I seem to recall Robert Heinlein having a good rant about this in one of his novels, perhaps 'rolling stones'. It's not in front of me at the moment, but I'll take a look and post it if I can find it. Basically, his concept of the modern automobile was a collection of systems kludged together, each one intended to correct the shortcomings of the previous, and none addressing the inherent problems with the original invention.
Here's another example from the vaults.
The first gasoline engines were stationary engines. They ran at a constant speed, and that speed was rather slow. The spark timing could be set at a certain point on the cycle, somewhere near top dead center, and the engine would run all day at that setting. Speed regulation was a matter of turning the spark on and off, creating the name of 'hit and miss engine'. Some engines, like the 'hot bulb' engine, didn't have any spark timing at all, as they used a red hot extension of the cylinder head to ignite the gas and air mixture. It took the form of a sheet metal bulb, connected by a pipe to the engine head. You heated it with a blowlamp before you started the engine, and the pipe connecting it to the engine head was supposed to keep the gas and air charge from igniting too early. Very simple engines, with low parts counts, and easily maintained. A farmer with hand tools could take it apart and put it back together. I've heard they're still made in sweden, as they're still useful in the stationary engine role.
When gasoline engines were adapted to cars, they were called upon to run faster, and to run at constantly changing speeds, as limited gear ratios required a lot of change in engine RPM between shifts. When an engine runs at high speed, the burning time of the gasoline affects the speed.
Where at slow speeds you'd want the spark to start the burn once the piston had reached the top and started down, at high speed, the gas wouldn't have much time to burn before the stroke was over. Then the exhaust valve would open while the gas was still burning, and the engine would blast fire out its exhaust, wasting most of the charge and running poorly with little or no torque.
The solution was to advance the spark timing, so that the gas was actually ignited as the piston was travelling upwards, and if you timed it right, the peak pressure would occur as the piston was travelling back down. Originally, this was something the driver had to do: he had to work the spark advance lever at the same time he was accelerating, so that the engine wouldn't lose power, but if he advanced the spark too far, or decellerated without retarding the spark, the engine would backfire and either grind to a halt or tear itself apart.
After multiple kludges and lots of trial and error, the solution to this was vacuum spark advance. The crankcase vacuum increases at higher RPM, and by a system of diaphrams and balancing springs working the spark lever, the spark could be kept roughly where it was meant to be. This was only a rough solution though.
Lots of other modifications were tried, and the spark advance on old cars is a pretty delicate and arcane bit of clockwork and ironmongery, and prone to need ajustment.
The modern solution keeps the vacuum spark advance, but adds electronic control. Now not only do you have the vacuum connections and diaphrams, but there are electronic RPM sensors, airflow sensors, pressure and vacuum sensors, and solenoid valves, all for the purpose of fine tuning the exact extent of spark advance. Some engines also modify the gas and air mixture by injecting inert gas, siphoned off from the exhaust manifold where the oxygen levels are low. Again, these are usually controlled by vacuum diaphrams and springs, with computer oversight to fine tune them.
What was a simple, low parts count gizmo that would run damned near forever was changed into a delicate, tempermental machine, first by making it do something that it wasn't meant to do, then by stacking layer after layer of kludged control system, each meant to regulate the previous kludge, and hopefully bring the system to some sort of reliability. Only recently, with pretty much total computer control of the engine, has that reliability been anything more than a dream, but just try to fix it yourself.
Now, the focus is moving to the hybrid vehicle. By using a small, simple engine to turn a generator, that engine can be set so that it's always working at its most efficient setting. Basically, this is using the gasoline engine in the role it was suited for, the stationary engine. The rest of the vehicle is a pretty standard electric car, and the bugs, with the exception of battery capacity, were worked out of the electric car long before the gasoline car was popular.
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