In Defense of the Gasoline-Powered Internal Combustion Engine
by Chris Hafner
I would like to kick off this post with two breathtakingly broad generalizations. My first generalization is that we live in an amazing time, in which the human race has made miraculous leaps in the fields of information, communication, transportation, medicine, and entertainment--to say nothing of feeding and clothing ourselves. My second generalization is that we have a bad habit of taking these advances for granted.
This is by no means a new opinion--comedian Louis C.K., for one, has a real knack for pinpointing the absurdity in this. Here, for example, are his thoughts on air travel:
It's not a particularly fashionable time to write a pro-car treatise. Cars, their engines, and their fuel are blamed for a variety of sins--polluting the environment; distorting our foreign policy; requiring ugly and expensive roads; encouraging social deviancy; killing off drivers, pedestrians and wildlife; and hurting small business in small downtowns by encouraging sprawl. Here in Seattle, for example, a rather vocal portion of the populace has argued that we don't need to replace a major highway through the city despite our existing problems with congestion. The thought is that the resulting level of gridlock would serve an ostensibly worthwhile purpose of getting some cars off the road.
Here's the thing--a lot of those complaints have merit. Today's cars do have their downsides--particularly environmentally. After all, cars take a lot of energy and materials to build. To make them run you need a variety of toxic fluids, any of which can contaminate water and ground, and most of which need to be extracted from land situated in a politically volatile part of the world. Gasoline, the most central of these, adds a nasty pollution cocktail to the atmosphere when burned.
This all true, but I think it misses the larger point. Cars cause problems because there are just so many of them--their impact is multiplied by the sheer, staggering scale of their ubiquity. They are everywhere, and that's because they're fantastic at mobilizing us and giving us the freedom of movement. Today's car and its gasoline-powered internal combustion engine is essentially a miracle with some rough edges; and while we should acknowledge and work towards removing those rough edges, I want to take some time to recognize the miracle.
On its face, the internal combustion engine doesn't have much to recommend it. For one thing, it's not a particularly efficient way of turning energy into motion. It works from a series of controlled explosions, which generate force that translates into reciprocal motion and, eventually, the rotation of the drive wheels. This means that of all the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline, only 25 percent turns into motive force. The remaining 75 percent of the energy turns into heat, light, and noise. This compares well to steam engines (roughly 8 percent efficient), but pales in comparison with electric motors, which are 75-95-percent efficient.
So, why am I defending the internal combustion engine? Because, despite this relative inefficiency, the gasoline-powered engine is an amazing machine. Let me explain by telling you what you already know--today's cars can do amazing things with a small amount of fuel.
Think of a one-gallon container of liquid--a typical milk container, for example. With only that much gasoline, depending on conditions and driving style, a brand new Honda Fit will drive 40 miles, possibly more, before it runs out of fuel. Please suspend your ennui for a moment; I'm going to do my best to persuade you that this truly is remarkable.
In absolute terms, 40 miles is a significant amount of distance. Think of the most common means of transportation before cars became common. Forty miles represents six hours of travel from a sailing ship traveling at a steady six knots. It represents five hours of travel from a horse trotting at a steady eight mph. It represents two days of travel from a cross-country wagon train. A late 19th-century train could cover 40 miles distance nearly as quickly as the Fit, but it would would need 1,000-4,000 pounds of coal to do so.
Let's take a look at the other side of the equation. The Fit is capable of covering those 40 miles on one gallon of fuel, within 40 minutes or less, without drama, and in comfort. The driver would be swaddled in an environment that includes a comfortably upholstered chair, a high-quality sound system with decent accoustics, and with filtered and climate-controlled air. And while we consider the Fit a relatively small and efficient car, it is capable of remarkable utility--it is a 2,500-pound car with a modern safety cage, seating for a family of five, and room for gear. It only takes eight fill-ups and 80 gallons of gas, costing the driver roughly $240, to propel this 2,500-pound object from one side of this continent to the other. That's an amazing accomplishment for a relatively small amount of fuel.
