Necessity is the mother of invention / How fossil fuels have stifled progress / Electric aeroplanes part 3.
The expression "necessity is the mother of invention" really came home to me thinking about electric vehicles. There is so much readily available power in those hydrocarbon droplets we as a civilisation have been lulled into a slumber of innovation. It was not until the EV revolution that automakers really started to think about efficiency, and the same will happen with air travel. Car efficiency According to the US EPA the average fuel economy of US cars in 2016 was a measly 25.1mpg. (This is in US imperial, for UK readers you should read it as 30mpg) Whilst this is an average across the whole fleet it also shows that t he best non-EV cars are only getting about 50 mpg (and those are hybrids). Looking at the graph over time, whilst we see some improvement especially around 1980 and 2005 mostly there hasn't been a lot of progress in the last 20 years despite government mandates trying to encourage it. Enter the EV. In 2012 the Tesla model S entered...