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Heywood 6 (1:25)
Topic(s): Auto Industry / Efficiency
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Video Transcript
One of the beauties of this engine, this internal combustion
engine, is that its basic principles are simple. But the
better we realize these principles in practice, the better
performing, the more efficient the engine is. The basic
principles, most people understand them. Fuel and air go into
the engine, we've got pistons going up and down, we burn the
mixture inside the engine, produce high pressures, high
temperatures, those gases push the piston down, create work,
the engine drives something. It drives the wheels of our cars.
That's pretty simple and that hasn't changed.
But what we now understand better, but not yet completely, we
understand better how to do that more effectively, how to do
that with less friction, how to do that so the losses are
minimized, how to get more energy out of the fuel. We're just
learning how to do all that, partly because we think about it
and we sort it out; partly we just experience empirically and
we discover, "Hey, this works better. Let's do that." Then we
say, "Well, let's do more of it." So, and then we put these
things together. So that's how it gets better. And if you
think of the size of the automotive industry, there are lots
and lots of engineers out there working very hard, day by day,
to make this engine better. It's a competitive business.