Bigger and faster cars are obviously less efficient, but it's a matter of degree. Most family cars are capable of 30 mpg on the freeway. Even a high-performance Chevrolet Corvette Z06, which cranks out more than 500 horsepower and is among the best-performing cars on Earth, can get more than 20 mpg on the freeway. If you're willing to trade utility and comfort for performance and economy, a motorcycle will take you even farther than the Fit, while allowing you to accelerate like a race car--with an engine displacing 1000cc or less, roughly the size of the water bottle pictured here. I think that's absolutely miraculous.
So, how is this possible? Well, for one thing, the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine is fundamentally a century-old technology in the same way that high-powered turboprop airplane is fundamentally a century-old technology. In both cases, the basic, primitive beginning has transformed into something much more sophisticated, thanks to billions of dollars of development, innovation from some extremely smart people, and a century of customer- and warfare-driven pressure to improve. New materials, variable valve timing, turbocharging, fuel injection, direct injection, computerized engine management, and other high-tech wizardry have turned the old internal combustion engine into a highly efficient source of power. Though, to be fair, these same forces likely would have driven some amazing strides in steam or electric cars as well, had either of those technologies emerged as the standard in the 1900s.
Boring old gasoline has also turned out to be a pretty fantastic fuel. It's easily transportable, burns relatively cleanly, and contains a lot of energy. This is one problem with a lot of the possible alternatives to gasoline--one gallon of gasoline is less expensive and contains more energy than liquid natural gas, liquid hydrogen, methanol, or ethanol. You get more bang (literally!) for your buck with gasoline.
To return to the clean-burning point for a moment; note that I said relatively clean burning. Burning any sort of fossil fuel will result in carbon and some nasty byproducts. But, compared to the bad old days, today's cars are amazingly clean (according to the EPA):
Car Pollution (grams/mile)
Year VOC NOX CO
1967 16.8 3.2 81.7
1998 1.2 0.6 3.0
VOC-Volatile Organic Compounds; NOX-Oxides of Nitrogen; CO-Carbon Monoxide
That's a staggering drop in pollutants--and it explains why the skies over major American cities are cleaner than they were in the 1970s despite an increase in the number of cars. Another interesting fact from that study--the typical 1998 car would need to drive 660 miles to emit the same amount of VOC put out in just one hour by a chainsaw. This data is also a decade old; cars have become cleaner as technology improves. My 2003 Honda Accord, like many other cars, meets ULEV criteria, which means that it pollutes less than half as much as the average new car.
Please don't get me wrong here--I'm not saying gasoline-powered, internal-combustion-engined cars don't have serious flaws, that we shouldn't build more and smarter mass transit, or that we shouldn't make a serious effort to pursue alternative propulsion technologies. On the contrary, I think there's a lot of room to have smarter, faster, cleaner, and more efficient cars, and I'm looking forward to what tomorrow's technology brings.
The point here is that we should take a moment to give today's humble, much-maligned car a nod of respect and to recognize that whatever new propulsion model replaces the gasoline engine has some really big shoes to fill.
by Chris Hafner
I would like to kick off this post with two breathtakingly broad generalizations. My first generalization is that we live in an amazing time, in which the human race has made miraculous leaps in the fields of information, communication, transportation, medicine, and entertainment--to say nothing of feeding and clothing ourselves. My second generalization is that we have a bad habit of taking these advances for granted.
This is by no means a new opinion--comedian Louis C.K., for one, has a real knack for pinpointing the absurdity in this. Here, for example, are his thoughts on air travel:
“I was on an airplane recently and there was high-speed Internet on the airplane. That’s the newest thing that I know exists. And I’m sitting on the plane, and they go ‘Open up your laptop and you can go on the Internet.’ and it’s fast, and I’m watching YouTube clips--it's amazing, I’m in an airplane! And then it breaks down, and they apologize. The guy next to me goes “Psshhhh. This is bull****.” Like how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago! ...
