Featured Will Piston Engines Get Clobbered by Electrics?

I've thought about it too, but how do you pass a slowpoke, or how do you let a tailgater pass you? All those overhead wires would be a serious problem in an ice storm too. Best to leave some things in the past. Another thought - slot cars. those are powered from underneath...

 

Now there's an idea. Ever see an airplane refuel in flight? Just have a bunch of these guys running down the road, cars can pull up alongside - both sides - and behind, automagically attach and recharge on the go!

 

Capacitors, just for short off-grid forays?

Still, if they're all self-driving, maybe slowpoke and tailgate drop out of the vocabulary?

 

In all seriousness (I know, rare for me) that is the answer. Unfortunately, I wont be around for that to finally become common enough to avert crashes and traffic jams and getting the me-firsts off the road.

 

In DC where I grew up, streetcars ran on overhead wires in the outburbs and switched to underground rails when they got to the city. Used to ride them to the ballpark (Griffith's Stadium) and to school or museums.

 

I worked with a guy once, also went through vocational school around the same time. He was maybe a decade younger, the kind of guy who never gets the commendations, but quietly does good stuff. Anyway:

On some project, he was assigned an area someone else had been doing, and it was a real dog's breakfast when he took over. So he was stoically soldiering through. We started talking about the revisions that kept coming, how it was hard to even keep up, and at one point he paused and said:

"We're moving backwards."

That's always stuck with me; that concept that you can be putting your 8~9 hours in daily, toiling away, and getting further from the goal.

When you talk to some of the old timers, they're sharp as tacks, they come from an era where there was maybe more clear thinking, lesser but reachable expectations, and an eloquence, in the way things got done.

Cars were a luxury item; a lot of city dwellers rode trains and trams, that ran on time. Stuff got done. Maybe we're moving backwards?

 

My family had 1 car and I walked about 2 miles to get to a regular bus or street car in the second grade. Affordable little house that now sells for $1m+. Bought originally for around $23k.

That city now is a metro area of maybe 10 times the size it was then. I could go anywhere and did. No nanny parenting. Not today. Yes times are different.

 

population growth, inevitable. life will find a way

 

I think a mind-shift too.