It seems too obvious to be a solution, but why did we give up on steam power? I believe nuclear power plants essentially work by generating steam, could this model be used in a car? Does steam not provide enough force to move the water and its container?
In: Engineering
Plenty of good answers here, but I want to point out one factor nobody seems to have mentioned: safety. To power a car by steam you need to have a large amount of steam. This stuff is hot and under pressure, and if due to some accident or failure the system gets a hole in it, the steam is released. The result is often the driver and passengers getting boiled alive, and in the days of steam cars there were some pretty horrific accidents. This is actually a more dire safety issue than a gasoline car catching fire, because a fire needs both a fuel leak and an ignition source, a risk that can be mitigated by keeping the hot bits of the engine away from the fuel tank. A steam leak doesn’t need an ignition source to be dangerous.
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