The decline of fossil fuels - and how that effects car enthusiasts

[Franco Cozzo]

Thought this could be an interesting topic to discuss given current world happenings around climate change and fossil fuels - specifically around how this will effect us car enthusiasts, before we're all dead and buried and our grandkids are renting single use cars on some phone app because no one owns cars anymore

There's been a couple nations who have banned the sale of cars powered by good old dead dinosaurs, dug up from deep in the ground, and have been promoting EVs and all other sorts of substitutes to what we've known and used for over 100 years now.

Do you think there will be a stop gap measure implemented to allow people who already own traditional internal combustion engine cars (see 99.9% of AFF) to continue to keep their '****box fleet' on the road?

I have an automotive engineer as a customer at work and we were talking about modified cars and getting past an emissions test, he mentioned you could convert it to run on E85 as a single fuel vehicle, and it will blitz the $1500 emissions test you have to pass before you get the mod plate, alcohol based fuels (particularly ethanol) creates much less nasties out the exhaust compared to typical unleaded fuel.

I have a feeling that while E85 is currently an obscure and hard to source fuel, this could be a great stop gap as a compromise for people who don't have the money to buy an EV (especially at current market rates) while keeping the environmental boffins happy - something that could bring real and tangible reductions through a low hanging fruit easy to implement measure.

For older diesel vehicles there is also biodiesel/waste vegetable oil - one of our forum members rokwiz runs his truck fleet on biodiesel/waste vegetable oil (his build threads are worth a view).

Maybe we could see cars powered by different types of fuels? BMW had done a hydrogen powered 7 series in 1990/1991 and again in 2007 using their 6L V12 7 series and created a dual fuel hydrogen/unleaded powered car (and it was crap)

Now there's focus on hydrogen yet again, maybe in fuel cell applications.

Something I'm also interested in is maritime freight, at the moment ships use some horrible heavy fuel oil substance that is absolutely horrible from an environmental perspective, we've got nuclear powered ships in use for military applications such as large aircraft carriers and submarines - could this technology see civilian applications such as cruise ships and freight?