A group of engineers believes that the future of the combustion engine goes by turning them around. Literally speaking. It is called the engine with opposing pistons, and was the latest fad in the nineteenth century. That the combustion engine will go to better life soon seems a fact; what for are all those investments and all those prototypes of electric cars if they do not?

What is not so clear is when this relief will occur. Some manufacturers want to bet on 2020 as the year of the electric car. Others are not so sure, and it’s not as if everyone is going to buy electric cars overnight.

The future of the combustion engine goes through a revolution. This is why it is possible for the future of combustion engines to improve and not destroy them; at least during a transition period.

So the important thing now is to improve these engines to consume and contaminate as little as possible; and it is now when ideas of more than a century that we had discarded for being impractical are appearing again. In a traditional four-stroke engine, each cylinder has a piston, with the cylinder head on top that seals the assembly. The fuel enters the cylinder, and is compressed by the piston, the explosion that moves the piston in the opposite direction takes place, and the produced gases are removed.

Therefore, the explosion that moves the piston, and in turn the shaft, occurs once every four times, hence the name. This idea is not new; in 1882 already the first engines with opposed pistons had been created. However, they did not get the efficiency they wanted.

Now companies like Achates Power believe that it is time to recover this design in order to make gas-powered vehicles more efficient; now that we have the knowledge and technology to avoid those problems.