Big Green Machines

For a hundred years, the internal combustion engine has been the piston-powered heart of Detroit. But the auto industry did not always run solely on gasoline. At the beginning of the 20th century, more Americans drove electric cars than petroleum-powered ones.

A century later, the American car industry is entering a new age of innovation, and the supremacy of the gasoline engine is once again being challenged. The first serious rival out of the gate was the hybrid Toyota Prius, which runs partly on electricity. But because hybrids still burn gasoline most of the time, they do little to cure our addiction to oil. European carmakers, especially Mercedes-Benz, are wagering on new, more efficient diesel engines, but environmentalists still complain that “clean diesel” is an oxymoron.

That’s why the real action lies in the next wave of alternative fuels and motors. Here’s an insider’s guide to the leading contenders to dethrone the gasoline engine.


Flex-Fuel
Flex-fuel engines allow a car to switch easily between gasoline and alternative fuels like ethanol. This is here-and-now technology: In Brazil, about 80 percent of new cars (such as Volkswagen’s Gol) can run on either ethanol or gasoline. The U.S. already has 6 million flex-fuel cars, and since it costs less than $100 extra to build a car with flex-fuel capability, every major automaker is getting behind the technology. Ford Motor, Chrysler, and General Motors promise to accelerate Detroit’s yearly output of flex-fuel cars from the current level of 800,000 to 4 million—about half their total car output—by 2012. Only Japanese firms have been reluctant to embrace flex-fuel, perhaps because they believe it threatens their commanding lead in hybrid-electric technologies.

Though you can already buy flex-fuel cars, you can’t find ethanol to fill your tank in most of the U.S.  That has made the cars a running joke in Detroit, where auto companies built them only to meet government fuel-economy standards. Many of the millions who bought the cars didn’t even know they had flex-fuel capability. Now, with the huge investment boom in ethanol, flex-fuel proponents argue that the infrastructure for supplying the fuel to customers will spread.

Biofuel has two big advantages. The first is that politicians in Washington love to shovel subsidies to the Midwest’s politically powerful farmers, who grow the corn that is converted into American ethanol. Second, it’s easy to adapt to the technology. Small amounts of ethanol are already blended into gasoline to be burned in today’s engines. But precisely because ethanol can be blended into gasoline, the current boom in biofuels, like the Prius euphoria, may only perpetuate our dependence on oil.

What’s more, unlike Brazil, where sugarcane can be made into ethanol efficiently, America uses corn, which requires a lot of petroleum-based fertilizer to grow and a great deal of energy to convert to fuel. Environmentalists worry about the pesticides involved in a big scale-up of corn production, as well as the resulting soil erosion.

Will it take off? The coming boom in flex-fuel technology is as sure a bet as there is in clean energy. Detroit is very likely to ramp up production as swiftly as it has promised, because the additional costs of making cars flex-fuel-ready are trivial. It’s much riskier, however, to assume that the infrastructure will expand­. Currently, fewer than 1,500 of America’s 170,000 gas stations offer E85, a fuel blend that’s 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.


Full Electric
Any day now, the first all-electric Tesla Roadster will hit the open road. The smoking-hot, two-seat sports car accelerates from zero to 60 miles per hour in about four seconds—as fast as a Ferrari. Equally impressive is its range: It can travel more than 200 miles on an overnight charge. Thanks to its lightweight carbon-fiber bodywork and its use of advanced lithium-ion batteries, the Roadster gets the equivalent of 135 miles per gallon of gasoline.

Electric cars didn’t die with Thomas Edison, who worked on developing their batteries a century ago. There are more than 50,000 electric cars on American roads today, though most are fleet vehicles or odd-looking hobbyist creations. Electric cars enjoyed a brief renaissance in the 1990s in California when the state’s zero-emission regulations pushed reluctant Detroit firms to produce them. G.M.’s EV1, the most aerodynamic production car ever made, was popular with environmentalists and technophiles, but ordinary consumers were put off by its limited range and the inconvenience of recharging it. The program was killed in 2003.

The new generation of battery-­powered cars is much more promising. Unlike its predecessors, the Roadster doesn’t need to be recharged at special stations: It can plug into a household outlet. It also has double the range of the older generation of battery cars. At nearly $100,000, the Roadster’s price is steep, but Tesla Motors is also developing a $50,000 version, code-named White­Star, that it hopes to bring to market within three years.

Mitsubishi and Nissan have said they are working on electric cars as well, but the real innovation in this area is coming from nimble industry outsiders. Norwegian entrepreneurs have acquired the electric-vehicle technology that powered Ford’s Think car and will start selling the two-seater in Norway early next year and in the United States in 2009. The Think City can travel about 112 miles on an overnight charge, making it attractive mainly as a second car or commuter vehicle. Another rival is the Reva, an Indian-made electric car already available in Britain. This two-seater has a range of only about 50 miles, but it runs at about a tenth of the cost per mile of a typical gasoline car. Chinese models, including the Happy Messenger, are wild cards; their reliability remains questionable.

Will it take off? Electric-car drivers enjoy tax benefits and other incentives in California, thanks to the state’s goal of getting more zero-emission vehicles on the road. But for the technology to make the big time, the batteries must prove ­reliable and safe, and the cost of carbon-fiber bodywork needs to be reduced by an order of magnitude from today’s level.

Plug-In Hybrids
Heads turned at the sight of Greg Hanssen’s license plate: "100 mpg." If you looked at the rear bumper of his Toyota Prius, you saw the secret that made the car so desirable: an ordinary electric plug. Hanssen, an electrical engineer and master tinkerer in the Los Angeles area, runs a startup that converts conventional Priuses to his homemade plug-in technology. He replaces one of the car’s standard computers with his own and fits it with a bigger, more robust battery, ending up with a vehicle that can be driven purely on electric power, with the gasoline engine as a backup. Plugging in overnight for the next day’s commute lets owners take advantage of cheap, off-peak electricity rates, bringing operating costs down 75 percent.

