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America's Cars Are Suddenly Getting Faster and More Efficient (bloomberg.com)
Kyle Stock and David Ingold, writing for Bloomberg: Sometime in the next couple of months, the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon and its 808 horsepower will show up in dealership windows like some kind of tiny, red, tire-melting factory. Yes, 808 horsepower. There's no typo. Last year, U.S. drivers on the hunt for more than 600 horsepower had 18 models to choose from, including a Cadillac sedan that looks more swanky than angry. Meanwhile, even boring commuter sedans are posting power specifications that would have been unheard of during the Ford Administration. The horses in the auto industry are running free. We crunched four decades of data from the Environmental Protection Agency's emission tests and arrived at a simple conclusion: All of the cars these days are fast and furious -- even the trucks. If a 1976 driver were to somehow get his hands on a car from 2017, he'd be at grave risk of whiplash. Since those days, horsepower in the U.S. has almost doubled, with the median model climbing from 145 to 283 stallions. Not surprisingly, the entire U.S. fleet grew more game for a drag-race: The median time it took for a vehicle to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour was halved, from almost 14 seconds to seven.
The purpose of these is the same as it's ever been. Dude gets dragged inside the dealership by his wife to fantasize about the muscle car, but still leaves with a minivan or a 4-cylinder commuter car plus a 5-7 year loan.
On the other hand, there are just as many of us who geek out on mileage (often just because we hate to blow money on transportation) so there's still hope for the planet.
Newer cars are made from lighter materials, and computer aided design has allowed for much stronger designs with less weight.
'69 Mustang is 1400 kg. 2017 Mustang is 1650 kg. But it's also physically wider and longer and there are real back seats because it's no longer a pony car.
To everyone thinking people are suddenly going to be blasting around in the Dodge Demon, it's quite obviously a car designed to be capable of fast drag strip times while also being street legal. And yes, I'm sure some dunce will wrap one around a telephone pole, but they are not going to be hugely prolific cars.
And as someone who is involved in both drag racing and oval dirt track racing, I prefer a car with good mileage, only modest power, and very good handling for a daily driver.
There ARE pretty high performance cars that get mileage I never even believed would be possibly, usually to displacement on demand technologies where cylinders are literally shut off when not needed. This was tried many many years ago with little success, but now they have the ability to actually collapse the lifters and keep the cylinder sealed so pumping losses drop to a minimum and you can realize the full benefit.
And as for the "squishy" torque converter, that was solved years ago with a lock-up converter. The converter only acts as a converter during necessary transitional states. The rest of the time, a clutch inside it locks up and turns it into a direct drive mechanism, removing most of the fluid losses inside.
One of the big gains to thermodynamic efficiency can be had with compression ratio increases, which has been seen. Historically, due to only crude control over the combustion process (carburetor, mechanical/vacuum based ignition timing curves), an increase in compression ratio pretty much necessitated increased fuel octane. Now this isn't as true, given the much more precise control over combustion with direct cylinder injection and individual coil per spark plug . So compression ratio can be increased with advanced control to prevent getting into knock, then detonation, the pre-ignition, then ultimate failure.
EGR is good for efficiency in some cases, but is a horsepower killer. Racing engines intentionally keep the exhaust valve and intake valve open simultaneously (known as overlap) to pull fresh air and fuel through the cylinder on every cycle to "scavenge" out and clean all combustion products out from the previousl cycle. The downside is that some raw fuel is discharged out the exhaust.
Bottom line is we have cars now with horsepower ranges from a 4 cylinder that would have been tough at times with an 8 cylinder engine and getting 2x or 3x the mileage (sometimes even more!). We are on the right track. High performance cars have been ingrained in auto industry DNA for a long time.
I have some bad news for YOU. We are an oligarchy.