Especially if you define “advanced” as “highly complex.” The ICE is that. I’ve seen old textile mills: they’re also madly complex feats of engineering that required great ingenuity to build and operate. The same could be said for Gutenberg-style printing presses. Likewise those room-sized computers with logic built from relays or vacuum tubes. All are now museum pieces.

What’s even more advanced is an elegant, more minimal solution. It’s difference between the old model of epicycles and celestial spheres versus the Copernican system.

ICE still outperforms EVs where physics matters most

ICE engines have been under continuing development for almost a century and a half. EVs had a brief period of adoption early in the automotive age, but then were abandoned for most of that period, only to be revived lately as new technologies have emerged.

When you take a systems view, it’s necessary to look at the whole end-to-end system, not one isolated component. You also need to look at all the externalities, particularly (in the case of the ICE) the downstream effect of very efficiently burning all that fossil fuel whose waste products end up in our atmosphere. Otherwise you’ve been fooled into believing that a local optimimization is the best global solution.