I drew almost this exact same picture in high school, along with just about every other kid interested in internal combustion engines (before I knew what a hori

I drew almost this exact same picture in high school, along with just about every other kid interested in internal combustion engines (before I knew what a horizontally opposed engine was, like the boxer engine in Subarus). I'm just glad to see a car company talking about it, because the way we do it now with transmissions is pretty much ridiculous. This engine is roughly 7 times weaker than it should be, because Nikola Tesla had a 110 horsepower turbine in 1913 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine which was unfortunately ahead of its time because the country was barely getting wired with electricity at that point. But today a 95% efficient generator connected to a 95% efficient motor for 90% overall transmission efficiency would be worth it on a turbine or Stirling engine running at 40-50% efficiency (maybe 40% overall at the wheels). Compare that with an old gas guzzler from the 70s running at 25% efficiency with maybe an 85% efficient transmission for 20% efficiency at the wheels. Not to mention that cars used to weigh twice as much which halved city fuel economy again, and lacked regenerative breaking which halved it again, and so on and so forth. It’s no wonder that cars used to get 10 mpg when what I would argue are relatively simple engineering changes could have raised that to 30, 50, even 100 mpg. It’s almost like they were deliberately designed to be as inefficient as possible…