In the past thirty years we've gone from pushrod ohv engines running on leaded fuel, through ohc 16v engines and multi valve technology to common rail diesel engines and hybrids, I'm certain in the next 30 years we will see cars powered by more efficient and viable electrical means (batteries are getting smaller and more powerfull) or smaller turbo charged eco-boost engines capable of 60+mpg on petrol, either that or we all need to start learning to ride pedal cycles and horses again lol
Matt to be honest not only have you got the bumper scrape but you've also got that battle damaged rear wing from the other car you scraped trying to get out of a carpark. It wasn't mentioned in the ad I read and it shows in your photos which may be putting people off. I thought you lacked space to store cars? Or rather your folks lacked the will to give you space to store your cars.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and all that, so my recommendation would be to stick it on Ebay with a reserve of £500 and take whatever you get for it.
Anyway, to quote your timescale above for technology advancement - the timescales for piston engined development are around 3 times the timescales you've mentioned. Multi-valve engines appeared in the 1920s. I'm not sure who put the first twin-cam car engine into production, but the old Jag XK engine certainly had it and that was in the C-Type racing in the early 1950s. Leanburn technologies were first pioneered in the 1960s and early 70s. Forced induction was first tried in the 1920s and has been standard practise for pretty much everything except cars since the 1960s - trucks, plant, generation, diesel-electric trains etc etc.
The point is that all of this stuff that has apparently been recently "invented" in cars has taken literally decades to refine and make it work properly.
Hydrogen fuel cells look the most promising of the current technologies. Battery power I just can't see to be honest unless something drastic changes with the way people live their lives - i.e. they stop travelling or it becomes normal to own a fleet of cars (unlikely). Battery technology aside, the simple fact is that it takes a long time to fill a battery with electricity, and although people are ferretting away trying to make batteries which will accept a faster charge without exploding, the power supply you need to plug into the car yields voltages that would require transformers the size of a large garden shed per car or currents that could turn Ben Nevis into lava in about 3.9 seconds. It's just totally impracticable. That, and the fact that the battery technology requires large quantities of relatively precious metals and have a very short life before they're knackered (degredation is inherent from the very act of charging and discharging them).
Nuclear is out too, because the shielding required from the radiation is either a few feet thick of lead, or lighter layered protection which requires tens of meters of separation of humans from the reactor. You could end up with Batmobile shaped cars with the driver at the front and the reactor at the back, and perhaps Audi drivers would stop tailgating then, but you'd also need to keep non-motorists a long way from the road too so you'd never be able to use one in town.
Probably the easiest fix, is just to bottle hydrogen from more efficient electrolysis stations, fill your car at a filling station like you do know with the stuff, and just burn it in a piston engine - possibly the same piston engines we've already got. They're fairly simple, need hardly any maintenance and will burn hydrogen quite happily without much change to the technology.
the fuel cells are getting better and better all the time..
