Gasoline does not give up. How auto manufacturers respond to the appearance of electric vehicles

Electric cars capture the world. Every year more and more new models appear, and manufacturers and entire countriespromise to completely abandon gasoline engines in a couple of decades. But the developers of machines with an internal combustion engine do not think to give up: they also offer new technologies and increase efficiency. We tell how gasoline engines respond with electric.

Squeeze

The internal combustion engine has gone far from the invention of the 19th century. Its effectiveness has constantly increased even before the appearance of available electric vehicles. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, over the past 40 years, car manufacturers have practically doubled fuel saving indicators.

Only from 2005 to 2015 in the world, on average, they began to spend less than gasoline (and another type of fuel in the equivalent recount) to drive 100 kilometers. By 2015, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), this figure dropped to 7.6 liters per 100 kilometers. The global goal is to reduce this indicator by 2030 to 4.4 liters.

An ordinary gasoline engine continues to change

Improving the gasoline internal combustion engine, which we face most often, did not end after the electronic injector arrives to replace the carburetor. In mass machines, turbocharges are increasingly used to reduce the volume of the engine without reducing power.

At this, attempts to achieve savings do not end. Already in 2018, Nissan promises to release the first machines in which the computer will be able to adjust the degree of compression of the fuel mixture - to switch from “street” to the “racing” mode, changing the mechanical parameters of the piston inside the engine.

There is even a proposal to put engines with oncoming pistons in ordinary cars - as in tanks and aircraft. Researchers argue that this will increase the efficiency by 50%.

If you are too lazy to come up with something, you can get fat

In 2015, it became known that Volkswagen used special software on diesel vehicles to deceive the regulatory organs that measure harmful emissions. Although this was done primarily to comply with environmental standards, in fact, cars in laboratory conditions “saved” fuel.

VW agreed to spend billions of dollars solving the problem and began to update the program control programs in the machines. Moreover, after the update in some cases, the owners began to complain that fuel consumption increased even in a regular (and not just laboratory) mode.

Burn everything that burns

Gas and diesel is the main fuel for internal combustion engines, but not the only one. You can burn other substances, with a smaller number of emissions and more efficiency: natural gas, biodiesel, ethanol and even algae . Now biofuel now occupies 4% of the global fuel market for vehicles. The share of natural gas is less than one percent, but, according to the expectations of the IEA, it can show the most significant growth among transport fuel by 2040. First of all, at the expense of trucks.

Hybrids

The main compromise between gasoline cars and electric cars is hybrids. This is a machine in which an electric motor exists along with an internal combustion engine (ICE). The battery is charged either from the internal combustion engine or during braking. The pioneer of mass hybrids in the car market was Toyota, which by 2017 had already sold more than 10 million such cars. And sales of hybrids are still growing.

Mikhail Zelensky

Photo in the announcement: Hannah McKay / Reuters / Scanpix / Leta