When I’m not designing and building boats with way too many hulls, I design engines and have been doing so for nearly 20 years. You wouldn’t believe the amount of good ideas that I see that can make engines better/cheaper/more fuel efficient. What kills most of them is the complexity of economics. Its way to easy to kill off any good idea with bad economics. Wouters idea may be a good one. But it’s the start up economics that would kill it, you would need an initial critical mass to get it going, that’s going to need government backing. He may be right but no ones going to fund it.

A good analogy would be getting us (UK) and Japan to drive on the same side as the rest of the world. Think how much money it would save us in the long run, but think of the chaos it would bring to start with!

The big complexity is life cycle costs (or the real cost of things). Life has become too complicated to define real costs. At what point do you start counting the cost. This is a really big source of bad economics, that and subsidies.

If I was going to put my money into something to save fuel it would be regenerative braking, instead of wasting energy to slow a vehicle down, use it to create energy that can be used later. There is lots of technology around to do that, the flywheel being the simplest. And as the traffic volume increases we all have to hit the brakes so much more often.

Gareth
www.fourhulls.com