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Comment by drdunce | Hacker News Reader

There's been significant improvements in ICE efficiency in recent decades. Some of the biggest leaps include turbo charging, variable valve control and electronic fuel injection and there's still a lot more scope.

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The car I drove in HS, 30 years ago got 25mpg. My current car, very similarly sized, gets 27mpg. Sure, I can merge on a freeway 4 seconds faster but the vast majority of efficiency improvements have not gone towards reducing our oil dependence.

What make? Lots of cars are much bigger now than they used to be, even if the model names haven't changed.

how does it matter? are we supposed to keep downsizing/downgrading from the high school cars just to make up for all these trends that we didn't choose?

A lot of a modern car’s extra weight when compared to older models are mandated safety improvements.

Oh there's no doubt my modern car is objectively better in numerous ways. That said, we could be doing a lot more to optimize for fuel economy but the market doesn't seem to want that.

There are both fuel efficiency optimized cars and not optimized cars. You bought latter.

Your new car likely weighs much more? The modern market demands a driving experience that's like sitting in our home - complete with huge sofa like seats, air conditioning, touch screen TVs, cameras and thousands of sensors. They can either cater to that or go out of business.

Carting around two tons of unnecessary random tech toys and the kitchen sink is inefficient regardless of the energy source. That's a separate problem.

But what do you propose as the solution if not electrification?

Cars are heavier because they're safer. They aren't just stuffed with hundreds of pounds of electronics.

So instead of realizing gains in efficiency, cars were simultaneously made less efficient to realize gains in safety and comfort. The end result is still cars that are about the same as what they were decades ago.

And the result has been only very small, incremental improvements in efficiency.

Average fuel economy for cars has improved by about 30% since 2005. I wouldn't call that small.

Is that only ICE or could it include hybrids?

Honestly, not sure. But I believe hybrids only represented around 3% of cars in 2013? So unlikely to be a big effect. Especially when you consider how much bigger cars are now, and how much more they weigh.

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