A chat with Prof Neville Jackson is a refreshing reminder that there is life after recession for the UK automotive industry. Talking to The Engineer at the launch of Ricardo's Innovation and Sustainable Transport Centre, the group's enthusiastic technology director outlined a brief that looks beyond the downturn to the technology that will keep us on the road when the 2009 slowdown is little more than a history lesson. 'We maintain a roadmap of what a vehicle might look like all the way up to 2050, in terms of what we're going to get the energy from, what the vehicle will do, what its specifications will be, and what kind of powertrain it will have,' he said. With a dizzying range of powertrain technologies - from all-electric to hydrogen - vying to prove their worth, it is a mind-boggling brief, but Jackson frames the challenge in simple terms. It boils down to improving efficiency and, for the foreseeable future, he thinks the internal combustion (IC) engine is our best hope of achieving these economies. 'If you take a barrel of oil out of the ground you lose about 15 per cent of energy getting that into the tank of the vehicle. But the vehicle can only use about 25 per cent energy maximum - the rest is lost as heat and friction. There's an awful lot of lost energy and there's a huge opportunity to reduce that. Our job over the next 20 to 30 years is to use more and more of that energy that we take out of the ground.' He claimed: 'The internal combustion engine will still be the primary powertrain in vehicles for the next 20 years at least. There are many alternatives and we are as engaged with them as anyone. But we won't bring in the alternatives until we say that's as far as we can go with the combustion engine, and there's a long way for it to go. Within 20 years we'll be doubling the fuel economy.'
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