"Flying is the worst one because people people come back from flights, and they tell you their story. And it's like a horror story. It's--they act like their flight was like a cattle car in Germany in the '40s: that's how bad they make it sound. They're like "it was the worst day of my life ... first of all, we didn't board for twenty minutes, and then we get on the plane, and they made us sit there! On the runway! For forty minutes! We had to sit there." Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero? That you got to FLY?? YOU'RE FLYING! It's amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, "OH MY GOD! WOW!" You're flying! You're sitting in a chair in the sky.
"But (the chair) doesn't--it doesn't go back a lot ... and the chair's really..." You know, here's the thing: people might say there's delays on flights. Delays? Really? New York to California in five hours. That used to take 30 years to do that. And a bunch of you would die on the way there and have a baby. You'd be a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and you take a dump and you're home.”
This is all funny because it's true; and I think it's especially true of modern cars and their motive force, the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine."Flying is the worst one because people people come back from flights, and they tell you their story. And it's like a horror story. It's--they act like their flight was like a cattle car in Germany in the '40s: that's how bad they make it sound. They're like "it was the worst day of my life ... first of all, we didn't board for twenty minutes, and then we get on the plane, and they made us sit there! On the runway! For forty minutes! We had to sit there." Oh, really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero? That you got to FLY?? YOU'RE FLYING! It's amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going, "OH MY GOD! WOW!" You're flying! You're sitting in a chair in the sky.
"But (the chair) doesn't--it doesn't go back a lot ... and the chair's really..." You know, here's the thing: people might say there's delays on flights. Delays? Really? New York to California in five hours. That used to take 30 years to do that. And a bunch of you would die on the way there and have a baby. You'd be a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and you take a dump and you're home.”
It's not a particularly fashionable time to write a pro-car treatise. Cars, their engines, and their fuel are blamed for a variety of sins--polluting the environment; distorting our foreign policy; requiring ugly and expensive roads; encouraging social deviancy; killing off drivers, pedestrians and wildlife; and hurting small business in small downtowns by encouraging sprawl. Here in Seattle, for example, a rather vocal portion of the populace has argued that we don't need to replace a major highway through the city despite our existing problems with congestion. The thought is that the resulting level of gridlock would serve an ostensibly worthwhile purpose of getting some cars off the road.
Here's the thing--a lot of those complaints have merit. Today's cars do have their downsides--particularly environmentally. After all, cars take a lot of energy and materials to build. To make them run you need a variety of toxic fluids, any of which can contaminate water and ground, and most of which need to be extracted from land situated in a politically volatile part of the world. Gasoline, the most central of these, adds a nasty pollution cocktail to the atmosphere when burned.
This all true, but I think it misses the larger point. Cars cause problems because there are just so many of them--their impact is multiplied by the sheer, staggering scale of their ubiquity. They are everywhere, and that's because they're fantastic at mobilizing us and giving us the freedom of movement. Today's car and its gasoline-powered internal combustion engine is essentially a miracle with some rough edges; and while we should acknowledge and work towards removing those rough edges, I want to take some time to recognize the miracle.
On its face, the internal combustion engine doesn't have much to recommend it. For one thing, it's not a particularly efficient way of turning energy into motion. It works from a series of controlled explosions, which generate force that translates into reciprocal motion and, eventually, the rotation of the drive wheels. This means that of all the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline, only 25 percent turns into motive force. The remaining 75 percent of the energy turns into heat, light, and noise. This compares well to steam engines (roughly 8 percent efficient), but pales in comparison with electric motors, which are 75-95-percent efficient.
So, why am I defending the internal combustion engine? Because, despite this relative inefficiency, the gasoline-powered engine is an amazing machine. Let me explain by telling you what you already know--today's cars can do amazing things with a small amount of fuel.
Think of a one-gallon container of liquid--a typical milk container, for example. With only that much gasoline, depending on conditions and driving style, a brand new Honda Fit will drive 40 miles, possibly more, before it runs out of fuel. Please suspend your ennui for a moment; I'm going to do my best to persuade you that this truly is remarkable.
