No single change has been a magic bullet, each has helped the engine run cleaner and more efficiently by a few percentage points, while also allowing engines to become more powerful. Today’s ICE cars are remarkably clean by historic standards, and more powerful than they have ever been, just as the world is preparing to move on.
The problem is, there are billions of them around the world, so even remarkably clean isn’t clean enough.
On the other hand, car companies have been working on ICE engines since the 1800s but have only really been serious about electricity for slightly more than a decade, when they started to realise that the Telsa Model S was not only a very clever machine, but was generating huge buyer interest.
So there’s plenty of improvement still to come in battery-powered cars, even if things are happening quite as quickly as some predicted (in 2017 this paper reported “spasms of anxiety” within the motor industry after an influential Stanford economist predicted that the ICE would be stone dead within eight years, as consumers switched en masse to self-drive, on-call electric vehicles. Needless to say, that was eight years ago). Still, several European countries now have EVs commanding better than 20 per cent of new car sales. China has 25.
The ICE has come far since the days of the Bugatti Type 57 SC Atlantic grand tourer from the 1930s, left, pictured next to the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, which has a top speed exceeding 300 mph.
So what is there to admire about the ICE? The sheer intricacy, and incredibly small tolerances for a start. To make a machine with 294 individual components (the number in the Bentley W12) that produces 467 kW and 900 Nm while running smoothly and reliably, is no small feat.
And then there’s the noise. That’s the thing most people say they will miss. I’m as bad as the next aficionado of just the right engine note though I often wonder why. It’s probably our association with racing cars, and the way their sound builds with increasing speed.
As F1 cars have become quieter, for example, they just don’t appear to be going as quickly. The reality is the opposite (today’s F1 hybrids are faster), so perhaps one day we’ll come to accept that the sonorous roar of a highly tuned V8 isn’t necessary synonymous with performance. It might be just a noisy way of doing something more slowly.
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