I was told that Steam cars were fast, clean, and efficient, and at one time it was the vehicle of choice.
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Faster than a horse drawn buggy? Sure. Clean? Well, it smelled better than a barn anyway. Burning coal/wood to heat the boiler isn’t clean by any stretch of the imagination, though perhaps a step better than burning petrol. And efficient? That’s debatable depending on what you’re trying to compare it to. Compared to an internal combustion engine, steam engines have lower thermal efficiency. They also took roughly 30 minutes to start/warm up to operation level – hardly efficient as far as time is concerned anyway. There’s multiple reasons it stopped being the vehicle of choice, and those are only a few.
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