I have a picture of my Great uncle standing beside my Grandfather and his touring car taken in 1918. He had just driven it from Buffalo N.Y. to Hartford Ct. It was a steam powered Car, my father who rode in it told me the excelleration was tremendous and that it was quiet and comfortable. Makes me wonder why steam has not been used or developed further since that time. I never hear of anyone useing heat and water as an alternitive.
"Makes me wonder why steam has not been used or developed further since that time."
Steam boilers often explode when they get old. I shudder to think of car crashes involving steemers. And they are HEAVY--they have to be, to get enough compression to last a while. I think gas engines were supposed to be far more productive in the power-to-weight department, which made them far more popular.
That said, I saw Jay Leno driving one on some car show a few years back. It looked scary fast and was wicked quiet. The only drawback, he said, was you had to get it steamed up and when you parked it, you had to let the boiler blow off, which was pretty noisy and would probably nuke the average garage after a while.
You buy one first. 8)
There was a LOT of research/prototyping on "external combustion" (steam) cars during the first energy crunch back in the 1970's. The tech simply wasn't viable. You can find articles in the Popular Science of those years.
Watching Jay Leno drive his c. 1910 Stanley shows just how fast these things are (acceleration-wise). Steam is incredible; if a tiny box on the front of a giant steamer locomotive and 200-car long train can propel that entire train at even 55 mph for hours, you know steam is incredibly powerful.
However, there were/are problems implementing it on a small scale. Even the best flash-point steamers like Doble - the last to die out - had trouble especially with STEAM-UP TIME. You have to wait a significant amount of time to get going - just like electrics. This is the same for locomotives (which had different mechanisms for heating, of course) - they take a long time to "warm up". It's also why they would absolutely continue running between reasonably spaced jobs - turning it down and up again would waste alot of fuel and time.
Steam is a great idea - better than electric, in general, I think - but someone has to come up with a way to warm it up "instantly" and efficiently (you need something to make steam - fuel or electric), primarily.
Mainly because external combustion is not as efficient as internal combustion, but picture this scenario:
You get up in the morning to go to work. You light the fire in your boiler (now of course you're using coal because you're doing this to avoid the high price of oil based products) and wait half an hour or so until you have adequate pressure. then you drive to work. Shut off the boiler which then cools down while you're at work thus wasting all of the heat used to heat the water. Then you go to lunch. Start heating the boiler which only takes 20 minutes because it hasn't cooled to ambient just yet. You drive around, but notice although you have plenty of coal, you're getting a little low on water so you stop to add about 50 gal (400 lb) of water. On the way back you notice that the ashes are building up, so you have to stop and dump off your ashes at a government approved ecologically friendly ash dumping station. You shut off the boiler and go to work. When you quit for the day you start heating it again, and in about 20 minutes you're ready to drive. On the way home you discover that your usual route home is blocked because an accident between two steam cars caused the boilers to blow on both with catastrophic results to the occupants of the vehicles. You get home shut off the boiler, top off your on board coal supply from your bunker top off your water, and wait for the boiler to cool down so you can do your daily cleaning of the boiler tubes.
We clear cut all the virgin forests, hadn't you heard?