Could aircooled engines make a comeback?
ICE aren't growing much in size and are getting more and more efficient. Why not make them air cooled? Porches used to be aircooled, and those were performance cars with the engine in the back. I would imagine having an engine in the front might be easier to cool, no?
I don't think so. I am not sure, if air cooled engines are even capable of meeting today's emission (noise and pollution) requirements.
Furthermore cars with internal combustion engines are currently in the process of being phased-out in favour of battery-electric cars and many manufacturers allocate less and less resources to engine development. The goal seems to be to make existing engines compatible with upcoming emission standards (e. g. Euro 7), phase-out unprofitable engines before new emission standards, and allocate the rest of development resources to new battery-electric platforms and models.
Such a boring future we are living in :/ Well, there is hoping that enthusiast scene won't die with it
I've learned to accept it. With mandatory driver assistance systems in Europe and the US, there is no going back to simple cars without proprietary software anyways.
And climate change already hits quite hard where I live. In winter we don't get snow anymore (we used to get several weeks with snow and sub-zero (°C) temperatures up until a decade ago), which makes me depressed every single winter to the point I am considering to move, and every summer we have to endure droughts and heat waves now, even though our summers used to be moist and mild.
It is overdue to make transportation much more sustainable and we unfortunately (as I like internal combustion engines) can't afford to keep extracting and burning fossil fuels.
But there definitely is joy to be found in electric cars and other modes of transportation. I actually started to embrace cycling more in the last couple of months and I learned to enjoy the simple technology of a bicycle. It certainly is a different kind of fun though ...
Air cooled engine makes less power, less torque, dumps heat into the cabin, less reliable. No way it's making a comeback regardless of what full ev will be in the future.
Is it less reliable though?
Yes.
Yes
The minimal cost savings (and space savings) wouldn't negate the massive horsepower drop and livability penalty that an air cooled engine would result in. Hell, even in the motorcycle world which still had some that were air cooled are moving even more into liquid cooling.
They're still a thing on motorcycles, atvs, side by sides, lawn mowers, etc. Everywhere but cars.