Is it the Oil Companies fault?

That we are still driving around with internal-combustion, gasoline powered engine's?





Is their greed for the money or whatnot slowing our future down?





You know we can think of better more economical and eco friendly ways to power our vehicles, so why havent we?





If people could invent the engine we use now back in the 1800's (http://inventors.about.com/library/weekl… then WHY 122 YEARS LATER CANT WE INVENT SOMETHING BETTER?





What do you think?Is it the Oil Companies fault?
And don't forget the 400 mile per gallon carburetors. The trouble is there is just so much energy in a gallon of gasoline and no more. Fuel injection meters fuel better than carburetion and moving and changing the camshaft has helped but the bottom line is you can't get something for nothing.





As for different inventions, how about the Wankel engine. It produced copious amounts of power but it had an insatiable appetite for fuel. I used a tiny sedan for two weeks in about 1976. That car got 10 miles to the gallon. It was about the size of modern hybrid. We have converted to compressed natural gas. My wife is part of a team that manages vehicles for the State Government of California. She tells me their CNG cars have a range of about 50 miles. That's no good if you plan to drive it 500 miles and back. Unless you can find a fueling station every fifty miles. Steam is an option and I have seen some interesting ideas in that arena but nothing that would make an investor enough money to explore the concept, and you still need heat.





I guess for the foreseeable future “the piston goes up and down while the crankshaft goes round and round” is what we will have to live with.





Just be careful, don't let someone think for you. If you were an oil company right now and could cut the price of gas by 10% and see 5 times the volume wouldn't you do it??? I know I would and all my investors would be so happy with me that I would get a very nice bonus. Everybody wants to be a victim; they want to believe some big conspiracy is aimed right at them and no one else. It just isn't true. China and India are putting tremendous strain on the world supply of oil.





The bottom line is you and I will have to pay enough to take the oil away from someone else.





In my opinion if we could get off burning fossil fuels to generate electricity I think it would make a big difference in a lot of things. Hydroelectric, harness tides, the wind, nuclear power and even the old water wheel would reduce the demand for oil enough that the price would have to come down before there would be many buyers. Remember electric cars work. It’s just the battery technology that could use some more tweaking.Is it the Oil Companies fault?
There just wasn't a reason to change. There was some focus on the environmental damage of the automotive engines that brought on cleaner running cars, better exhaust systems, carburetors going to the wayside, diesel engines running clean (and not the black puffs of smoke of thinking back to old diesel engines) and such... Aside from this, though, the oil has been so plentiful and cheap and so widespread that it's just been easy to keep developing cars with these internal combustion engines.





To forward other technologies is unfortunately difficult. Diesel cars are still wildly unpopular in the US (well, not really wildly unpopular, but considering people's complaints about gas prices, it seems so) and diesel fuel is hard to find. Biodiesel is even harder to locate. I can probably think of maybe 3 places off the top of my head in the Seattle area that offer biodiesel. Gasoline is plentiful enough to be found everywhere you turn. What about natural gas? Not common at all. Do I want to have a car that runs on natural gas when I can only refill at a few select locations?





I fully agree that people should be trying to move towards better technologies, but I also would fully agree with seeing gas prices rising up to the levels of European gas prices such that people didn't just complain, but would decrease fuel usage and necessitate change (and the added taxes went to furthering research in ';better'; greener technologies).





Short answer... we can invent something better, but we aren't allowing it to happen. Not the oil companies. Us. It sucks, but we aren't caring enough to make the changes and not stand for the complacency.
Oil companies and the big auto manufactures, YES.





When ever a new technology is invented one of them buy it and shelve it in their basement.





In the 1980's there was a transmission invented that could raise the gas milage of any car to over 300 mpg.





In the 90's there actually was a viable engine that would run on water.





Most of the inventors are broke and look for funding for their projects, they usually just get their patent bought for millions and the invention is put away forever.





I actually met the group that built the transmission as I was looking for funding for a different project at the time and we met some of the same potential investors. They took about a 20 million offer from an auto manufacturer.