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Triumphant gearheads, standing ovations for a
hydrogen bus, and a yuppie BMW that's actually good for the planet.
I've seen the future and I like it.
By Marilyn Berlin Snell
Alan Welch and his team of engineers and mechanics are building
the car of the future. But on the day we meet last fall, the future
isn’t cooperating. Just a few miles from the finish of a three-day
automotive competition and rally, their car poops out.
"We need another optical sensor," Welch pronounces from the
backseat, where he’s been hunched over his laptop running an engine
diagnostic in the Mojave’s desert heat. Wires are everywhere—some
spilling from the glove box, snaking over the passenger side, then
connecting to Welch’s computer. "It’s burned. We’ve lost RPM. Off,
please." Welch is talking to driver Campbell McConnell, who receives
the news, follows orders, and slumps down in his seat. The sensor
that overheated is the size of a fingernail and available at most
electrical-supply stores. But it’s late afternoon along a desolate
strip of Interstate 15 near Sheep Mountain, above which a pale
half-moon is on the rise. The car will need a lift the last 28 miles
into Las Vegas on a flatbed tow truck.
The team from Westport Innovations, a small, independent research
and development firm in Canada, has been working for two and a half
years to retrofit light-duty diesel engines to run on
cleaner-burning natural gas. Now, not only has their prototype Ford
Focus come to an unscheduled stop, it looks like McConnell is going
to spend the bulk of his 25th birthday in a parking lot.
Westport’s prototype is one of 49 entries at the Challenge
Bibendum, a kind of moving showcase for cleaner, greener vehicles
sponsored by the Michelin Group. The event, named for the company’s
doughboy mascot, is the third for the French tire-maker. The first
two took place in France, in 1998 and 2000. "Bibendum" derives from
the Michelin family’s original ad campaign, now more than 100 years
old. In the ads, a marshmallowy creature holds aloft a champagne
glass full of nails. (They’re French, remember.) The Latin phrase
nunc est bibendum or "time to drink" was used as inspiration for
copy that read "Michelin tires drink obstacles." The fat guy became
"Bibendum" and one of the most popular and recognizable corporate
logos in the world, and so he stays. But his name is awkwardly out
of step with modern attitudes about drinking and driving—as out of
step, in fact, as the Challenge Bibendum itself is with oilman
George W. Bush’s vision of an unapologetically consumptive
drill-and-drive America.
It is a stroke of genius to begin the U.S. Bibendum beneath the
particulate haze of Los Angeles, a city whose car culture has
contributed to some of the nation’s most notorious air. L.A. artist
Stephanie Sanchez has spent many years painting the atmospherics
above her hometown. "When I paint a realistic Los Angeles sky,"
Sanchez says during my visit prior to the event, "I use earth
colors—usually raw umber and raw sienna." High concentrations of
nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxides, and lead
apparently often cancel the need for traditional blue.
As an ice sculpture of Bibendum melts in the parking lot of the
Automobile Club of Southern California, I get a glimpse of the
less-polluting vehicles on the horizon. It is estimated that by 2020
the number of cars on the world’s roads will have tripled, to nearly
1.5 billion. If technological innovations such as the ones being
shown off here aren’t a significant part of that mix, the palette
used to paint skylines will surely get darker.
Some of the Bibendum entries are bizarre, like the one-seater
Solar Eagle III. The bright yellow vehicle is designed by students
at California State University, Los Angeles, and propelled by
photovoltaic panels that make it look like a computer punch card on
wheels.
Others look out of place at a competition, like the stodgy 1994
Buick Regal station wagon retrofitted to run on a mix of hydrogen
and corn alcohol, or ethanol.
Still other entries will suit more conventional tastes, and—their
builders and backers hope—mean big business down the road. Eight of
the world’s top automakers are participating, including Ford,
General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, which all have relatively clean
vehicles in prototype or production. In addition to natural gas and
ethanol, there are autos run by electricity (think plug-in), and
hybrids, which have a gas-powered engine that works in tandem with
an electric motor to boost fuel economy. Electric vehicles have zero
emissions, though the juice to move them comes from utilities, which
now pump 25 percent of all CO2 greenhouse-gas emissions into the
atmosphere. (Cars, sport-utility vehicles, minivans, and pickups are
responsible for 17 percent.) Hybrids don’t need to plug in to power
plants, since they generate electricity on board via the gas
engine.
There are also fuel cells (which can be powered by a variety of
fuels—see "Are You Ready to Drive Green Today?" page 44), and
hydrogen-powered internal combustion engines. The latter combine
hydrogen with oxygen from the air to run the motor. Though the only
thing coming out of a hydrogen car’s tailpipe is water vapor—a very
good thing—there is a bit of a fuel-storage problem that still must
be overcome: It currently takes 11.6 gallons of hydrogen to create
the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline. Engineers on Ford’s
H2 ICE team (cool mechanic-speak for "hydrogen internal combustion
engine") say they are working to improve hydrogen storage
technologies.
I try to keep pace with car talk about ICE, torque, and
horsepower, but later, in need of remedial education, I call Harry
Quinsler, who’s been a professional mechanic for more than 18 years.
