What is the future of cars? Will car culture die? Will the manual transmission phase out? Are cars becoming too modern? Is gas being phased out? All these questions can be discussed here.
I think electric cars are really starting to take out gasoline cars. Supposedly Calfornia and Britain is going to try and ban all gas cars by 2040.
California's and Britain's logic "Hey lets jump on this new thing that we don't know if it's even good let because Trump likes the other thing that we have been using for years."
I heard that China was going to eventually ban gas powered cars too. Anyway, I do think that electric cars and self driving cars are the future. Electric cars will probably replace gasoline cars once we run out of oil, as I've heard that's going to happen.
For Britain, its only new cars and a lot of us doubt that the governments going to even bother with this when 2040 comes. My personal bet is that there will probably some production limit where you cannot sell ICE cars.
I really have nothing against electric cars but i do have something against self driving ones i spent over 2000 euros just so i could drive normal cars and now i must sit in a car and cant be able to do one of my favourite activities just because the goverment thinks its the future? No thanks ill rather take the bus then
I've always had this philosophy in my mind, that ''technology should be here to help humanity, not to do their job for them.'' That's why I'm against self driving cars. And to be honest, I don't have any trust towards self driving cars when comparing to human driving it. James May already said, that there is self driving cars already and they're called Taxi. The whole car owning culture is all about the individual freedom to travel wherever they want, when they want and they themselves have the freedom to do so. And it's pleasuring, driving the car yourself. Self driving cars would also make motorracing obsolete. As for electric cars, there is still a ton of problems to be solved with them, so I don't see them as my daily driver for now. First of all, they're lightyears behind in the terms of ''refueling'' them. On normal petrol or diesel car, refueling takes couple minutes, whereas electric car requires many hours to do so. So for people who need to do quick and random trips with a car, electric car is not suitable for that job, as it requires careful planning of every single trip you have to do, since you cannot refuel it quickly on the way. And you have to remember to hook it up to the charging all the time. That's why I'm more into the biofuel's way, as it serves as temp bridge towards the electric cars. Besides, no one has yet talked about, that how to extinguish burning electric car, as that sort of burn resulted from the batteries is chemical reaction, that is impossible to stop with current fire extinguish techniques. And they do burn in extremely dangerous manner. I just hope that I can drive with petrol cars 'till I die. I wanna have the pleasure of turning the key and hearing the engine starting up and off we go. Simple, honest, pleasure. Eat that, Elon Musk.
I have no problem with killing off gas... it is dangerous and a pollutant. That being said I do NOT want to see the ICE die... Remember this... ICE's do not have to run on gas or diesel. They can run on anything that will burn that is in gaseous form. There are many alternatives to gas... some better than others. Natural gas engines can be optimized to get near (not close, but close enough) the same kind of power that a modern gasoline engine can produce, so there is that. Granted, if you ran gasoline through the same engine, it would probably have almost double the HP if it didn't explode. Then there is the potential for silly fuels like in wood gasifiers. They burn wood in a special way that it somehow extracts wood alcohol from it (or whatever you burn really as long as it's organic... one of my uncles had a Model T with a gasifier and he ran it for 30 minutes off of a dead cat... weird, I know) But some major advancements would have to be made in both the fuel purification process and the ICE itself before that becomes a viable option. Right now wood gasifiers are huge and use a large amount of fuel to get a small amount of power. The best deal I have ever seen for one so far was an S10 with a V8 that had a gasifier for each bank of pistons to get close to 3/4's of its original power... but it had to burn so much wood that it needed a full bed of wood to go 180 or so miles... not exactly efficient. Liquid nitrogen engines have also been made which is a kinda neat thought. It works by injecting liquid nitrogen into the combustion chamber which hits the much warmer air and turns to a gas. That is what pushes the piston. It kinda works like a steam engine in a way. Neat concept, but probably not practical seeing as the cost of keeping that cool. Plus accidents would create a cold day in hell if a tank ruptures. Compressed air engines are also a possibility as well. I thought I was so smart in 6th grade when I came up with the concept of this one only to find out that people around the world had already perfected the art of this one years ago. Basically it works the same as the liquid nitrogen engine, except compressed air is used instead. Plus side, the engine would only get luke warm and you actually could use the engine as a regenerative brake down hills to fill the tanks back up a little. The down side is, again, power would be a bit of a problem unless you get a big engine that can handle the airflow and the tanks could rupture in accidents... that would almost go off like a bomb as they hold up to 3000psi or so. Solenoid engine. While this isn't really an ICE... I think I could live with it as it would still kinda sound like an engine... you would still have to have a transmission and shift gears, plus you would sorta get a noise that is similar to a real engine... the only reason anyone would make this into a car is pure novelty of course... there is no practical reason or benefit to using this kind of engine. There is also the possibility of using the Stirling engine to burn... well... whatever the hell you felt like to keep one side hot and use whatever the hell you felt like to keep the other side cold. Again this is stretching the rules as it technically isn't an ICE but an ECE. The problem here of course is the fact that you need a very large temperature differential to make the thing run at any sort of usable power in earth's gravity. On the moon you could probably run one on nothing more than sunlight and have a pretty fast car, but on earth... it needs a bit more punch than that. Plus sterling engines need to run at a constant speed to be at their very best, so that means it would need to use a variable transmission (ok, it wouldn't need to, but if you want the best efficiency of one of these engines, every little bit counts)... one thing that almost all of us car guys hate. Lastly, and my personal favorite. Hydrogen ICE. I mean... why not? Any regular engine can be retrofitted to run on hydrogen, it burns perfectly clean, it burns much hotter which means the potential for much more power, it has an ignition temperature of about 250°C higher than gasoline, It is already a gas so mixing it with the air is a breeze (ha), and if you have a tank rupture, it all floats away! No gas all over the ground causing fire potential or anything like that... it just... floats away. The only problem with this is the fact that Hydrogen is rather expensive to produce right now in just about any method that you choose to produce it. It takes a lot of energy. Down the road however, if we can get solar panels efficient enough, they could potentially break the hydrogen down fast enough to keep up with demand which (let's be honest here) will just be us old farts that want to keep our classic cars away from anything electronic but still have to keep from polluting due to new laws that are in place by then. But, truth be told... if the governments have their way, all ICE's will be dead by 2040 or whatever they are aiming for now along with transmissions and whatever else goes with them. That truly is depressing.
