The difference is, for all the activities above, the resources are still available. We can still run because we have legs, we can still ride horses because we have horses and we can still shoot bows because we still have the feathers, wood and string to make a bow and arrow.
In 50 years, conventional ICE's will not be possible because we simply don't have the fuel to run the vehicle. Good look trying to run a race team when fuel costs are super expensive because of low supply. Main categories in motorsport will always guide the way for other transportation, and that means that they must convert and change with the times.
Just a few thoughts:
- Motorsport has not lead the way for transportation. There were hybrids on the streets way before they hit the track. I am not sure that anything concrete has been brought into electric street cars thanks to racing.
- The end of petroleum reserves may happen in 50 years or 90 years, but what about uranium and the rare metals that are needed for electric motors? Their reserves are expected to be depleted too at the horizon of the 22nd century.
- The carbon footprint of an electric vehicle is not currently that much better than a standard engine during its entire life cycle. The manufacturing and recycling of electric cars requires more energy and the electric power to recharge batteries does not come from nowhere.
- In an urban environment an electric vehicle still emits 30 to 40% of the amount of small particles of a standard cars. It is far from 0 because a good part of those particles comes from friction between road and tires and the brakes.
- All things considered, an electric vehicle is not "clean". In France a couple of advertising compaigns presenting those cars as clean have been discontinued because they were flagged as misleading.
I do not think that the electric vehicle is THE answer to our problems. It is a false answer to a certain extent, one that replaces mass energetic consumption by mass energetic consumption.
The main answer is to stop using cars for comfort and restrain usage to what is needed. It's been three years that I got rid of my day-to-day car, using train, plane and metro; I rent cars or use taxis when I need it. It did not make my life any worse.
It did not bring me any cookie either and the Paris town has banned my Alfa spyder: too "polluting". I cannot take it out once in a while to a short leisure trip. That would make me such a bad guy compared to those guys who waste gallons on the streets every day in their heavy SUVs with seats heating their buts in the winter and AC units fully working in the summer...
And to go back to racing, so far burning fuel is still the more efficient way to go fast. Multiplying the cost of fuel by 10 or 20 would remain peanuts compared to the exploitation of a racing car. Making combustion engines more efficient is as valid a solution as going fully electric. The way F1 has gone is as good as FE, and it still makes much better races for the moment.
