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Gasoline engines aren't going away for a while; even when every self-driving car is electric, there will be a market for people who want gasoline engines. If it

Gasoline engines aren't going away for a while; even when every self-driving car is electric, there will be a market for people who want gasoline engines. If it gives a bump in fuel economy to the next (last?) generation of gasoline and hybrid vehicles, great! I also wonder if the maintainability of these engines will be the same as with diesel. That would be another big benefit.

mbreese 9y ago
> I also wonder if the maintainability of these engines will be the same as with diesel They also include traditional spark plugs and the engine automatically switches between modes. So, I fear that maintenance wise, it may be the worst of both worlds -- but with less wear and tear on the spark side, perhaps it will be better.
- mohaine 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure "wear on the spark side" is an all but solved problem at this point. Most car engines made in the last 15 years have 100k mile lifetime on the entire spark system.
  - paulirwin 9y ago
    I know for more recent vehicles that is probably true, but as an owner of a 2006 F-150 with the 5.4L 3V Triton V8 that had the infamous spark plug issue, I had to lol with a tinge of sadness at your "last 15 years" comment. Backstory: Ford came out the gate with a new spark plug design for the 2004 F-150 3V Triton 5.4L V8 engine (after their previous spark plug design failure in the 2V Triton where the plugs would shoot out) and told everyone that the spark plugs would last 100k miles. Turns out if you let them go that long, they would get stuck in the cylinder head and break off when you tried to remove them, leaving stuck broken pieces of spark plug behind. Conveniently, 100k miles happens to be when most people's warranty expires, leaving people with a best case a few-hundred-dollars-extra tune-up bill, if not thousands of dollars if the heads had to be removed. Ford faced a class-action lawsuit over this debacle, and there are still companies selling special broken spark plug removal kits designed solely for this engine to this day. Of course the root cause of the problem is faulty design, but it would have been mostly avoided had they not claimed a 100k mile service interval for the plugs. So yes, Ford went from an engine where the spark plugs would shoot out of the cylinder head, to one where they would get stuck so hard they would break. I know all of this not because I am an engine geek, but because it happened to me. Two spark plugs broke off while being removed and I came this close to needing to have the heads removed and machined. Fortunately those special removal kits I mentioned earlier really do work. Given how relatively cheap spark plugs are, you can bet it will be a while before I trust that 100k mile number :-)
    - kw71 9y ago
      Well, that's sure unfortunate. I care for my father in law's focus, and the iridium plugs really were good for 100k miles. In 35 years of caring for cars I have never been so frightened by the sounds and feel of unscrewing a spark plug though. This is the one with a "permanent air filter" so they were thinking about eliminating maintenance. Boy this is going to suck when it is clogged.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - HNSucksAss 9y ago
      I had a plug shoot out of my '96 Cobta. Wasn't just the trucks, apparently. It's still running, though.
  - mbreese 9y ago
    I agree that for the most part engines are extremely reliable. The potential downside here is that the compression mode makes the entire system more complicated. This might make the new system less reliable. I have every confidence that Mazda will do this right, and this has great potential to extend the lifetime of the ICE. However, it isn't without risks.
robin_reala 9y ago
Outside of Europe maybe. Inside, well, UK and France have already said no more ICE vehicles to be sold past 2040, and other countries are planning the similar (including India). That’s a big loss of market and consequent economy of scale.
- TomMarius 9y ago
  Politicians have said things, but no laws have been passed yet - and these laws can be (and have been in the past) changed.
  - ajnin 9y ago
    In the immortal words of former French president Jacques Chirac : "Promises only bind those who believe them."
- tpm 9y ago
  This only concerns passenger cars, not trucks, possibly not even vans. And the discussion is still ongoing.
- linksnapzz 9y ago
  In the 1990s, the CA state gov. wanted 10% of the cars on the road to be EVs by 2000. Wow, was that ever effective.
  - CyberDildonics 9y ago
    That's interesting, do you have a link to the law they passed?
- calafrax 9y ago
  2040 is a long way away. very easy to pass laws that take effect after you retire. and very easy to change them after you retire as well.
  - varjag 9y ago
mywittyname 9y ago
Diesels aren't inherently more maintainable than gasoline engines. That impression comes from the fact that diesel engines are used in situations where durability is paramount, thus are designed to be robust. Most passenger car engines have several criteria that are more important than maintainability (emissions, power, fuel economy, size, cost, manufacturing simplicity). People don't hold up BMW passenger diesels as the hallmark of maintainability. Heck, even the diesel offerings in American trucks are pretty bad from a reliability standpoint. Both Cummins and Navistar faced multiple CALs over reliability and warranty-related issues.
- pkolaczk 9y ago
  Here where I live, modern turbo-diesels are considered less reliable than NA gasoline engines. They are much more complex and need fragile components like DPF filters and turbocharger to get acceleration on par with low-torque, high-RPM gasoline engines.
mulmen 9y ago
Nothing about a self-driving car requires it to be electric.
ouid 9y ago
I visited a Tesla store once in mountain view, and they have a great little demo where you can check the cost of charging your car in various states. Washington DC, for whatever reason, gets its electricity from a gasoline power plant. In Washington, the Model S gets 28 MPG. This happened a while ago so I could be misremembering, but regardless I don't believe that the environmental value of electric vehicles has been realized. In a lot of places, your Tesla is still coal powered. Efficient internal combustion engines are still a worthy cause, and this will continue until more electricity is being produced than is normally consumed.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  That is wrong. Almost all of the energy DC uses comes from its interconnect to the RFC grid. Locally, it does look like 2/3rd of the power DC generates is nat gas, and 1/3rd gas or gas-like, but it doesn't make sense in a grid structure to assume that the energy produced near you is the energy you use. https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=DC#tabs-1 https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=DC#tabs-1
  - connorcpu 9y ago
    Given that its neighbors' top two electricity sources seem to be Nat Gas and Nuclear, seems probable that most of the electricity comes from those sources
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      You should really just take a weighted average of all the things putting energy onto the eastern interconnect grid(including grid-tied home solar installations, but those are probably negligible in the grand scheme of things at this point). The reality is that anyone in the US, east of the rockies and not in texas will have the same 'mpg equivalent' for their Tesla.
- pkulak 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe#Criticism The biggest nail in the coffin of the long tailpipe fallacy is that you can drive an EV farther on the power needed to refine a gallon of gas than you can drive a ICE car on that same gallon. So, even if you built a gasoline engine that had absolutely no emissions, and oil bubbled up into crude lakes right next to every refinery, EVs would still be more efficient.

