Just allow the information in and see it from the bird's eye view.
Let's not talk about pollution, this aspect is clear to everyone. There are many more issues the car manufacturers and marketing agencies are desperately covering up, so you keep buying their products and feel good about it.
To understand the perspective, let's go back into car evolution briefly. Back in the time, the combustion engines were weak, a lot of energy was escaping as we only started to understand the physics behind in past few decades and the factors such as fuel efficiency, torque, speed, acceleration, suspensions, drag, friction, etc. weren't much of a deal. But as the time was passing, we learned from mistakes and kept developing better performance cars. Milestones were born. Instead of using wooden wheels, we created rubber tires. From this, we moved to air-filled tires and from this to air-less tires. Another milestone was the suspension, or multi-cylinder engines, turbochargers, seat belts, Airbags, in fact, anything, what changed the direction of the car manufacturing and added new value to the product.
It was all ok until we started improving at such a level, where people started to die as the cars became very powerful. New rules had to be implemented to prevent this from happening. Speed limits in areas, but also on the cars itself. All cars except racing or luxury sports models have the maximum speed established on the gauge. The point is, if you have a car which can perform speed of 300kmh, that's already beginning of aviation industry. A slight bump and your pretty metal pet take off, flip and end up on the roof. We can't go faster than these limits.
To drive safely not only for yourself but also for other drivers and pedestrians involved in traffic, we have location speed limits in place. No matter how powerful engine you will buy, it doesn't matter, because you can't use it. We have reached the limits of the ethics of using the cars. The same is with the efficiency of the engines. It used to waste a lot of energy, petrol, mechanics and now we are almost at the end with what we can achieve by using combustion principle.
When was the last milestone introduced by combustion car manufacturers which contributed significantly to the technology upgrade and value increase?
No matter how much efficient engine you will create, it will always need some amount of fuel to function and time for the combustion to happen. We're at the end here as well. It is similar logic as with computers. When the computer era started, you were able to buy standard pre-set configurations of specific speed and performance. But you could go beyond and build amazing powerful beast, which was fast, very fast compared to standard models. People were competing who has a better PC at home and spent fortunes to build them. The technology evolved so swiftly in the IT sector, that you don't need to care about the configuration of your PC anymore. Anything you buy today is very powerful, you will not experience a slow response. Even your smartphone is faster than your back-in-time PC. That is of course for the masses, who are using PC daily only for checking social media, playing movies, games, using writing editors etc., but clearly, you have industries where you need better configuration. That's not the point. The point is, that we stopped to care what's inside because it's powerful enough by default.
**THE GOOD NEWS**
“New” trend took place - electric cars. Finally. Today, Tesla is the only car which makes sense in the 21st century of car manufacturing. Mind you, that one of the first cars ever was electric. Imagine where we will be today if instead of combustion engines we would be evolving electric engines/technology, multiplied by the fact, that we had wireless electricity 100 years ago developed by Nicola Tesla. We are at least 100 behind the schedule, so whatever shape, design, or engine size will petrol car offer today, I am not impressed a bit. It's a waste of nature's resources in every way and waste of our time.
The difference is clear and combustion engines will be left for collections and museums soon. You don't need to be a scientist to realize it. They're just not efficient enough for the 21st century. Combustion engines work in the sequence of - injection, ignition, combustion, and exhaustion. With this principle, there's time limitation in which all 4 steps can happen. That means, that the acceleration or torque will take some time to happen simply because of the laws of physics. You can't have exhaustion stage to empty the cylinder together with combustion. It has to happen in sequence. One after another. In electric cars, the torque, for example, is available immediately as you only send an awful amount of electrons from one place to another. There's almost no delay as electrons can travel extremely fast. Have a look at the size of the Tesla engine of 500 horsepower and compare it to the size of the combustion engine of 500 horsepower. Are you kidding me right? Electric engine has only a few parts, how many parts has a combustion engine? Hundreds. What is more likely to break? The biggest advantage of an electric car such as Tesla is, that it is working on a similar principle to your mobile phone too. When you want better performance, all you do is download an update. In the Tesla, if the team of engineers will write a new algorithm for the car to manage electrons in a more efficient way, your car will go faster or save energy the very next day, if you install the update. You don't need to go to your local mechanic and buy and install turbocharger for extra money. Your car will change behavior towards better by simply installing software for free. Even the design and position of the control buttons can be changed because it's based on software. In other words, you might have 5yo Tesla, but it's up to date with performance and dashboard design, buttons and functions. If you buy new combustion engine car, after 5 years you're driving old technology in analog style, nothing can be changed, no button with new functionality added unless you pay for it and drill new holes to the dashboard yourself to accommodate the new control.
