I dunno. Cars still travel more or less the same speed for the purpose of personal transport, etc. Getting to Alpha Centauri is going to take a fundamental cha

I dunno. Cars still travel more or less the same speed for the purpose of personal transport, etc. Getting to Alpha Centauri is going to take a fundamental change in space travel technology. Also, a) we had diesel/electric/gas motors a century ago, b) would you believe that we had FWD/AWD a century ago? We did! c) we've always had engines with insane number of cylinders d) i'll admit turbos are newer -- 1930's planes first used them e) i still don't want to be in them and they're not foolproof as we as having different engineering goals than a normal car. g) no comment. :) h) so could the original jeep (GP) i) have you seen the inside of a chevy recently? Our current space travel tech needs a couple of orders of magnitude in improvement before we can just travel to distant stars at will. Your examples are incremental improvements to practical problems. In the mean time, I say we send a probe! :)