That's what they said 20 years agomyglaren wrote:Surely we will all have flying cars that never wear out by then
I'll lay a wager we'll still be running cars on petrol and diesel, albeit highly efficiently, and the bonnets will be locked and inaccessible.
Fact is, however you look at it, petrol and diesel has the highest energy density by far and there's nothing else that can pack so much energy into such a small space and so conveniently. Petrol and diesel are easy to store in relatively flimsy tanks and relatively, just a little takes you a long way. It would be lovely to think LPG would see greater uptake. It's clean, has a high intrinsic octane rating and is cheap but storage is the problem and it cannot be stored as densely as either petrol or diesel as you'll always need a heavy pressure vessel to store it and filling such a vessel is nowhere near so straightforward as filling with petrol or diesel.
So, on that basis, it's going to be jolly hard to replace petrol and diesel. They've been trying for years and in reality are no closer to cracking the problem than they ever were; it's all still fiddling around the edges of a problem that basic physics and chemistry will not allow a solution to.
There’s an awful lot of blind alleys being travelled at the moment. Hydrogen, batteries, hybrids and so on. Just mere fads with no real future for the mainstream.