To go green we must keep improving the internal combustion engine

Last Fall I had the pleasure of joining seven other brilliant speakers at the 2016 TEDx event in Madison, Wisconsin. It was an incredible experience, and unlike any talk I've given before. But with great power comes great responsibility. I needed an "idea worth spreading" -- something that swims against the tide of conventional wisdom. This talk needed to be bigger than Computational Fluid Dynamics, the engineering field that my company is known for. It needed to include a level of controversy, because what's the point in rehashing the status quo?

After some reflection, I decided to focus on another area that my company is known for -- the internal combustion engine. Popular belief seems to be that the IC engine powered car is a dead man walking, soon to be replaced by a sexier electrified version of itself. Tesla and other so-called zero-emissions cars are the future, so why continue improving combustion engines? This talk is in response to that mindset.