 at 8:04 AM, martin-w said:

currently we are just tweaking the materials and design.

We've been doing that with computers as well.  In hardware, we've gone from cams and gears to relays to vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits and are working our way into the future, always building on the past.  Computer software has gone through similar stages and we're still developing new languages and operating systems and methodologies.  I've lived through a lot of this advancement in just my own software development career.

We've seen the upsides and downsides to electric cars.  We've been promised upsides and have yet been reported few downsides to electric commercial vehicles.  The tweaking of materials and design of internal combustion engine cars has brought us a LONG way since the 1950's and has improved the upsides and reduced the downsides while introducing a few new downsides (for example, can you still work on your own car?).  It's proven technology we can live with and will continue to be improved.

"95% of all electric cars are still on the road.  The other 5% made it all the way home."  This joke is especially poignant during the winter.  If only there were a way to  make the world warmer to produce milder winters and a friendlier environment for electric cars.  One can only hope and dream.

There are places in the world (I'm thinking about Alaska) where you can pre-stage barrels of avgas for your airplane but the nearest electrical outlet is over 100 miles away and nowhere to set up "green" electricity generation.

Hook

3 hours ago, LHookins said:

Sure we will!  Mostly we'll be burning coal (and natural gas) to produce the electricity to run all these electric vehicles. 😄 

 

I know you jest, but obviously, in 50, 100,  200 years, we won't be. But we will still be advancing in terms of computer technology. 

 

3 hours ago, LHookins said:

We've been doing that with computers as well. 

 

Far more than "tweaking" computers, we've  been making huge strides, for example Mores law and indeed, now quantum computers, but I think you misunderstand. My point is that the potential for further combustion engine development is limited. But as I highlighted above, there's a vast amount of technological development still to come in terms of computer technology. As I said... "graphene based transistors, DNA storage, biological computers, neuromorphic technology, optical computing, distributed computing, nanocomputers, and of course, analogue quantum computers that are currently just in their infancy and offering miraculous capability far, far into the future." The aforementioned is far more exotic and stretches' a lot further into the technological future than "a new piston". Hence why computer technology, despite the first example being as far back 1822, still has me excited for the future. Whereas internal combustion has a limited developmental road ahead

 

3 hours ago, LHookins said:

There are places in the world (I'm thinking about Alaska) where you can pre-stage barrels of avgas for your airplane but the nearest electrical outlet is over 100 miles away and nowhere to set up "green" electricity generation.

 

Well yes, now, yes, but we were referring to the future, and whether we will still be "burning stuff" to power vehicles in 50, 100, 200, 500 years time. Predicting the future is always a tricky game, but given that internal combustion is highly inefficient, something like only 20%, wasting 80% of the energy in the fuel as heat, with limited potential to improve that inefficiency, we certainly will have advanced to a much more efficient method of power generation in the future.