Captain Hybrid - Slideshow: Internal Combustion Engines Primed for Performance

Internal combustion engines.: At risk of making many folks really irat...

The fact that nobody has come up with a fundamentally different system in a hundred years is quite a testimony to the suitability of these engines to the task. There certainly have been a whole lot of important improvements that have made them work much better. My point being that the lack of a better solution is not from a lack of trying! A thermal fuel cell that would convert petroleum directly into electricity to drive electric motors would be a nice alternative, except that the physics don't quite seem to work that way. The real problem is that it takes some source of energy to move a car, and the means to convert some form of chemical energy into thermal energy to drive our engines is the best found, so far. Of course, people have been searching for those alternatives also. Of course, aside from the pesky laws of physics that do limit things, we also have all kinds of...

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