Own assets. Buy and renovate property, rent it out. Set up a glamping site. Cut people's hair.

LPT : maintain your shit or it degrades and eventually stops working.

I'd get a bigger improvement spending an extra chunk of money at the optician rather than going from 1440p to 4k. The pixels are already too damn small to see, I don't need them smaller!

Shouldn't this be in r/foodporn?

That's a good point about allowing the engine to run closer to peak efficiency more of the time, rather than having to do exactly what the driver requires. The buses in London are all hybrid diesels, and you hear them pull away from each stop on the electric motors, then the engine starts up shortly afterwards and trundles away as needed. So they can avoid the need for peak power on acceleration which tends to be more inefficient. It probably leads to increased reliability as well.

Regarding the valve timing, from memory that's called the Atkinson cycle. It's also used on non hybrid setups sometimes. I used to have a Peugeot 307 2.0 petrol engine that ran exactly like that, and I've encountered it in a lot of other engines as well over the years. As you said it's a reduction in maximum power output in order to increase efficiency.

Of course, yes. But those same factors affected older cars as well. Peak efficiency in lab engines is higher now than it was 20+ years ago, and efficiency in terms of real life use is also higher now than it was 20 years ago.

Hybrids start to bridge the gap with regenerative braking, but then of course its not purely an ICE vehicle anymore. Technically if its not a plug-in hybrid then all of the energy used came from the ICE, so you could argue that its an ICE vehicle with additional efficiency technology installed. That addition alone significantly improves the efficiency in terms of miles per gallon (or equivalent metric), but doesn't alter the thermal efficiency of the engine itself.

Yep, absolutely. Air compressors for air suspension can take a fair amount of power, heated windscreens, the list goes on.

I think the most recent production ICE engines are tending towards 45% efficiency, which is incredibly impressive.

Also people expect more gadgets these days - heated seats, steering wheels, computers and screens, AC in winter for dehumidification, and so on. All of these put more of a load on the engine.

Electric tons are lighter than hydrocarbon tons

Worth bitingo Hancock has the series on Netflix because his son works for Netflix in charge of procurement of this genre of program, not because the ideas have suddenly gained merit.

Yes, very easily