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Manufacturers have to live and to do that they have to work with currently available technologies.
'Governments' have to be seen to be 'doing something' so they will squeeze the margins on things they can claim to be 'bad' (or for which the public seems not to care enough to complain.) So they squeeze oil burning transport.
Now at some point will come the realisation that the Electric dream is a future not a now solution for the masses and certainly not a free ride based on 'wind' power. Hope prevailing over experience in its present prominence. Following along the manufactureres are playing the political game and refining IC technology to meet the targets - or are so doing where they feel the need to. The 'great and good' who are taking their companies 'green' seem, in the main, to be quite happy to continue to buy IC powered vehicles at the higher end of the CO2 output league. As it happens I don't think the CO2 output league is important as a 'green must have' so I don;t blame them at all. However, as a display of hipocracy it speaks loudly to those who think about it.
So Ferrari, Porsche, et al., don't really give a stiff but those in the lower markets do. Hence as the 'governments' change the rules and subsidise low CO2 outpu vehicles the manufacturers find technology to make that work in their marketing favour. Sometimes it is real. Sometimes it is an interpetation of the 'rules' which may have been poorly written.
If they can get to producing a 'powerful enough' IC engine capable of doing 100mpg and, because the infrastructure exists already, capable of being solf now all around the world then the alternatives will either have to be further subsidise of development will be reined back to, say, city cars and municipal transport.
If the primarily IC development gets to 150mpg for a 'powerful enough' engine running, perhaps, natural gas as an alternative if required, Poland will become a very wealthy country and any other technologies will only continue to be developed with the support of huge subsidies and a powerful influence lobby. And that assumes that there is enough flexibility in the economy to allow such vanity projects to still be funded once they are no longer seen as unavoidably necessary in the short to medium term.
There may be laws an Engineering Physics and Chemistry which would make such IC achievements impossible. But then that may also be true for battery development and hydrogen production.
Of course that does not mean that motor sport will not be stamped on anyway. It would not surprise me to see all sort of pressure brought be bear for all sorts of reasons, if not in the UK and USA then in other countries from which revenue is earned. Shrink the market and you strangle the product slowly but surely. There are plenty of people out there who would like to see that happen and a much larger number who would not care if it did since they have never thought about it. Nor will they think about the consequences of anything until it directly affects them - by which time it will likely be too late.
All of this may happen sooner rather than later although I really hope the effect will not become too apparent until I am old enough not to care too much.
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