mbreese 9y ago

> I also wonder if the maintainability of these engines will be the same as with diesel They also include traditional spark plugs and the engine automatically switches between modes. So, I fear that maintenance wise, it may be the worst of both worlds -- but with less wear and tear on the spark side, perhaps it will be better.

mohaine 9y ago
I'm pretty sure "wear on the spark side" is an all but solved problem at this point. Most car engines made in the last 15 years have 100k mile lifetime on the entire spark system.
- paulirwin 9y ago
  I know for more recent vehicles that is probably true, but as an owner of a 2006 F-150 with the 5.4L 3V Triton V8 that had the infamous spark plug issue, I had to lol with a tinge of sadness at your "last 15 years" comment. Backstory: Ford came out the gate with a new spark plug design for the 2004 F-150 3V Triton 5.4L V8 engine (after their previous spark plug design failure in the 2V Triton where the plugs would shoot out) and told everyone that the spark plugs would last 100k miles. Turns out if you let them go that long, they would get stuck in the cylinder head and break off when you tried to remove them, leaving stuck broken pieces of spark plug behind. Conveniently, 100k miles happens to be when most people's warranty expires, leaving people with a best case a few-hundred-dollars-extra tune-up bill, if not thousands of dollars if the heads had to be removed. Ford faced a class-action lawsuit over this debacle, and there are still companies selling special broken spark plug removal kits designed solely for this engine to this day. Of course the root cause of the problem is faulty design, but it would have been mostly avoided had they not claimed a 100k mile service interval for the plugs. So yes, Ford went from an engine where the spark plugs would shoot out of the cylinder head, to one where they would get stuck so hard they would break. I know all of this not because I am an engine geek, but because it happened to me. Two spark plugs broke off while being removed and I came this close to needing to have the heads removed and machined. Fortunately those special removal kits I mentioned earlier really do work. Given how relatively cheap spark plugs are, you can bet it will be a while before I trust that 100k mile number :-)
  - kw71 9y ago
    Well, that's sure unfortunate. I care for my father in law's focus, and the iridium plugs really were good for 100k miles. In 35 years of caring for cars I have never been so frightened by the sounds and feel of unscrewing a spark plug though. This is the one with a "permanent air filter" so they were thinking about eliminating maintenance. Boy this is going to suck when it is clogged.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - HNSucksAss 9y ago
    I had a plug shoot out of my '96 Cobta. Wasn't just the trucks, apparently. It's still running, though.
- mbreese 9y ago
  I agree that for the most part engines are extremely reliable. The potential downside here is that the compression mode makes the entire system more complicated. This might make the new system less reliable. I have every confidence that Mazda will do this right, and this has great potential to extend the lifetime of the ICE. However, it isn't without risks.

