Look how many years it's taken the car & engine manufacturers to come up with a powerful small engine that gets 40mpg. Renewables will be the same way. in 50 years, there will be very few combustible engines on the road. And people will wonder why it took so long to make the switch.
Not really so PT
It is all about energy density
No matter what technology advances happen you still need a certain amount of energy to move forward & push the air away from you
Reducing that energy requirement is what streamlining is all about
Small engines that will push a car along & get 40 mpg have been around since WWII
It is just the USA car companies did not want to make them
A 1000 cc flat 4 VW engine will push almost any small car along very economically and did so for 50 years till US passed laws that made them uneconomical
What has happened with the auto industry is the architypical failing of the capitalist free market economy where what is cheap & readily available is wasted for the purpose of maximizing profits or plain old squandering a plentiful resource till it is gone.
and this applies to just about everything you buy .
In the case of cars, it was the US makers deciding to produce massive vehicles , near twice the size of any other country on the planet because THE USA had plenty of space to ( again ) waste by making very wide roads and huge car parks , a guarranteed source of very cheap petrol and cheap steel .
Really big vehicles are very cheaper to make and because they are big they appear to be good value for money , so an investors dream , cheap to make with massive profits .
In Europe where roads were narrow and built out so can not be widened and space for car parks is very hard to come by, cars are smaller and far more economical .
For EV's to advance we will need substantially stronger magnets and batteries that can both store more energy and discharge at a higher rate .
I spent a while at Sims metal who were a major battery maker at the time.
The car makers continually pushed us for smaller lighter batteries to make their cars lighter & more fuel efficient while at the same time adding 5 kg of electric motors to move the two front seats around .
The love affair with EV's created my Elon Musk, ( for his own financial gain ) will go sour very quickly when you start getting daily reports of people being roasted to death inside their mobile bombs because something has caused the batteries to ignite .
Their is mot a more dangerous source of energy than a Lithium battery which is basically a bomb that we try to explode slowly to drive the car forward .
As a side note . on a per mile driven basis, Tesla is the most dangerous vehicle on the road with 3 times the fatality per mile rate than any other brand .
And the self driving cars as a group have 5 times the fatalities per mile than the "dumb" cars do
Now both of these are skewed because there are small numbers of both of them .
Li batteries have an iltelligent use, small hand held devices where the energy stored in them is not enough to kill or blow the item apart
And of course they are small & light
However for a car / truck they are plain old stupid and over time this will be borne out .
For now the P T Barnam reincarnation ( Musk ) has us all convinced that we can solve all of the problems we have created by over consumption buy consuming more .
The solution is leave the car at home , ride a bike or walk or use public transport .
But the government has to pay for public transport infrastructure where as they profit from the taxes on you buying a new very expensive car .
And remember the TESLA uses the same amount of roads as your 10 Litre 12 cylinder SUV but generates 2 to 3 time the amount of tax revenue .
So governments will encourage you to buy a new electric car .
