Internal combustion is over. There's no future to be improved in it, it's going away. We simply can't afford to use it any more, and it is being phased out.
IIRC, batteries get 13% cheaper per year, and that means price halves every 5 years or so. Right now 1 kWh of batteries (including BMS) costs about $100. So in 2025 one kWh of batteries will probably cost only $50.
Electric vehicles purchase price will simply be cheaper unless ICE vehicles get subsidies. At that point, for economical consideration you'll need to have pretty compelling reasons to buy an ICE vehicle.
Ultimately even gas station network will be decimated and gradually fade away.
Extreme environments, heavy machinery, etc.
ICE are never going away.
No OEM is going to sink billions into R&D when they know everything will go electric in the near future.
So while you may be able to by an ICE Catapillar D10 or a John Deer Tractor or other machinery in 2050, I'd bet it's engine isn't any different to the 2020 version. Same goes for sports cars.
There will always be collectors and niche uses for ICE vehicles (e.g. backcountry 4x4) even if they get largely displaced by EV
Flat panel yield was a problem in the 1990s, every screen had dead pixels. The magic of film grain and a Pentax SLR wasn't that special, kids today don't even know or care. The warm colours of old lightbulbs are forgotten too. Yet there was amazing analog engineering and precision mass manufacturing with these products.
ICE is going that way. The yield on the battery part is being solved, aka range/price. For performance the electric motor has no equal and things like regen are game changing. In time ICE will have specialist applications such as for creating electricity to charge a battery in remote locations, that will be about it. The tech innovation and investment has moved on to electric power trains. The horse has gone and it is too late to shut the gate. Nostalgia is not enough for ICE particularly when the baby boomers have moved on.
This is obviously not true; when I go to a hardware or home improvement store, there is all sorts of information on the color temperature and purported color reproduction quality of the light bulbs. And "warm white" LEDs that are supposed to imitate incandescent are ubiquitous.
If you look at the temperature variance across the planet, you'll realize that there's vast numbers of people for whom batteries are never going to be an option.