That said I'm all for synthesizing hydrocarbons if it can be done economically, because it makes no sense to retire the ICE fleet before it reaches its natural lifespan.

I've heard good rumors about direct air carbon capture lately too, which is very promising.

Exactly; it will be cheaper to convert existing ICE vehicles to Hydrogen than it would be to make billions of electric vehicles.

In the short run, yes, but if the cost and performance of batteries gets good enough it will just happen over the course of about 20 years due to market demand.

Hybrids and extended range electrics offer the best potential, me thinks.

At the moment they are a sweet spot. But again, the bottleneck is all in the batteries.

Electric motors are already superior to gas engines in almost every conceivable way.

The problem is carrying enough energy to run them in a car.

I have a 1976 Skylark, which is lovely, fast, and modern enough. It's less safe, but easier to fix. I doubt I will live to see 40+ year old electric cars which are just as usable as modern versions.

I'd bet you are wrong--well, actually I don't know how old you are--but we'll have to wait and see.

In theory, electric cars should be more reliable, and easier to keep in service, but are the companies making these building them with long-term durability in mind?

The problem is also that liquid batteries would probably be better

But people are too dumb to ever maintain them.

I've got a circular saw from the 1940's; still works great. Not much to go wrong with an electric motor, but I'm not a contractor, so...

I thought the advantages of solid state and air batteries were that they do not use liquid?

Technically, Lead Acid batteries are liquid.

That is an advantage

I was in the navy and we had to nurse our lead acids all the time

It was nice though since they just use copper and water, leads, and other low tech ingredients. I should stop talking all I know is what kind of batteries power nuclear plants from 50 years ago.

It's sad the technology hasn't advanced much since then.

I meaaaaaan

Yeah Batteries are bitchy things though.

Fuel Cells are better than batteries, at least for civilian locomotion.

Where is this contest to win the attention of a discord woman?

We want to have this item that somehow we can chemically excite and then will provide the motive force to push a car without having to burn any materials.

Anyone saying some material or test in a lab is just a couple years away has never worked in a lab on a real technology or process.

When someone tells you 2-5 years you can bet it's more like 10-20.

So true

"It's just a 2 week experiment/project"

..... five years later....

"Shit this is hard"

Part of it is that the English majors writing about STEM don't understand what they're talking about or what they're reading.

They just want that article they think people will want to read about.

A lot of "breakthroughs" are English majors being retards

Are we talking about journos? Because most of them didnt go to post secondary institutions

Excitement sells ad space, and articles get grants, but rhetoric does not guarentee breakthroughs.

Here's the reality. We have a generation of kids, Gen-X and post Gen-X, who were absolutely convinced that in order to get anywhere in life, they had to get a college degree....
Well.... these kids go to college, realize they have to pick a major, so they pick the shittiest humanities majors, easiest test-classes possible...communications.
Then when they get out, they realize, shit they have loans to pay off... and how are they going to pay them off with a non-STEM degree?
Then suddenly these internet publishers offer them sleazy tabloid jobs to print bullshit and get paid.

So basically, the media is shit because these young kids were lied to, taken advantage of, forced into basic debt-slavery, and there were plenty of billionaires with biased blogs willing to pay them to print bullshit.

dont forgot that all these people are barely doing real jobs, so connections and sycophancy are the name of the game.

So no one is will to push a boundry because everyone is expendable.

@Jeremy-Retard I agree with a lot of that, except for the "forced" part. People in that particular situation just made poor decisions.