There's less money to be made by making automobiles more efficient...The world prefers going about it's current existence until we run out of oil...and then we'll just circle the tankers like the Mad Max gangs. ;)

I did hear the reply from the car companies about how the vehicles would be if they were made like computers (i.e.; one would have to re-install the engine after a 'crash', one would have to relearn how to drive when one bought a new car, one would have to pay for the car again after it failed to recognize you as the owner, etc [from the once I think I remembered]). I read references of BG (or some body) comparing cars to computers. :)

The reply however was referring to the urban legend and they were using Windows as an example. Compare cars to computer hardware and it's a much different outcome. Of course you need an OS so I say try Unix or Linux.

The automotive industry has now desire to truly improve their efficiency. They can make advances, fuel just isn't something they want to change. Look at where their focus has been: CD-players, mp3 players, adjustable seats, convertible tops, trunk releases, tire pressure sensors, antilock brakes, airbags, etc. Aside from the hybrids they have made no significant advances in energy efficiency whatsoever.

That joke about the computers to cars was more of a spoof on Windows 98 since nobody can deny how fantastic the actual machines are compared to what they were 50 years ago. Even the jokes they made about crashes and such aren't relevant today with a fully updated copy of Windows XP.

Haha.. thanks for bringing that up, Tom. If those excuses are the main reason why car companies have been lagging, then doesn't it make sense to live with those analogies for the sake of efficiency? And, are they saying that there are less crashes back then compared to now, and computers crash more now than before?

Many people would benefit form relearning how to drive, properly.

All the car company can bring in reply is rhetorical and humorous, distorting the reality of their own agendas. Sounds like a family of values Steve Jobs was raised in..

This is old news, this comparison has already been made in the past, years ago even before computer power efficiency became a buzz word and marketing tool. While I agree that cars could and should be far more efficient than computers, there is no point comparing them. You can't do a "die shrink" on a car to make it more efficient. This is like a creationsit comparing different kinds of bridges to different kinds of dogs and claiming it's proof of a "creator". Bridges don't breed, cars can't be "shrunk" (well they managed to do it in Europe but they look ugly). Let's put pressure on car companies to use an alternative to oil instead.

This comparison was done by someone who obviously doesn't understand thermodynamics. Wind resistance is the most significant factor that affects fuel economy. What would be the appropriate comparison in a computer?

The most significant factor that affects energy saving is user stupidity.

One liter of gasoline contains a total energy of 34.8 MJ according to Wikipedia... Suppose gasoline is the sole source of energy for moving the car to its top speed.

If the mass of the car plus driver were somehow whittled down to something like 200 kg and the car driven twice a day for a year on a trip on a perfectly level roads on tires with zero rolling resistance and no air resistance, and all kinetic energy change due to braking stored in the vehicle and re-extracted to accelerate again, and reaches a modest 80 km/hour (~20 m/s) top speed, then each trip consumes energy from gasoline equal to the kinetic energy of the car at that top speed.

So each trip extracts KE=0.5 m v^2 = 0.5 (200 kg)(20 m/s)^2=40 kJ. Doing this twice a day for a year requires a total energy of 2*365*40 kJ = 29 MJ.

These were incredibly favorable assumptions, ignoring major, essentially unavoidable energy loss mechanisms (drag, rolling resistance), and even that barely squeaks in under the wire. It also ignores any energy consumption for heat, fans, air conditioning, lights, radio, etc.

I assume the main point was simply to give a feel for the many orders of magnitude by which computing performance has improved. If that is the case, I think the headline is a significant distortion of what the professor was trying to say...

Yeah, and every 50 miles, for no explained reason, the engine will completely shut off, the car will smash into a telephone poll, roll down all the windows, and start the car again.

or straight BS.
applying the same logic (or lack of it) to computers your laptop would run for a week off 2*AA (does it?) and your high tech flatscreen would not take 300W for such a trivial task as projecting some pop junk (wasting more juice than the old CRT it's replaced).
i guess the progress has lost its meaning quite some time ago.