In absolute terms, 40 miles is a significant amount of distance. Think of the most common means of transportation before cars became common. Forty miles represents six hours of travel from a sailing ship traveling at a steady six knots. It represents five hours of travel from a horse trotting at a steady eight mph. It represents two days of travel from a cross-country wagon train. A late 19th-century train could cover 40 miles distance nearly as quickly as the Fit, but it would would need 1,000-4,000 pounds of coal to do so.
Let's take a look at the other side of the equation. The Fit is capable of covering those 40 miles on one gallon of fuel, within 40 minutes or less, without drama, and in comfort. The driver would be swaddled in an environment that includes a comfortably upholstered chair, a high-quality sound system with decent accoustics, and with filtered and climate-controlled air. And while we consider the Fit a relatively small and efficient car, it is capable of remarkable utility--it is a 2,500-pound car with a modern safety cage, seating for a family of five, and room for gear. It only takes eight fill-ups and 80 gallons of gas, costing the driver roughly $240, to propel this 2,500-pound object from one side of this continent to the other. That's an amazing accomplishment for a relatively small amount of fuel.
Bigger and faster cars are obviously less efficient, but it's a matter of degree. Most family cars are capable of 30 mpg on the freeway. Even a high-performance Chevrolet Corvette Z06, which cranks out more than 500 horsepower and is among the best-performing cars on Earth, can get more than 20 mpg on the freeway. If you're willing to trade utility and comfort for performance and economy, a motorcycle will take you even farther than the Fit, while allowing you to accelerate like a race car--with an engine displacing 1000cc or less, roughly the size of the water bottle pictured here. I think that's absolutely miraculous.
So, how is this possible? Well, for one thing, the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine is fundamentally a century-old technology in the same way that high-powered turboprop airplane is fundamentally a century-old technology. In both cases, the basic, primitive beginning has transformed into something much more sophisticated, thanks to billions of dollars of development, innovation from some extremely smart people, and a century of customer- and warfare-driven pressure to improve. New materials, variable valve timing, turbocharging, fuel injection, direct injection, computerized engine management, and other high-tech wizardry have turned the old internal combustion engine into a highly efficient source of power. Though, to be fair, these same forces likely would have driven some amazing strides in steam or electric cars as well, had either of those technologies emerged as the standard in the 1900s.
Boring old gasoline has also turned out to be a pretty fantastic fuel. It's easily transportable, burns relatively cleanly, and contains a lot of energy. This is one problem with a lot of the possible alternatives to gasoline--one gallon of gasoline is less expensive and contains more energy than liquid natural gas, liquid hydrogen, methanol, or ethanol. You get more bang (literally!) for your buck with gasoline.
To return to the clean-burning point for a moment; note that I said relatively clean burning. Burning any sort of fossil fuel will result in carbon and some nasty byproducts. But, compared to the bad old days, today's cars are amazingly clean (according to the EPA):
Car Pollution (grams/mile)
Year VOC NOX CO
1967 16.8 3.2 81.7
1998 1.2 0.6 3.0
VOC-Volatile Organic Compounds; NOX-Oxides of Nitrogen; CO-Carbon Monoxide
That's a staggering drop in pollutants--and it explains why the skies over major American cities are cleaner than they were in the 1970s despite an increase in the number of cars. Another interesting fact from that study--the typical 1998 car would need to drive 660 miles to emit the same amount of VOC put out in just one hour by a chainsaw. This data is also a decade old; cars have become cleaner as technology improves. My 2003 Honda Accord, like many other cars, meets ULEV criteria, which means that it pollutes less than half as much as the average new car.
Please don't get me wrong here--I'm not saying gasoline-powered, internal-combustion-engined cars don't have serious flaws, that we shouldn't build more and smarter mass transit, or that we shouldn't make a serious effort to pursue alternative propulsion technologies. On the contrary, I think there's a lot of room to have smarter, faster, cleaner, and more efficient cars, and I'm looking forward to what tomorrow's technology brings.
The point here is that we should take a moment to give today's humble, much-maligned car a nod of respect and to recognize that whatever new propulsion model replaces the gasoline engine has some really big shoes to fill.
