[Big time]

With all the pressure for renewable energy sources and traffic jams reducing speeds and power requirements
Will cars engines finally get back to external combustion?

Instead of harvesting corn to only get a small yield when converted to ethanol, or algae to biofuel maybe you can burn the entire plant?
External combustion allows to clean much lower grade fuel.
Of course the trick is to grow more plants than they harvest as not to cause desertification.

There have been huge improvements since steam power.
Now we have great synthetic working fluids, and maybe valve timing, injection and computer control can help too.

Maybe external combustion can be cleaner as it has more time to burn completely?

So, What do you say guys? Is external combustion the future?