I doubt it... today, I burn a heck of a lot more electricity to type a letter than I did on a 486. If you look at USEFUL work, many of the advances over the last 5 years or so don't add up to a lot. We're burning more and more wattage in our cottages to just gain slicker, neater UIs and fancier games. Can I really do all that much more than I could on a Pentium 2 with Win98 SE? We can certainly do SOME more, but are we in the realm of diminshing returns? Net useful work is a far better measure than how much power per Hz.

I make that point to make this one: by the 1940s, automobiles were relatively mature technology. A better comparison would be to compare a Prius with a 1890s steam tractor than with a Studebaker. After all, the physical technology shared between a 1948 vac tube machine and a modern semiconductor machine is pretty limited if any.

tell the professior...he is going to still die at the age of 100 and below.
if he apply the same math to medicial science, he should live to 10000000.
but he is not.

I work in the auto industry as a computer scientist. I write software for the ECU's (Electronic Control Units) that run your car. There is absolutely no amount of technology or software that could make your car run on 1 liter of gas per year.

First the problem isn't technology. It's A) People wanting more power and B) The government mandated safety systems and steal. The average car today was weighs almost 800 pounds more then it did just 15 years ago thanks to government safety regulations. These two factors alone have nullified the fuel millage gains made by technology over the past 15 years.

Second the internal combustion engine is inefficient by nature. Things like turbos, and direct injection and maybe gas compression engines will make nice fuel gains, but to get a lot of millage out of an engine fundamental shifts will need to be made. For example using the internal combustion engine as a power plant to charge the hybrid batteries.

IMO the article should be titled if BATTERY technology had kept pace with computer advances cars could run on 1 liter of fuel a year. Because it wasn't until resent battery advance that things like hybrids and electric cars were even feasible. Any one remember the EV1 electric car by GM? Thing could only go 20 miles before the batteries died and if you floored it you might get 5. Now they have electric vehicles that can put out a lot of power and last for many miles. Thanks to advancements in battery tech. See http://www.teslamotors.com/ if your interested.

This is simply a misleading headline. The speaker was just trying to explain how far computers have come, not trying to suggest that cars should run on 1L / yr.

and he called himself a professor. duh

This professor mirrors the "better, faster, cheaper" mentality. This mentality came from the advent of the transistor. Engineers are able to make chips "better, faster, cheaper" by improving production. Essentially, following Moore's law.

I've worked in the industry, and it is actually a miracle Moore's law has been followed for so long. The computer industry is the ONLY industry that has followed it.

When you look at a vehicle, it simply costs WAY too much energy to move a full sized vehicle. Jones is right, it's just simply not possible, unless you drove 5 miles a year.

begin stupid professor routine
{
if { professor is joking } then { joke is not funny : go to begin }
else { computer professor has no clue of basic science : go to begin }
if { professor can not afford gas } then { should be car salesman : go to begin }
else { go to begin }
}

Dudes, I don't think this news is to be taken all serious. Just take the professors statement with a bit of humor and let your brain digest the idea for a minute. We don't have to get all technical about it.
I am sure everybody knows, that a car can't really run on 1L/year, but a little playing with the idea doesn't hurt.
I did enjoy Jon's calculations, though.

so don't say it can't be made. there might be processes in nature that we don't know yet, something more safe than fission, perhaps a mini fusion reactor or something totally different.
hydrogen will not be the last innovation. it's just another phase.

most of the gasoline we consume goes to transporting the car, not the person(s) inside of it. we should do something about this. make the car 200-300 kilos and ban anything more, except for the trucks. limit the top speed to 80km/h. we can live with that. there was the time of the horse and the horse went maybe 10km/h.

eventually I believe, the human race will become the guardian of the garden of Eden which is the earth. ok, stop laughing :) we'll have all the technology to make this a wonderful green park where all the little fishes have a somewhat happy life. it just takes time and we'll face some problems before that. this is the true meaning and potential of human species. now you say, wasn't it a garden before human? sort of yes. but it was more of jungle. not a carefully planned garden. I mean, human race can add a layer over it. take it one step ahead.

we can also just f*ck it up. a reverse process of the same.

