With all of the technological advances lately, couldn’t a catalytic converter be designed with cheaper materials that aren’t worth stealing?

Question

With all of the technological advances lately, couldn’t a catalytic converter be designed with cheaper materials that aren’t worth stealing?

In: 2057

Answer 1

Probably not.

The cheapest catalysts we have now are platinum, rhodium, and palladium, and none of them are cheap. So suppose Elon Musk invests a billion or two dollars into developing a material that replaces all three. Great job, Elon! Oh — and here are your royalties, because obviously after putting billions of dollars into developing Muskium you’re not giving it away for nothing. So great, there are no precious metals in the catalytic converters anymore; oh darn, people are stealing them because they’re full of Muskium. Tl;dr: the chemistry’s tough, but the economics are absolutely brutal.

And when you look at the economics, it doesn’t make sense to put billions of dollars into something that cleans up dirty engines’ emissions when you could put that money into making clean engines — or into designing cities where you don’t need a car to survive. Or both.