So take this fascinating improvement:
Wired News: New Engine Combusts Old Ideas:
If your next car gets twice the gas mileage of your current vehicle, and belches out only a fraction of the pollution, you may have Carmelo Scuderi to thank.
Scuderi, a Massachusetts engineer and inventor, started tinkering with the fundamentals of the internal combustion engine when he retired in the mid-1990s. The result was a radical new design that could make engines for anything from gas-powered lawn mowers to diesel locomotives lighter, far more efficient, and a whole lot easier on the environment.
and incorporate it into the Golden Eagle Bike Engine:
One tank of ordinary pump gas gets me 22 to 25 miles, urban riding. The tank on this model is just about 11 ounces, so that equates to somewhere approaching 250 miles per gallon!
and think of the improvements. Sure, not everyone will want to ride a bike, no matter how much easier it gets, and I’m not sure you could fit the Scuderi design into that small a package. But perhaps we can fight this war on two fronts — make low-impact vehicles more palatable and make high-impact vehicles less damaging. I suspect if you could wave you magic wand and drop a Scuderi-type powerplant into the fleets of cars in Atlanta or Houston, you would see a big improvement in air quality and climate almost immediately.