...so all technology advances are exponential...
By that logic,
- since we went to the moon in 1969, we should be in Alpha Centauri by now,

- Since we flew at the speed of sound in the 1950s, we should be traveling well past the speed of light by now.

this "professor" has proven the fact that PhD is an acronym for "piled higher and deeper"

When was the last time you fixed your car by turning it off, then turning it back on?

PS, It is possible for a car to run on one liter of fuel. The question is what fuel are you using?

Sounds cool to toss out the thought, I guess, but I hate the comparison. Mostly because physics makes it obviously not possible. A liter of gas simply doesn't have enough potential energy for that .. period. Enough purely theoretical comparisons that have no base in reality.

Computers don't consume less, they do more. The proper analogy would be that cars would go from 0 to the speed of light in .002 seconds while towing the Empire State Building.

E=mc^2? There's more energy than 34.8 MJ in a litre of petrol (liter of gasoline)

What a dunce

Computers could barely do anything back then and now they still can't tell a Viagra ad from pictures from the family

I'd agree with others, who have said that said professor was alluding only to the progress of the computer industry. Some have commented that their computers aren't doing much more, that's a very narrow way of looking at it. When a rig powered by 8 graphics card cores (4 9800 GX2s) can do supercomputer work not even thought of a decade ago, that's progress. The automotive industry has barely progressed. Look at the average mpg from two decades ago, and you'll find many cars capable of the 30 mpg that is so bragged about in commercials. Jay Leno wrote about his electric car, which is almost a century old. To say we should all be driving vehicles with far superior mpg capability isn't a misnomer, it's the truth. But there is no profit in it. Progress, as unfortunate as it may seem, is often tied directly to that profit. No profit, no progress. So until the consumer makes it unprofitable for the industry to produce gas hogging stupidity on their production lines, that is precisely what they will produce. And (in America) as long as there is no push for Biodiesel, alternative ethanol (biomass sources), CNG, or any of the other solutions, they will not appear. And until you make a personal choice to further these goals, you can't complain.

My first laptop runs 16 hours on 4 AA batteries, still works great (and yes, I still use it), boots instantaneously, and runs a very stable Micro$oft operating system!

It's called the Tandy 200 laptop. It has 72K of RAM, 104K of ROM (no typoes) and has a keyboard that I can type over 100wpm on, was built in February of 1985 and still works great 23 years later.

Now, in the terms of stability, usability, durability and longevity... explain how things have gotten *better*?

I find it pretty funny how so many people on here are asking about how computers have gotten better over the years and how they aren't as energy efficient as they were.
Well lets look at this shall we? Yes, you're computer running a Quad core 2.4ghz per core will suck up more energy than a computer running a single core running a 9mhz from back in the day. What the efficiency is is the wattage per mhz, semiconductors have gotten much smaller thus allowing for a lower voltage to be used to run them.
As for Roger, I don't know what you're trying to prove with your 23 year old PC. I don't know what your wpm has anything to do with the computer. Lets see your computer send an email, or run a video game. Try to encode an mp3 or try to even compress a file, I'm sure that if it was able to do it, it would take days if not weeks what would take my computer a few minutes if not seconds.
Lets also look at the internet, just a decade ago the average house was running on 56K if not slower (48.8k and so on) But compare that to 3mb today. To date the fastest connection was over 1TB a second, when faxes back then took 20-30 minutes to be received and printed.
I would have to say the professor was simply making a comparison in how fast technology has advanced over the years compared to how slow technology in the automotive industry has advanced.

ICs got more efficient by becoming smaller. People are not going to drive an ant sized car.

Fine y'all can sit in your gas guzzling suv's and get fat. I vote we get back to the days where we thought anything was possible....making the impossible possible.