Going in circles

The internal combustion engine is a triumph of insanity over cool reason. It all started back in 1885 when Karl Benz designed the world’s first practical motor car powered by an internal combustion engine. Electric motors go round and round, driven quietly by electricity. Just like the wheels on the road that go round and round, so there can be direct connection. Internal combustion engines go up and down driven by noisy explosions of dangerous gases. So a complicated transfer must be done to change the motion from up and down to round and round, and gears must be added to provide the kind of power needed to start a car and keep it running. And to go backward. Only the ingenuity of clever engineers has made possible what should never have been attempted. Electric motors you just turn a speed control knob, or flick a switch to go backward.

A vehicle’s engine and drive train will be reduced from 2,000 different parts to 20 in an electric vehicle. And you won’t repair them, you’ll replace them. The old-fashioned repair shops will go out of business. Car mechanics will become car electronics technicians who’ll mostly replace, not repair.

The move to electric vehicles couldn’t be more welcome. But I will miss the throaty roar of a V8, and the scream of an FI. Dead silence at speed somehow doesn’t seem right.

With it will come automatic driving, the car will do it for you. So you can relax and enjoy the ride. Inevitably there’ll be the occasional accident, and the scream of people that it’s not safe—as has already occurred. This despite the fact that 1.3 million people die annually from human mistakes when driving their cars. A human killing a human is accepted. A machine doing it is not. Logical thinking be damned.

It does mean you’ll no longer need to own a car. In my day, the dream was to buy your first car, inevitably secondhand. And you saved every penny to do so. Today’s youth must have a smartphone. Car ownership is passé.

Even the oldies will no longer need a car, just call and an automatic car will arrive at your doorstep, and unaided take you where you want to go. If you haven’t decided to take an automatic rapid bus, or high-speed maglev train. Or a human-carrying drone, automatic of course. I wonder if the car companies are planning for the day when they’ll be selling not only all electric but fewer of them.

Electricity revolutionized the world the moment Thomas Edison created a light bulb design that enabled it to last a long time and hence become practical for household use. Nothing’s been the same ever since. Electric motors will equally revolutionize the travel industry. Ships will go electric, even planes once the other revolution is discovered: A lightweight, long-lasting battery. A sodium-ion battery has been developed that can power cars that will last longer and is 30-50 percent cheaper. But another breakthrough is needed.

That battery when it comes, and it will, will change not only transport but electronics and just about everything else. The cordless power tools I use now will be the only ones you can buy. Like incandescent lamps disappearing as LEDs usurped them, cords on a power tool will no longer be available. You’ll mow the lawn silently, not with a noisy two-stroke (we already have a cordless electric grass cutter).

All this is going to put huge demands on producing power. With coal, oil, and gas plants being shut down the standard renewables (wind, solar, water, geothermal) won’t be able to sufficiently replace them even with new-fangled batteries that solar and wind must have to be 24-hour reliable. Nuclear will become an inevitable necessity, even if human emotion defies factual reality and doesn’t want it. There’ll be no choice. But I suspect we’ll have to experience debilitating blackouts before much of humanity accepts the shift to nuclear.

The industrial revolution revolutionized the way societies live. The battery and the advanced use of electricity, coupled with nanotechnology (which will need a tiny, tiny long-lasting battery) and AI tied to an ever-faster developing IT world is at the dawn of a revolution that’s going to result in us living in an even more different world than we’re already experiencing. I still have a record player but must admit using my phone and Bluetooth to listen to music these days. My record collection gathers dust. And CDs, DVDs? Well, can you remember them?

IC engines will be museum pieces.

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