Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
I bought a water-cooled VW. You saw it at Darko. A mile of rotting rubber hose and an oil pressure indicator light that is an LED on a printed circuit board. 
I'm not convinced water cooling is a good idea in general. They could have gone with high-working-temperature ceramic cylinder blocks instead. |
The EPA realized that there was a shortage of blown radiators, hoses, heater cores, leaking water pumps, inoperative sensors, thermo-switches, broken belts, dead blower fans, HVAC actuators, thermo-clutches, electric fans, oil filters,ethylene glycol, propylene glycol, and distilled water.
The air-cooled engine was thermodynamically limited in efficiency. The ceramic engine and vapor-phase cooling would have improved that, but nitrogen oxide formation could not be dealt with, and 12-year-olds living along 101 and the 405 in LA County had already lost 10% of their lung capacity to ground level ozone, cooked up from the nitrogen oxide soup.
The water-cooled engine turned out to be more fuel efficient, less noisy, cleaner, very compact considering.
None of that can compete with electric motors, and a generation from now, 'pistons' will be studied in history books.