Yeah, I know... it is kinda disturbing. Story goes that he was shipping it over to Europe for some kind of car show or something and was at the docks to pick up the car once it was unloaded. Once unloaded a crowd gathered around it as no one had ever seen a contraption such as this before. While explaining what it was and how it worked he boasted "It will run on damn near anything that burns!" Well, naturally, no one believed him so some guy struck up a bet with him that if he could find something that it wouldn't run on he would win 10 pounds and if it did run on anything he could throw at it my uncle would win 10 pounds (or whatever the currency was, also, this was in the 50's or 60's when that was worth a lot more). Well, being the show off that my uncle was of course he accepted this bet and off to the races they went. They supposedly threw all sorts of goofy stuff in like boots and random cloths, paper, boxes, grass, cheese, coffee, but everything ran the car just fine. Finally, one of the dock workers brought over a dead cat that supposedly was found on the dock that morning. Sure enough that was flung in there when the burner was empty, they threw a couple pieces of charcoal in to light it off and get it burning, but once it got going, it ran for supposedly a half hour on that cat. When it finally chugged its last chug, they opened the burner to see nothing but ash. My uncle won that weird bet.
The term 'electric car' makes me think of something futuristic with a sharp and aerodynamic design, with popup head lamps, and taillights hidden behind some sort of rear grille. The rear window would be covered by louvres and the front windscreen would have one, central wiper. It would have these massive, slick tires, like something you'd find on a 70's F1 car, and the rims would just be huge flat discs with small vents around the edges. The car would feature butterfly doors, and they'd make a 'swoosh' noise when you open them. And you would be greeted by a monotone computer voice, calling you by name and asking how your day was, as you slot into the drivers seat and grip the suede covered wheel ahead of you, then ahead of that would sit a large LCD display. Turning the car on would be done by pressing a big 'start' button on the steering column, this would play a short beep sound and the dashboard display would flash to life displaying everything there is to know about the car's current condition, like the suspension setup, tyre pressure and temperature of the headlamps. Across the centre of the display would be the speedometer, like a big loading bar from 0 to what ever the car's top speed is. The motor, would be liquid cooled, with numerous ducts and scoops leading air into it's radiators and it would be coupled up to a 2 speed manual transmission with gears 1 and 2 labelled as 'Drive' and 'Overdrive', when you select overdrive the monotone computer voice would tell you that 'You are in Overdrive' and you'd void the warranty. The 'Drive' gear would top out where ever the speedometer stops, then 'Overdrive' would activate a second bar, just below the speedometer that would take you over 300mph. Unfortunately, this is stuff of dreams - instead we get sorry excuses that go by the brand name 'Tesla' with floppy doors and a design based on a used bar of soap. Toyota isn't any better with it's EV Prius and Ford's electric Fiesta isn't anything special either. I'm not opposed to electric cars, I will miss the petrol engine when it's gone, the problem is that no recent car design that I've seen is anywhere where near worthy or deserving of the next gen, earth saving technology that the electric motor is supposed to be. If cars are going electric, they better start looking like wedges again.
Wedges are behind us. Its not the 80s anymore. I personally think cars like the Faraday Future will be what Supercars will look like in 10 years.
This description is basically this but electric... that would be an epic car. Vector Tron would be a good name for it perhaps?
Technically, wedges would be in front of us - because that would be the front of the car... No it isn't the 80s anymore, thank you Captain Obvious. I personally think cars like the Faraday Future are too over complicated in their design. Yep, that was kind of where I was going.
Sometimes I think when watching those sort of ''batmobiles'', that how the hell are you supposed to wash them ? As soon as you move your arms a bit, the spronge is in pieces from those sharp lines. And even if you manage to wash it, these's actually a ton of more surface that you need to wash up than with regular shaped traditional car.
The reason why self driving cars are the future is that they will remove traffic lights, jams and human error.
