> In the long run, society goes to 100% electric transportation due to global warming. Any analysis that treats this as a simple matter of consumer choice is going to miss the biggest driver of adoption.
As @Ray20 pointed out, this is Western thinking. The only factor that will flip most poorer people is a direct economic incentive. Who cares about the weather when your children cannot eat.
> Maybe some alternate carbon-neutral fuel for combustion is possible, but all the ones we’ve tried so far have lost out to electric.
It was getting more efficient, but this stopped ever since all the governments got together and decided that by 2035 no more combustion vehicles would be sold. All incentives to produce more efficient combustion vehicles went out the window.
We are actually only a handful of inventions away from pretty low emissions combustion engines. There have already been significant inventions, such as the catalytic converter, DPF, fuel additives, turbos, intercoolers, direct water injection, etc.
I suspect we were only years from seeing KERS and MGU-H during acceleration events. I think it is also quite likely there would have been more effort to push for hybrid vehicles where only small batteries are used, again for acceleration events. Improvements in manufacturing processes would allow for high tolerances, increasing internal pressures and combustion efficiency.
As @Ray20 pointed out, this is Western thinking. The only factor that will flip most poorer people is a direct economic incentive. Who cares about the weather when your children cannot eat.
> Maybe some alternate carbon-neutral fuel for combustion is possible, but all the ones we’ve tried so far have lost out to electric.
It was getting more efficient, but this stopped ever since all the governments got together and decided that by 2035 no more combustion vehicles would be sold. All incentives to produce more efficient combustion vehicles went out the window.
We are actually only a handful of inventions away from pretty low emissions combustion engines. There have already been significant inventions, such as the catalytic converter, DPF, fuel additives, turbos, intercoolers, direct water injection, etc.
I suspect we were only years from seeing KERS and MGU-H during acceleration events. I think it is also quite likely there would have been more effort to push for hybrid vehicles where only small batteries are used, again for acceleration events. Improvements in manufacturing processes would allow for high tolerances, increasing internal pressures and combustion efficiency.