Instead of the nickel-metal-hydride batteries in stock Priuses, Hanssen uses the superior lithium-ion technology found in laptop batteries. He also hacks the Prius’ software to prevent the gasoline engine from kicking in unless the car is traveling at high speed. As a result, his modified Prius can go 30 miles in all-electric mode, compared with less than two miles for an ordinary Prius. And even when burning gas, Hanssen’s car blends in electric power to improve fuel economy and provide about half the total power at highway speed.


Hanssen and like-minded activists have managed to whip up so much media attention and grassroots clamor for plug-ins that the big auto manufacturers have been forced to respond. At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, in January, G.M. announced plans to rapidly develop plug-ins. Executives unveiled a prototype, the Chevrolet Volt, that they intend to have ready by 2010 in an effort to catch up with Toyota, which has a big lead in conventional hybrids. Toyota has never liked the idea of plug-ins—it even marketed the Prius as the electric car you never plug in—but in mid-2006 it made a U-turn. Toyota now promises to deliver a handful of plug-in prototypes to the University of California, Irvine, by November for environmental-impact studies. Malcolm Bricklin, who brought the Yugo to America, plans to import plug-ins from China through his firm, Visionary Vehicles, by 2009.



Critics argue that plug-in cars are an environmental hoax: Because they recharge from a power grid that relies on coal-fired plants, they merely pollute somewhere else. It’s a legitimate point, but several studies calculating the environmental impact of battery-powered cars over their life cycle have determined they are still greener than the average gasoline-fueled car, despite their dependence on coal power. And, of course, they also help us kick the oil habit.

If there’s a green obstacle facing this technology, it’s not environmental; it’s financial. The advanced batteries and lightweight carbon-fiber bodywork necessary to give electric cars decent range add thousands of dollars to their price. The Prius has shown that green technologies can eventually achieve economies of scale, but early adopters must be willing to pay a premium.

Will it take off? The main reason this technology may have a bright future is the noisy environmental movement supporting it. Advocates have even convinced the White House that this hobbyist’s invention is the Next Big Thing. Political pressure will force Detroit and Japanese automakers to devise at least a token number of plug-ins by 2010.

Fuel Cells
Larry Burns, vice president of research and development at G.M., was one of the first in the industry to conclude that the internal combustion engine will one day be replaced by the fuel cell. His reasoning is simple: Ninety-eight percent of the auto industry’s vehicles run on petroleum, and that creates volatility, political risk, and greenhouse gas emissions. If the 2.5 billion people who will be added to the world’s population by 2050 drive cars, Burns believes, only hydrogen-fuel-cell electric vehicles will prevent this mass of new automobiles from ruining the planet.

That is a surprising view from Detroit. But Burns is not alone: Bill Ford himself has predicted that “fuel cells will end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine.” So what are fuel cells, exactly? Simply put, they are electro­chemical devices that replace internal combustion engines. Instead of gasoline, they use hydrogen as fuel.

Fuel cells are the ultimate clean-car technology, promising zero local pollution and zero global-warming gases. What’s more, they could prove to be the coolest cars you’ve ever seen. G.M.’s Hy-Wire, a hydrogen concept car, compresses the entire fuel-cell apparatus into an 11-inch-thick “skateboard.” On top of that, the car is designed to let customers snap off the body, so they could have a convertible in summer and an S.U.V. in winter. The superquiet fuel cell could power a mobile office or a cabin in the woods, and you could use its perfectly clean steam exhaust to make double-foam lattes.

G.M. is working furiously to develop a practical prototype based on the Hy-Wire’s concepts by the end of 2010. It is developing several fuel-cell models, including a version of its Chevy Equinox, which it expects to have production-ready by then. But take that with a grain of salt, as G.M. has given itself an out: It has promised to make a million of the revolutionary vehicles a year, at prices the company says will appeal to the mass market, but only after a suitable network of hydrogen filling stations is in place. Honda also has an advanced fuel-cell car, dubbed the FCX, which was launched in very limited numbers in the U.S. this year. In typical Japanese fashion, Honda executives are tight-lipped on details but have let slip to the Japanese press that they aim to price the cars below $85,000.

This progress is promising, but fuel-cell technology has had false starts before. DaimlerChrysler spent a billion dollars on the effort in the 1990s but bet on the wrong fuel. Rather than relying on pure hydrogen, Chrysler’s fuel-cell cars extracted hydrogen onboard from ­methanol, which proved a costly dead end. Today, most serious contenders plan to use hydrogen for their fuel cells.

Therein lies another potential snag. Hydrogen may be the most common element in the universe, but you can’t just pull up at your local Exxon station and ask for a tank of it. Until there are hydrogen-refueling stations, nobody will buy a fuel-cell car, but no firm will invest in refueling stations if no one is already driving fuel-cell cars. For its part, Honda is developing a home energy station that lets customers make hydrogen fuel at home from natural gas. Governments also might lend a hand. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s hypergreen governor, has proposed a “hydrogen highway” of refueling stations up and down the state. The U.S. Department of Energy also plans to cooperate with energy companies to develop hydrogen-refueling technologies. Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron have both independently developed hydrogen-refueling methods that tap into the existing natural-gas grid, thus helping solve the chicken-or-egg problem.

Will it take off? Fuel cells are the riskiest bet in clean-car technology, but they also have the most potential to change the game. It won’t be easy to replace the vast infrastructure that supports today’s engine technologies with an entirely new one. But fuel cells’ promise of clean, carbon-emission-free personal transportation and an end to oil addiction is so great that this long shot is well worth keeping an eye on.



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