Not surprisingly...You couldn't be much more wrong about the internal combustion engine.
We continue to make them more efficient.
see below:

especially this quote:


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With oil prices hovering above $50 a barrel, some of the world's major auto makers are accelerating efforts to improve the fuel efficiency of cars without resorting to expensive batteries or hybrid gas-electric systems.

Their goal: to enhance today's gasoline-engine technology so that cars can travel vastly more miles per gallon of fuel.

"Even the best of today's most advanced gasoline engines on average waste more than 80% of the [thermal] energy they create by burning gasoline," Honda Motor Co. Chief Executive Takeo Fukui says. "We think possibilities for improvement are almost infinite there."

Archrival Toyota Motor Corp. has a similar goal. "Everybody wants to double the efficiency of gasoline engines, and we are all working on similar technologies," says Masatami Takimoto, chief of Toyota's power train development in Japan. "Most likely it's going to be a dead heat."

At General Motors Corp., engineers are working on a new type of gasoline internal-combustion engine that could provide "80% of the efficiency of a hybrid or a diesel for 20% of the cost," says Scott Fosgard, a GM spokesman.

Underlying many of these efforts is a renewed interest in a technology automotive engineers call "homogenous-charge compression-ignition," or HCCI. The technology, which is believed capable of providing as much as a 30% boost in the fuel economy of a gasoline engine, is a hot topic in automotive research labs at GM and Ford Motor Co. in the U.S., Volkswagen AG and DaimlerChrsyler AG in Germany, and Toyota, Nissan Motor Co. and Honda in Japan.

Mechanically, an HCCI engine, like a conventional gasoline engine, sends a finely balanced mixture of air and fuel to the cylinders. In a conventional gas engine, a spark plug ignites the air-fuel mixture to create power. But in an HCCI engine, the air-fuel mixture is compressed by the piston until rising heat inside the chamber ignites the mixture -- a process similar to that used in a diesel engine.

Daniel Flowers, a combustion engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California, says vehicles powered by gasoline HCCI engines are a "strong contender" in the competition to create an affordable, high-mileage, clean-burning vehicle. HCCI could create a new class of power trains that match the eye-popping fuel economy of a diesel without high emissions of nitrogen oxides, or NOx, and sooty particulates -- a problem that hampers the wider use of diesel engines. Mr. Flowers says an HCCI engine would significantly cut the emission of particulates while producing "close to zero" emissions of NOx, which are blamed widely as one of the chief causes of smog.

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Even some environmental activists say all the talk about the promise of hybrid vehicles -- which are powered by a combination of batteries and gasoline engines -- misses a larger point. Even if, by 2025, all new vehicles sold in the U.S. were hybrids that averaged double the fuel economy of today's vehicles, the best result would be that the nation would hold its overall fuel use at today's levels, they say. That's because there will be many more vehicles on the road then, and many still will have internal-combustion engines. A better way to measurably curb oil consumption, these groups say, is to significantly improve the fuel economy of the internal-combustion engine, since many more of these will be sold.

Standing in the way of that vision, however, are obstacles that have sidelined HCCI technology since auto makers first began experimenting with it in the 1970s. For one thing, it's extremely difficult to make an HCCI engine run smoothly at very low and extremely high speeds because engineers cannot control the spontaneous combustion in those ranges.

Now, however, auto makers say new computerized electronic controls are improving the odds. Already, some car makers are deploying a precursor to HCCI called gasoline direct-injection technology.

Gasoline direct injection differs from the fuel-injection technology used in many cars today. In fuel-injected engines, gasoline and air are mixed together before they are introduced into the combustion chamber. In gasoline direct-injection engines, the air and gasoline are introduced into the combustion chamber directly and separately. The system helps boost fuel efficiency.

Honda last year launched in Japan a version of its Stream car with a gasoline direct-injection engine. VW's Audi brand will use the system on its 2005 A6 model. It's a key technology to achieve the finely balanced charge of air and gasoline necessary to make HCCI combustion work, although HCCI requires much faster and more accurate fuel injectors and a higher-powered computer control system, says Udo Ruegheimer, an Audi spokesman.

There are other signs of progress on the road to HCCI. One recent afternoon inside GM's Powertrain Systems Research Lab in Warren, Mich., researcher Paul Najt demonstrated an experimental HCCI engine that idled effortlessly -- a big achievement for such engines since they typically have trouble with low speeds.

Mr. Najt says GM has found ways to control HCCI combustion in an engine's low to mid range, which he says should represent about 65% of the load range necessary to run a gasoline engine properly on the highway. GM, like other auto makers, has trouble controlling combustion in the higher range. Still, Mr. Najt says, "We have our arms around this combustion process."

GM's current thinking is to deploy the HCCI process from idle to the mid range and handle the engine's initial cold-start and heaviest loads by using more conventional approaches, such as spark plugs, to smooth out kinks in combustion. Such an approach, Mr. Najt says, should allow GM to boost the fuel economy of a gasoline engine by 25%.

Honda and Toyota are aiming even higher.

Honda earlier this year opened an Advanced Powertrain Research center in Japan to focus on improving internal-combustion engines. The aim, Mr. Fukui says, is to tap on average as much as 40% to 50% of the thermal power generated by a gasoline engine per unit of fuel through things such as HCCI -- more than doubling the efficiency of a typical gasoline-powered engine now.

Toyota's Mr. Takimoto, meanwhile, says his company's objective "for the time being" is to boost the average thermal efficiency of a gasoline engine to 40%. He deems achieving that objective as "critical" to making its gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles even more fuel-efficient.

Both Honda's Mr. Fukui and Mr. Takimoto say doubling the efficiency of combustion roughly should translate into doubled fuel economy. Honda officials say their goals could translate to a gasoline-fueled, V-6 Accord sedan that would get 50 miles per gallon -- double the 25 mpg such an Accord gets today. Gas-electric hybrid versions of HCCI Accords might go more than 70 miles on a gallon of gasoline.