Hot Car Tech.

It is not like there have not been significant advancements in many parts of the current cars of those 10 or 20 years ago but when it comes to gas mileage it basically gets down to physics.

Yes they can make a car that will get much better mileage but only with trade-offs that until recently have only been marginally accepatable by at least US consumers.Taking the hybrids out of the mix, there is really only a few factors you can mess with the increase mileage in a gas engine based car and the biggest is the weight of the car or HP of the engine.

Making the car lighter you can use a smaller engine and thus less gas, however at about 40 MPG the trade offs get pretty significant.

Most of your gas when you are going over 35-40 mph is going against wind resistance on a flat road, so making the car lighter offers less and less.

Making them more aerodynamic tends to make them smaller and often very ugly (odd how jets tend look cooler the more aerodynamic they are and cars uglier)...There are some new tricks like how the fuel is injected, deactivating cylinders once you are at cruising speeds but these tricks tend to introduce other issues, like reliability.

So if buyers are willing to buy cars that can fit 2 people tops in comfort, are pretty ugly by current standards, have very poor accelaration,

and a top end of 60-70 MPH with no head wind, and they load it with every gas saving trick in the book you can end up with a car that might get even 60-70 MPG and that costs 40,000-60,000 bucks, the problem is there is no market for a 40K ugly 2 seater...

So there is really one area in auto advancements that has pretty much hit the wall with technology, but so many other things have come a long way, my current car has built in GPS, bluetooth that senses my phone as I get in and auto-links to it,

the GPS has traffic / cogestion avoidance (works ok where there is good data), it has side, front and lower air-bags, keys you can't lock in by mistake, auto-dimming rear-view mirror, USB connection, MP3 player connection, sat radio, anti-skid, auto traction control,

On-Star with auto diagnostics and calls for help when the air bags are deployed, seats and mirrors that remember where I like them and the list goes on and all this in a car in the 30K range, what is amazing is most of these features can even be found in under 20K cars.