robin_reala 9y ago

Outside of Europe maybe. Inside, well, UK and France have already said no more ICE vehicles to be sold past 2040, and other countries are planning the similar (including India). That’s a big loss of market and consequent economy of scale.

TomMarius 9y ago
Politicians have said things, but no laws have been passed yet - and these laws can be (and have been in the past) changed.
- ajnin 9y ago
  In the immortal words of former French president Jacques Chirac : "Promises only bind those who believe them."
tpm 9y ago
This only concerns passenger cars, not trucks, possibly not even vans. And the discussion is still ongoing.
linksnapzz 9y ago
In the 1990s, the CA state gov. wanted 10% of the cars on the road to be EVs by 2000. Wow, was that ever effective.
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  That's interesting, do you have a link to the law they passed?
calafrax 9y ago
2040 is a long way away. very easy to pass laws that take effect after you retire. and very easy to change them after you retire as well.
- varjag 9y ago

mywittyname 9y ago

Diesels aren't inherently more maintainable than gasoline engines. That impression comes from the fact that diesel engines are used in situations where durability is paramount, thus are designed to be robust. Most passenger car engines have several criteria that are more important than maintainability (emissions, power, fuel economy, size, cost, manufacturing simplicity). People don't hold up BMW passenger diesels as the hallmark of maintainability. Heck, even the diesel offerings in American trucks are pretty bad from a reliability standpoint. Both Cummins and Navistar faced multiple CALs over reliability and warranty-related issues.

pkolaczk 9y ago
Here where I live, modern turbo-diesels are considered less reliable than NA gasoline engines. They are much more complex and need fragile components like DPF filters and turbocharger to get acceleration on par with low-torque, high-RPM gasoline engines.

mulmen 9y ago

Nothing about a self-driving car requires it to be electric.

ouid 9y ago

I visited a Tesla store once in mountain view, and they have a great little demo where you can check the cost of charging your car in various states. Washington DC, for whatever reason, gets its electricity from a gasoline power plant. In Washington, the Model S gets 28 MPG. This happened a while ago so I could be misremembering, but regardless I don't believe that the environmental value of electric vehicles has been realized. In a lot of places, your Tesla is still coal powered. Efficient internal combustion engines are still a worthy cause, and this will continue until more electricity is being produced than is normally consumed.

oh_sigh 9y ago
That is wrong. Almost all of the energy DC uses comes from its interconnect to the RFC grid. Locally, it does look like 2/3rd of the power DC generates is nat gas, and 1/3rd gas or gas-like, but it doesn't make sense in a grid structure to assume that the energy produced near you is the energy you use. https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=DC#tabs-1 https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=DC#tabs-1
- connorcpu 9y ago
  Given that its neighbors' top two electricity sources seem to be Nat Gas and Nuclear, seems probable that most of the electricity comes from those sources
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    You should really just take a weighted average of all the things putting energy onto the eastern interconnect grid(including grid-tied home solar installations, but those are probably negligible in the grand scheme of things at this point). The reality is that anyone in the US, east of the rockies and not in texas will have the same 'mpg equivalent' for their Tesla.
pkulak 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe#Criticism The biggest nail in the coffin of the long tailpipe fallacy is that you can drive an EV farther on the power needed to refine a gallon of gas than you can drive a ICE car on that same gallon. So, even if you built a gasoline engine that had absolutely no emissions, and oil bubbled up into crude lakes right next to every refinery, EVs would still be more efficient.