The Death of the Internal Combustion Engine?

The Economist magazine recently proclaimed that the internal combustion engine, the revolutionary design that made the modern automobile industry a commercial reality, is finally on its way out. The main reason is the significant advances of battery-powered electric vehicles, promoted by Tesla and others, which should become cost competitive *soon*.

How soon is the real question.

As much as we would love to see this becoming a reality at the earliest opportunity, news of the death of the internal combustion engine may have been greatly exaggerated.

Why so?

Thomas Edison was one of the most prolific inventors (or VC backer, depending on your views of History) in the late industrial age. Many of his creations / investments still remain in use today. However, there was one pursuit that always frustrated him, and indeed nearly bankrupted him more than once. And that was the challenge of finding affordable power storage.

It has frustrated many others ever since. Make no mistake, this remains a very significant challenge despite all the progress that has been made in recent years, and that has been substantial. We do have to wonder why that is - a century+ after electricity started to become ubiquitous across society.

Even if a durable, low-cost and long-lasting battery is developed, scaling production up to the levels that are required to satisfy minimal commercial demand is certainly not trivial.

This will require, among many other things, mining for new materials, and that mining in turn will require – you guessed it – lots of conventional fuels powering very large internal combustion engine vehicles. This partially explains why carbon emissions savings might not be as large as some would have hoped with the conversion to electric vehicles.

The same goes for the electric grid. A massive upgrade and scale up would be needed to allow a great number of cars to power up at different supposedly convenient locations. Since we will still need things like copper wires, once again we are left with the dilemma of having to mine a lot of new stuff to replace the old.

All this comes at the time when both consumers and the Federal Government do not exactly have lots of spare cash lying around. A recent study shows that most Americans can’t handle a $500 surprise bill. Where will the funds to invest in all this come from? More debt?

So while not insurmountable the challenges remain very significant from all sides.

As all of this is playing out, a wise strategy should be to conserve as much energy as possible. That will be essential to support whatever transition society goes for in the hopefully not too distant future.

Until then, long live the internal combustion engine!