The costs associated with switching to a different engine type with a lot of unknowns and little to no real backlog of knowledge about its finer points of behavior is just not going to be commercially interesting/feasible.
True, but forgetting about all the off-the-wall designs and attempts to make radical changes like the split-cycle or 6-stroke thing, there are plenty out there that are already points of research for nearly every manufacturer (HCCI being one of those), and also long-since proven technologies like diesel. The death knell for diesel has always been the associated stigma.
Even otherwise, the fact that they are as heavily regulated as they are is yet another detriment to progress (not that it's a totally unfounded regulation). Someone could create a miracle engine right now that can run for 80 years without a single problem, but also be designed with planned obsolescence to the microsecond and produce 800 hp while consuming 1.15 l/100 km and run on anything from petrol to cat urine, and it would still take 50+ years before it would ever make it to market, if at all (my money's on the latter).
The concerns of an environmentalist is the environment, and thus to release as little pollutants as possible for a particular amount of work carried out. How htis is accomplished is inconsequential; nobody that truly cares about this planet is playing favorites for any particular technology.
I should have said "environmental lobbyists"... the ones who try to push for things like ethanol as if it was some end-all answer. What I was saying is that nobody is trying to improve the powertrain itself. They're trying to push for things that ensure that the powertrain's inefficiency is not an issue.
And in general, a lot of those ideas are emphatically stupid. They're just easy to sell, because environmental lobbyists are politicians all the same, and the problem is that the random people who claim to care about the planet lap it up blindly.
We want the best solution and if that involves an axial vector whatever (never heard of it - must be a conspiracy) or a bunch of trained mice running in a wheel driving a generator it really makes no difference.
Well, the axial vector thing was just an example, and that's really nothing more than an alternative way of going through the Otto cycle. Specifically, that the pistons ride on a cam and their motion causes the cam to turn -- I can only assume that it's called "Axial Vector" because the rotation of the cam (which is basically the crank) is on the same axis that the pistons move. Still, some twenty-odd companies were posing pretty much the same idea, and I'm kind of surprised they're actually still around.
(sale of new cars that is). we already have a 100hp legal limit for motorbikes here, afterall