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germanbird writes: "Jalopnik has an interesting article up about Koenigsegg's Prototype Camless Engine. The engine uses pneumatic actuators rather than a cam to open and close the valves in the engine. The engineers behind this claim that it can provide "30 percent more power and torque, and up to 50 percent better economy" when applied to an existing engine designs. The article and some of the comments also mention that some work has been done with electromagnetic actuators to accomplish the same task. It may be a while before this tech is mature enough for passenger vehicles, but maybe if a racing series or two picked it up, it might give some of the manufacturers the opportunity to work the bugs out?
Not sure this is on topic for SoylentNews, but the article brought me back to my introduction to engineering course in college. One of my classmates was a car nut and I remember a discussion with an EE professor one day about the potential (or actually lack thereof due to performance issues) for using electric actuators to open and close valves."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by emg on Friday February 28 2014, @04:55PM
"Great improvement, but being entirely eclipsed by another form of locomotion: electric"
Uh, yeah. That'll be why I see so many electric cars on the road every day.
You appear to be unaware that electric cars are an older technology than ICE cars, and vanished very quickly once the ICE became viable. Our ancestors dumped them because they sucked ass, and they still suck ass for all the same reasons.
Until there's an electric car that can travel 500+ miles on a charge, recharge in five minutes, and work almost as well at night at -40 as it does during the day in California, they're not going to 'eclipse' ICE cars.