Hyundai is working to prove this.
No.
Agreed. The car goes boom.
The only thing I would consider a truly new design is Ecomotors opposed piston opposed cylinder design.
I’m happy that they keep experimenting, but honestly, Bill’s probably wasting his money. There have been so many “alternative” engines that you have to wonder why none have worked out.
There’s the Stirling, the Orbital, Huttlin Spherical, Swing Piston, Scuderi, Grail, Wankel, two-stroke, turbine, and many more. We’ve tried natural gas, hydrogen, steam, electricity and french fry oil as an alternative fuel. The early part of the 20th century saw virtually every kind of propulsion and configuration and the gasoline powered Otto Cycle won out. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best for the way automobiles are used. Diesels are competitive, but someone is conspiring to see that they never get a foothold in the USA.
The electric car looks good on paper, but as it becomes more popular, large flaws will be revealed. What if you only have a driveway or park on the street? There aren’t enough parking spaces in most cities now, are you sure that a charger will be available to everyone? What happens if your home/office charger breaks? What will happen to electric bills with this increased load?
Keep an eye on Mazda. They continue working on their rotary engine to keep the patents valid and work out any remaining bugs. Excessive oil & fuel consumption currently make it impractical but it’s a very efficient powerplant for burning hydrogen.
My prediction is that we will move to a community car model within the next 25 years. Competing businesses with a wide array of automated robotic electric vehicles rented on a per-mile basis. Sort of like a robotic taxicab, but with luxury rides, pickup trucks, one-seaters, convertibles, etc. The wealthy will still own a pleasure car resembling what we have today, and it will have a gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine.
did you look at the design carefully? It gives you the power of a 2-stroke with the clean burning efficiency of a 4-stroke. I don’t remember the exact numbers but I think it reduces engine weight for comparable horsepower by something like 40-60%. I see no reason why this won’t replace standard 4 stroke engines in very short order — at least for however many years we’ll still be burning dinosaurs.
yes. have you? What about its tremendous increase in reciprocating mass over a conventional piston engine?
opposed-piston engines are not new. Look up the Napier Deltic powerplant; the big difference with the EcoMotors design is their use of a single crankshaft rather than the multiple crankshafts of previous opposed-piston engines. The “gotcha” I see is that with the mass and length of the opposed pistons’ conrods, I can’t see this thing being able to rev very high.
besides, I don’t see why you’d link to Forbes as support; they know as much about engine technology as they do the digestive system of a yak. All they care about is who Bill Gates is throwing money at.
What mass might that be? Piston heads? Seriously? Is that all you’ve got?
As to the rev speeds, the pistons are traveling half the distance and therefore can rev twice as fast — try watching the videos.
Chrysler spent over $100 million in the 1990’s, trying to develop a 2-stroke 4 cylinder engine for use in the Neon model. Great idea-no valves, twice the power output (for a given displacement). However, it could never meet the emissions tests.
So I doubt we’ll see anything really revolutionary in piston gasoline engines.
Personally, I’d like to see turbines replace reciprocating piston engines.