by Eric Richard

In the past few days, I have seen articles coming out of the research side of the world talking about technologies that can possibly be applied to the fuel effeciency/emissions problem.

One of the articles talks about redesigning some of the fundamental aspects of how the combustion engine works and another talks about how “intelligent cars” can improve fuel efficiency.

I have no idea if either of these ideas will pan out or how long it would take for these ideas to get to market, but I think that this is exactly the sort of research that the auto manufacturers need to be looking at and the sort of thing that increasing the CAFE standards will motivate.

I thought it was kind of ironic that the second article positioned the debate a “intelligent cars vs. hybrids” as if there was a competition here and our goal is to prove that hybrids are a “bad” solution. When I read the article, my first reaction was, “so, what improvements would you get from having an intelligent hybrid vehicle?”.

While hybrids clearly have received the majority of the glory over the past years, there is no reason to think that they are the end solution. In fact, I think you could make a very strong argument that the real evolution will come with a totally different type of hybrids — hybrids that run on pure battery power for the majority of the driving but have a combustion engine as a “backup” for longer driving. This is the basic idea behind the Chevy Volt.

Anyway, the really exciting and interesting thing will be to watch to see how increased CAFE standards wind up affecting innovation in this sort of area.

Hopefully we’ll see all sorts of hair brained ideas being floated and some of them actually making their way to market.