A mechanical engineer starting her or his college education today could expect to be working until 2070. Should they spend a lot of their education learning the principles of internal combustion engines? If they do so will they be like someone who spent time mastering the technologies of the horse drawn carriage at the dawn of the auto age? People have made predictions about the end of the internal combustion engine, and the French minister of ecology has said that he sees the end of the sale of gasoline or diesel vehicles in France by 2040. (Sorry, the article is in French.) Is that likely? The New York Times recently ran an article arguing that the internal combustion engine was “not dead yet.” (Here is the obligatory link to the Monty Python sketch.)
The ideas of networks of practice, paradigms, and technological systems can help us to think about this. For any successful, well established technology, there are a lot of people and organizations committed to that technology’s continuation. The New York Times mentioned that Mazda has developed a technology for gasoline engines using principles analogous to diesel engines, which promises to be 20-30% more efficient than existing gasoline engines. As one thinks about gasoline ICE technology versus battery technology, one thinks of all the components and systems that already exist for the ICE that require only incremental change, while there are many things that have to be developed from scratch or nearly so for battery powered cars. Given the cost differential between electric and ICE cars, it takes a long time to make the electric car pay for itself.
We are apt to overstate how easy it is for a new technology to overtake an established one. I worked in the electronics industry at IBM and there was a semiconductor technology that many people touted as the next big thing. Some wags said “Gallium Arsenide is the technology of the future and always will be.” So the morale of this story is that ME’s should still study principles of combustion. A professor of mechanical engineering at MIT predicts that in 2050, 60% of cars will still have internal combustion engines.