The combustion engine car industry is trying to make us believe, it's worth to pay that much for a new car, even if they are selling us outdated technology. You should see this perspective already. When was the major milestone in their car production they've delivered? They are trying to impress us with the new design, new button on a dashboard on the left, new light control on the right and you should be wowed by that. You are tricked. Nothing is worth the money when using the old technology unless they will come with the new milestone. But even if so, there's no future for combustion cars anyway, so such investment doesn’t make sense anyway. The value of your car will never exceed its original price, that’s a fact. Not in your lifetime. It can only happen after one and a half century or more as a case of an antique car, collection car or any other form of expression of its rarity. Again, you’re not gonna be around to cash up.
When a new car is purchased, its price drops immediately. If you’d wait 10 years to sell it and buy yourself a new car, you lose all your previous investments, plus now you have to add a sum for the new car. So if a starting price of a good car is 30,000, after ten years you’ve lost 30K plus another 30K for a new car. That’s why people sell their new car within first 2-3 years, knock off 10-15K of the price and now they only have to add the difference to buy a new car…that’s exactly what car manufacturers want - to people keep buying. With this approach we produce so much junk and exhaust so much of nature’s resources, it’s beyond the sane mind. With this approach to everything in our lives, one day we will definitely run out of our resources.
I know there are many car lovers who would never buy an electric car. We still have people who love riding horses. I am sure when cars came to the street replacing horses, there were many horse lovers against the idea for many reasons. Who talks about horses on the streets these days? If you happen to be in the "transition generation" you will have issues to accept the changes, no matter how logical they may be. The next generation born in the system where the technology is already implemented will look at your car as junk. We only need to recognize, that electric cars are the next phase and it is a new exciting industry.
But this doesn't end here. Even the idea of owning a car is obscure. That's a push from the industry and it is linked to economic growth. If you live in the city, have a look at any street with new eyes. Parked cars everywhere. Have a look tomorrow. Parked cars. Have a look the day after - parked cars...they're not in use! We spent so many resources, energy, and money to build it and it’s not serving! People in cities are buying cars to use them 2 days during the weekend. So for the luxury of being able to leave the town, we buy something we will use 2/7 days. That doesn't sound like smart human thinking to me. Furthermore, the usual car has 4-5 seats. We all want to buy a car, but we mostly drive by ourselves, so all the other seats are constantly empty. We bought a car for 5 people, but only one person is sitting inside. Waste of space and potential. Family? Yes, sure, they utilize the cars more, but as soon as the kids are old enough, they buy their own car and again, 3-4 seats will be empty. When I see a car with one person in it, it looks comic to me. We've been convinced to buy something we not gonna use and we think what an amazing product we bought. No common sense involved.
The solution is to have car companies in the large cities of the similar concept as Barclays/Santander bikes. You pay a monthly fee, you can take any bike from point A, drive it to point B and someone else will take it from B to C. We don't need to own cars anymore and it's fewer headaches. If such a scheme would be in place, you can have up to 60% fewer cars parked in the cities, more space available and almost all cars would be in constant use. Not a waste of natures resources. It's not easy to do this transition, but just for a moment drop all the ideas you know about today’s world and cars, your feelings and connections to it and simply, without judgment, imagine how would it feel not to have the pressure on you, which is connected to a car owner. Registration fees, fuel, oil change, parking fees, theft or intentional damage, MOT, etc. If you’d pay a monthly fee for using the car and someone else have a headache with all of this, wouldn’t you prefer it? You’d have cars available everywhere, it’ll be only matter of preference.
The week has 168 hours - for how many hours of driving per week are you using your own car?