The death of the internal combustion engine has been greatly exaggerated

[PhilBill]

A presentation in the UK parliament by a highly qualified professor of engineering. Battery electric cars are unlikely to be the future.

[Jeff Turbo]

It will eventually die, but electric cars are not the answer, only a stop gap in my opinion

[Sussex Pete]

In our current focus on reducing CO₂ emissions, I would propose that it is nigh on impossible, with current technology, to devise an item that is capable of moving a transport unit (such as a people carrying vehicle) without creating a pollutant at some stage in its process. I would further add that this includes batteries, fuelcells or hydrogen power as the most popular/common alternatives at the moment. The only thing that appears to come close to meeting the requirement is solar power, and unfortunately, that is not suitable for all countries or all seasons. On that basis, I feel that the IC engine will continue, even if it becomes a pariah, for some time to come.

[Doctordiesel77]

In our current focus on reducing CO₂ emissions, I would propose that it is nigh on impossible, with current technology, to devise an item that is capable of moving a transport unit (such as a people carrying vehicle) without creating a pollutant at some stage in its process. I would further add that this includes batteries, fuelcells or hydrogen power as the most popular/common alternatives at the moment. The only thing that appears to come close to meeting the requirement is solar power, and unfortunately, that is not suitable for all countries or all seasons. On that basis, I feel that the IC engine will continue, even if it becomes a pariah, for some time to come.

If you do the sums, ic engines and fossil fuel start to look much less bad than the powers that be have painted them. I didn't get as far as doing a detailed analysis on cars, but posted the total carbon footprint of locally mined Anthracite on facebook, including all of the figures that I had used and links to sources. It was less than the chimney emissions (ie not adding in the transport, loss of carbon sink, felling and processing overheads) of the allegedly green biomass alternative. I rounded everything in favour of the biomass, so if there were any holes in my theory I had a good margin, so far no-one has argued with this. An older ev such as the Bedford cf electric would score better than many modern ones as far as carbon footprint and sustainability goes, but the 50mph top speed and 60 miles range lets it down a bit......