Are there going to be any revelations, any great new technologies in the next 2 years?
A friend of mine close to the battery industry claims that a company will announce a major break through either 2010 or 2012. But he won’t go into details.
I have 190K on my car. I will have to buy a new one sometime in the next two years, I’m guessing. Is there anything worth waiting for?
I always buy new, and keep it until it no longer runs.
How about the next 5 years? Maybe I should buy used and wait for the next big thing.
What’s coming? What’s real?
The Aptera has been coming for a while now. I remember when it was going to be released in CA at the end of 08. Now it says the plug in will be released in 09 and the hybrid in 2010. I’m starting to doubt it will be.
The two big things that are in the very near future are plug-in hybrids and high-mileage “clean” diesels, which might be worth looking at if very good fuel economy is important to you, but they’re likely to stay as niche products and they definitely aren’t going to render the old fashioned gasoline powered car obsolete any time soon.
On the somewhat more distant horizon, hydrogen cell cars will likely get cheaper and the infrastructure more established in the next 10 years or so. These do have the potential to make regular cars obsolete, so if you keep cars for a long time you might plan on having the car after your next one be one of those.
If there were a remarkable breakthrough in automotive technology in the next year or two, it would show up as a new feature in the 2025 model year. The automotive industry is monumentally slow in implementing new technology. As an example, the first U.S. patent for seat (safety) belt was in the 1890s; it was 1956 (on the Ford Crown Victoria) before a U.S. manufacturer offered seat belts as an option, and the late 'Sixties before seat belts were standard equipment on all cars. The airbag was developed in the late 'Sixties but airbags weren’t widely available, even as optional equipment, until the mid 'Eighties.
The only thing that moves slower than the automotive industry is a Godard film.
On the other hand, big gains in mileage are possible without any sort of breakthrough. Over a decade ago, there were already cars (using perfectly conventional technology; a non-hybrid, gasoline-burning internal combustion engine) that were getting 50 MPG. The only reason we don’t see cars like that now is because the auto industry decided that that’s not what people were interested in buying. But if that changes, then the car companies could certainly go back to making cars like that.
I had an 89 CRX that got around 45 MPG right up until it was junked.
But one difference is - it would now not pass safety standards. It got like a 1 or 1.5 star rating and you couldn’t sell one with less than a 4 star rating now. (I got this info from an article about a year and half ago, because I have wondered for a long time where the high-mileage cars were.)
Well, all those examples were safety devices and nobody really cared about safety in cars until about the 80’s. But you can point to examples like electronic fuel injection, which was pretty well developed by the late-60’s, but didn’t regularly show up in American cars until the late-80’s.
Nowadays, though, I think there’s enough interest in better fuel economy that if someone did invent some great breakthrough, it’d be implemented in a matter of years instead of decades.
You’re missing the point; there is an entrenched, conservative mentality in the automotive industry about implementing any new technology regardless of benefit. The cost of implementing a new technology, and the liability (financial, and in the case of anything safety related, personal) is huge, and even fairly progressive car companies are loathe to integrate a new technology into a vehicle until it has been rigorously proven out.
Fuel injection is, as you point out, a primary example. The Germans implemented it first, and then the Japanese on higher end vehicles throughout the 'Eighties; it wasn’t until the 'Nineties that it was almost universally implemented on American vehicles, despite the engine efficiency, performance, and emission reduction benefits of EFI. Air bags are another; Audi didn’t start even offering air bags as an option until the mid-'Nineties because of reliability concerns.
No, the auto industry didn’t decide anything. Consumers did with the cars they were buying. For decades, what was primarily valued in the American car market (valued by the consumer) was size, luxury and power. And no, they can’t go back to making cars like that, either. Safety standards are monumentally higher and harder to reach these days, and the end result is a dramatically heavier car.
Two factors are what keep mileage down today. They are power and weight.
To move that enormous yet safe car, you need more power, and to move that car in a satisfying manner you need significantly more power. Cars capable of 50 mpg typically have engines well under 2.0 liters and a weight nearer to 2000 lbs than 3000 lbs.
We are getting to the point where cars are just too heavy, and alternative materials are being looked at more seriously (aluminum, magnesium, plastics in unconventional locations) where they were simply too expensive to be worth the benefit before.
Hybrid technologies are a decent step, and they’ll continue to improve for a few years, but I can’t see them as anything but a stop-gap. Until we develop some sort of rapid recharge system for batteries, they will always be reliant on oil. Hydrogen will be the big breakthrough, but we’re not going to see that for quite some time. Short of the technology itself, you need distribution. Retrofitting every gas station in the country will be a bit of an undertaking.
Okay, here’s another one. How about automatic transmissions? The first practical automatics came out in the mid-40’s and practically overnight the domestic companies were selling them in large numbers, to the point that they were outselling manuals probably by the late-50’s. Things like fuel injection and safety improvements call for careful cost/benefit analysis, but what car company couldn’t see the advantage of a car that shifts itself?
All the companies these days are trying to get the best economy they can get because of the market for one, but also because of government regulation and so if battery guy’s revolutionary fuel economy breakthrough came out and was indeed an economic way to drastically improve fuel economy, I think they’d all be jumping to get it implemented as fast as possible.
Early fuel injection systems were expensive, unreliable and high-maintenance, and all that for a marginal benefit compared to good old carbs. Jetronic - Wikipedia
It didn’t make any economic sense to put fuel injection on your average econobox back then. Same reason things like turbocompound or individual throttle bodies aren’t widely used on everyday cars. Too much initial cost, too little gain.
Not really. Audi did not use airbags because they had their own proprietary system, Procon-ten.
One big problem with hydrogen fuel cells is in where the hydrogen comes from. There is no large store of free hydrogen available on earth. Most processes for obtaining hydrogen break down hydrocarbons (like methane) into H2 and CO2. In other words, they produce carbon dioxide as a by-product, just the same as if you burned the hydrocarbon directly as fuel. Just because there is no CO2 coming out of the tailpipe of the car doesn’t mean it isn’t produced somewhere. People are working on ways to sequester CO2, but that problem probably won’t be solved soon.
It’s also possible to get hydrogen by breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen, but that takes a lot of energy, which has to come from somewhere (it also takes energy to break down methane into H2 and CO2). In a sense, you’re storing potential energy as hydrogen - energy which can be converted to electrical energy in fuel cells. If you burn fossil fuel to get energy to produce hydrogen, you’re not helping to prevent climate change at all. The original source of energy has to be clean. Solar or nuclear would work. But it’s not clear to me that hydrogen is the best way to store energy. It has to be stored at very high pressures if you want to put enough of it in a car to drive for any distance, and even then the energy density isn’t very high.
Considering these basic problems, it seems unlikely to me that hydrogen fuel cells cars will ever become common. Biofuels might work better to solve our environmental and national security problems.
And when it does show up on a production car, it will be the Mercedes S-Class. You won’t be able to get it in your Toyota Corolla until 2038.
The current S-Class suggests that the Next Big Things are: radar-based automatic traffic following- cruise control that is smart enough to slow down and speed up based on what the car you’re following is doing; adaptive seats that mould themselves into different shapes to provide extra protection in a crash; and head-up night vision displays.
I’ve always heard what Discipline said: the reason we don’t get the MPG that old cars did is because we’ve added a lot of weight to cars with various safety features (and that the catalytic converter is somehow responsible for MPG decrease too) that the old cars didn’t have.
Here’s an article from a year and a half ago about things “coming soon.”
I loved it too. I could take that car darn near anywhere. Even in a huge snow storm, it would keep going. I suppose it wasn’t very safe, but it was a great little car.
This does not conflict with what I said. I said that the industry decided that consumers didn’t want high efficiency. What you said just means that that they were justified in that decision. A car company could have decided to keep making the high-milage cars, but if they had made that decision, they would have sold a lot less. Knowing this, they decided otherwise.
It seemed like you were implying that the manufacturers were making decisions counter to the consumer demand, forcing cars to be the bloated and overpowered monsters they are now. I just wanted to say that it’s not the big evil corporations forcing their arbitrary decisions on us, they are driven by market demand.
That is actually true, to some extent. There’s a very good reason why the Japanese were able to grab such a huge chunk of market share so quickly when they started building cars for export to the US- lots of people wanted small, efficient, cheap vehicles, and Detroit wasn’t producing them.
I wouldn’t say that the big evil corporations were trying to force people in American land barges; they just didn’t know that people wanted anything different.
Market demand is the obvious answer. For example, everyone says that the big 3 deserve to fail, because they don’t build cars people want. Keep in mind that they collectively own almost 50% of the market, versus 20 or so other makers. They certainly do make what people want. When it was SUV’s, they made SUV’s. Look at the sale of hybrids; now that gas is cheap again, sales are plummeting. Not many people want to pay a premium for purely environmental purposes. I don’t mean you or you or you specifically; I mean people in general.