How long would I need to wait for these theoretical improvements to go from lab to reliable, mass market cars? Why aren't they here already, why would I wait a decade or two (for what, a 10%-20% improvement?) if I can buy a full electric car tomorrow?
I don't object to improvements, but it's a race, and it seems like ICEs are losing that race unless they can do something impressive on a very short timescale.
We're still improving on DSL and coax as long as they have to be around even if fiber is better.
If electrics take the mass market, as I think they will, then new ICEs will largely just vanish from the market, and anyone who needs a normal family car can and will buy electric. Improvements to ICE tech don't go into old used cars because we don't upgrade their engines. The only ICEs that would be sold new are ones built to meet special needs, but they're probably going to be uncommon enough that improvements in them don't benefit "us" in a meaningful way; instead they become something you can largely ignore.
Like, nobody is campaigning for fuel efficiency / pollution mandates for ATVs, tractors, supercars, or excavators, because they aren't a blimp on the radar. In these applications, fuel economy tends to be a very secondary concern anyway.
Over time, more areas will have fiber, and more people will be able to make the choice, or even have no choice but to buy fiber. Likewise, over time, charging access will grow and gasoline access will shrink, and more people will own electric cars. During the transition, there will be lots of people who might yearn to own an electric car (just as I currently yearn for fiber), but don't because the vehicles will be expensive, they won't be able to charge at home, and their routine places won't offer car charging. For those people, having access to less-dirty ICE cars will be a strict, if less-than-maximum, improvement over owning older, dirtier ICE cars.
[1] I can't charge at home because my neighborhood only has street parking, and the parking spots are on the other side of the street from my home.
EV charging infrastructure in many countries is rarer than hen's teeth. It's also much more expensive compared to fuel infrastructure that's already paid for and in place for decades.
> fuel economy tends to be a very secondary concern anyway
Fleets of vehicles always have fuel consumption as a prominent concern. But the pollution might also be since legislation could very well start covering construction or industrial equipment.
> If electrics take the mass market
"Mass" never meant 100%. We are surrounded by outdated tech that is still around because it fills a need even if just in a niche. Despite people insisting the fixed phone and snail mail have been superseded by mobiles and email, both of those legacy options are still there. Even selling 10% of the current volumes of ICEs still justifies improving them.
45 miles an hour seems like a reasonable compromise speed. At 65% the common highway speed limit of 70 mph, it's still fast enough to cross most states in a day, to travel between nearby cities in an hour or so, and to do errands in an afternoon. But a car at that speed has only 41% the kinetic energy as at 70 mph, making colisons less lethal, and has similarly less wind resistance, requiring smaller engines and less fuel.
Maybe I just think trains are romantic...
On the other hand, cars have been getting safer and faster and more efficient, roads have been getting wider and safer.. only speed limits haven't been lifted to match. A part of me wants to live the utopia where I can get where I want to be in less than half the time it takes today. That'd make the difference between going to my parents for a coffee after work vs having to reserve a full day (if not a full weekend) for the trip.
Trains are not really a solution around here.
I was glad I wasn't driving, because not only is that a greater posted-vs-actual speed difference than I've seen before, but I've never actually driven that fast in my life. I'd have been torn between driving 80 in the right lane and being constantly passed at 10-15mph, or being white-knuckled behind some other vehicle and setting a personal landspeed record.
In my case, rural Finland, it's been the same for as long as I remember. Maximum limit is 120 km/h on freeways (and there are practically none of them where I usually drive), elsewhere on bigger inter-city roads it's 100 km/h during summer and 80 km/h during winter. Lesser roads, never more than 80 km/h.
And traffic never flows significantly faster than the limit. A few km/h over the limit at most. There are some weirdos who drive much faster and are constantly overtaking others, but relatively few people drive like that. If anything, it seems to me that speeding has become less common over the years as the police have tightened the limit at which they'll fine you.
People are basically behaving like it's German autobahn everywhere. Even the informal rules have adjusted - in a major city, you not only respect the right hand rule, but also give right of way to all vehicles on the more major road. The conflict is resolved by blinking headlights.
Honda used to be the most popular brand here (90's and first few years of 00's).
Speed limits themselves only have a passing correlation to safe traffic speed. Almost nobody actually follows them intentionally at scale (traffic just moves at the maximum safe speed which just sometimes happens to be at or below the posted limit) which is why most municipalities are abandoning the "slap a sign with a low number on it" approach for "traffic calming" road features. Traffic moves at what it considered to be the highest safe speed for the conditions (a bunch of factors too long to list). You're seeing high differences because there's many roads that have speed limits that are unrealistically low for light traffic conditions (often below the designed speed of the road) and traffic density (as opposed to visibly or a sharp curve) was the road condition that was the bottleneck on speed on most busy roads. 'Rona has widened that bottleneck so of course you're seeing bigger differences between the posted limits and the traffic speed on those roads (which is probably all roads if you only ever drive during daytime hours in urban areas).
Edit: kind of got off on a tangent there but the point I should have made is that speed limits are fixed whereas traffic speed is variable based on conditions. As conditions change both slowly over time and day to day/hour to hour the max safe traffic speed changes. With 'Rona chopping congestion across the board it's no surprise that you see traffic speeds much farther from the speed limit on roads where traffic volume was a big factor in the traffic speed.
What do you mean by that? If you're covering long distances in the Western US, it's not at all uncommon to be driving 70+ for hours at a time.
That is solely determined by the energy required. And there is, where the electric car excels. A Tesla uses less than the equivalent of 2l of fuel for 100km or in other units achieves 120mpg. In situations you describe, it fares even better, as 60% of the kinetic energy built up is gained back when braking using the electric motors. So mass is much less a problem with electric cars than with combustion engines, which can't recuperate the kinetic energy.
And there are currently more fossil fuel cars on the road with regenerative braking than there are EVs ;-)