Have Cars Changed?

Anybody who repairs cars would tell you that cars have changed a great deal. And if you look under your hood yourself, you'll notice that the engine compartment has gotten more crowded. Today's cars have many more features, systems, and devices for safety, emissions, and more. Cars have sophisticated electronic controls (basically computers), and can even diagnose themselves.

One could argue whether cars of today look very different from the cars of a few decades ago. They still have four wheels, headlights, and taillights (although even the lights are changing, with LED taillights becoming common).

We may be starting to witness a major change in our cars. Toyota has sold over a million of its hybrid Prius model. And the first electric cars are appearing. Are hybrids and electrics the wave of the future?

If you took all the Priuses and all the exemplars of a few other hybrid models, they'd all add up to a small percentage of the cars on the road. The overwhelming percentage of cars we're driving use gasoline internal combustion engines that may have changed in detail but still use the same fundamental principle as cars of 100 years ago.

One would be foolish to say that cars are not going to evolve, and even evolve in some fundamental ways. I personally think that the hybrid automobile is an interim solution. Having in essence two drive systems is complicated and expensive; in engineering terms, the hybrid is not an "elegant" solution. We need some simple system of storing a fuel or energy source, and a simple, compact, efficient motor for converting that fuel to motion.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein