Yarly, but I still sometimes read the car magazines. I get annoyed at 95% of cars that are over about $35k, largely because there are
so many of them, and it just seems like people are begging for the guillotine. But the engineering often interests me -- even if the same engineering effort could produce elegant solutions to problems that actually need solving, instead.
I've only bought one new car myself, ever, and that was a Toyota Tercel back when you could get one for $10k. Right now, I'm considering buying an old Civic that's in great shape, but I'd need a loan . . . and it's the insurance that might make it impossible. This 'car state' isn't a state where you can get one blanket policy and one set of plates and just drive whichever car the plates are on at the moment.
The stuff being built right now is hampered by car companies not being able to quite decide, by and large, how non-traditional they want to go. They tried really hard in the 60s through the early 80s to consider alternative designs (turbines, rotary engines, vapor engines, atomic power sources, etc), and it was almost universally a
huge financial loss. A few companies (mostly Japanese and German) kept at it, with smaller budgets, smaller plans, and smaller marketing campaigns. That's why the Germans (Mercedes and VW) developed awesome diesel engines and the Japanese developed advanced gas engines (Mazda's rotary and Miller-cycle beasts, Honda and Toyota's insanely low-emission engines).
In the US, there's a far greater preference to stick with the same thing decade after decade and just refine it. The current push-rod engines are amazing . . . versions of the old ones. And the thing is, if you try to make a hybrid that's as similar to a non-hybrid as possible, you're going to be adding a lot of complexity but not necessarily make a lot of difference. The new 'low-compromise' hybrids are impressive but don't represent a huge change. If Detroit and the GOP hadn't generally fought CAFE standards every step of the way, we'd already be driving non-hybrids that got better mileage than the mild hybrids that are available.
Meanwhile, the European hybrids we get are mostly luxury cars. (Lexus is doing the same thing. Efficiency, after all, can mean more
power per gallon, not just more miles per gallon.) The European manufacturers don't seem to want to bring out mass-market hybrids until they have the mix just right. In the next five years or so, I'd expect low-emission pure-electric hybrids from VW, for instance -- imagine a Golf with 75 HP motors at each front wheel and a tiny 100 HP three-cylinder turbo diesel running a generator at an equivalent of 80 MPG.
Similar things have already been done, and there are experimental / custom micro-turbine hybrids, like
the sports car that guy from EA Games drives, a Ferrari-like monster that I hear gets around 50 MPG from biodiesel at 0-60 in 4 seconds. That's not world-beating mileage, but it's three times the mileage of the same model-year Ferrari F430. And it has a better power curve. That beast is a bit silly -- you don't need such a high-speed turbine with so much wear and tear, but even so it's got enormously fewer moving parts than a normal car, and with mass production that turbine wouldn't be implausibly expensive.
Meanwhile, battery technology is improving so rapidly that the biggest stumbling block is going to be retooling factories to mass-produce whatever the next generation is. There are already four or five battery workable technologies that kick lithium-ion's ass up and down the block. Nobody's set up to mass-produce them yet, but some will almost immediately be cheaper.
Which is good, because, yeah, I won't be able to afford a sexy hybrid or electric car until I get can a five-year-old one off of Craigslist.