"Torque is the ability of a vehicle to pull or haul weight," my
friend tells me. "Horsepower makes you go fast." As cars become more
fuel efficient, torque and horsepower tend to be compromised—which
is why engineers at the event were so eager to talk about how new
technology has eliminated, or at least significantly reduced, this
problem.
On day two of the Bibendum, the vehicles perform at the
California Speedway in Fontana, where they are tested for emissions,
noise levels, fuel economy, range, and braking. Toward afternoon,
the electric cars have run their emission-free range and look like
wilted flowers, with doors open and engines dead, while other cars,
including those powered by hydrogen, continue to roll. Some may
consider this event NASCAR for sissies, but I prefer the nearly
silent electric SUVs with birds of paradise painted on their sides
to ear-splitting race cars emblazoned with ads for Valvoline and
Viagra.
Then comes the chance to drive or ride in some of the vehicles
during the 225-mile rally to Vegas. This is a journey for nerds and
gearheads, with no junk-food stops or brushes with the law. But it
offers the possibility of a future in which the Great American Road
Trip—that fine art of the serial escape and symbol of freedom and
independence—could be done without smutting up the skies.
First, I drive a hydrogen car built by Ford. Bob Natkin, a senior
technical specialist and team leader on Ford’s hydrogen internal
combustion engine project, sits next to me in the compact but
comfortable P2000. I am also chauffeuring a journalist from London’s
Daily Telegraph—one of more than 150 reporters from 23 countries
covering the Bibendum. "What am I hearing?" asks the Brit as our
hydrogen car clanks a little going up a 4,700-foot incline outside
L.A. called the Baker grade. "It’s the fuel injection system," says
Natkin. "Right now, this car is really just a rolling laboratory."
The P2000 has the knock-around sounds and anemic pickup of a Ford
Fiesta, but I am still capable of keeping up with traffic flow.
As my passengers speak knowingly about performance features and
NOx traps (nitrogen oxides are a nasty component of most fuel
exhaust), I am fixated on the hydrogen sensors. Who cares about
performance, I wonder nervously, when we are encased in a vehicular
Hindenburg? I am assured that Ford’s engineers have installed more
than enough safety equipment: The dome light doubles as an H2
detector; there are four fans in the back of the car—two for
circulation and two for extracting escaped hydrogen; and a sunroof
automatically opens if sensors detect a leak. Natkin points rearward
and says proudly, "That’s not an antenna; it’s a fuel-storage-system
high-pressure vent." All very impressive, I say, but has anybody
fixed the flammability problem? They have, Natkin says, noting that
the P2000 hydrogen-sensor technology is currently being upgraded to
the kind used in the space shuttle program.
The deal-breaker with hydrogen isn’t safety or technology.
According to Natkin, clean, green hydrogen cars could be in mass
production in a relatively short period of time. "It’s more of a
fuel availability and cost question at this point," he says. The
holdup is the lack of political will, and therefore government aid,
to build a fuel infrastructure that would support a hydrogen
economy. While the Ford Focus prototype I rode in had been able to
fill up in Barstow (there are more than 1,200 U.S. stations that
sell natural gas), fuel for the Bibendum’s hydrogen vehicles must be
provided by a tanker truck that trails the rally participants.
The Bush administration is suddenly hot for hydrogen, announcing
a program called Freedom Cooperative Automotive Research, or
FreedomCAR, and with it $150 million in subsidies for
hydrogen-fuel-cell research. But Bush has remained mum about outlays
for infrastructure, which is required to make his green talk amount
to anything more than a delaying tactic that lets automakers off the
hook in the short term.
Germany, on the other hand, takes hydrogen seriously. According
to Thomas Dietsch, director of the clean-energy program at BMW’s
engineering center in Oxnard, California, in 1998 the German
government formed a roundtable with Shell Oil and car companies,
including BMW and DaimlerChrysler, to work out a strategy to bring
on the hydrogen future. The state of Bavaria has already helped fund
and build a hydrogen station in Munich, for example. And in
September, Berlin will open its first hydrogen station. (Private
companies are unlikely to make the move alone. According to the
California Fuel Cell Partnership, it will cost a U.S. station almost
$450,000 to put in just one hydrogen pump.)
BMW has announced that by 2020 it aims to have 25 percent of its
cars worldwide running on hydrogen fuel cells. I am only allowed to
sit shotgun in the hydrogen BMW at the Bibendum, but the ride is
smooth and quiet, like a regular-old, obscenely expensive Beemer.
"The power," says researcher and driver Erich Gruber in a charming
German accent, "is only slightly less than the conventional
twelve-cylinder model." Gruber and his colleagues break speed limits
on a regular basis, gunning their hydrogen cars across Death Valley
during summer endurance tests.
The Germans also enter several Audis, whose A8 and A2 turbo
diesels both receive Bibendum awards for interior and exterior
design. With a radio, CD player, TV, and computer on the dashboard,
the A8 is better-appointed than my living room, and almost as
spacious. I don’t want to give up my seat when rally participants
stop to change vehicles at the Bun Boy in Baker, California. With
all-wheel drive, the A8 gets 24 miles per gallon. Both it and the
A2, which gets an astounding 78 miles per gallon, are available in
Europe, but not in the United States.
Stuart Johnson, a spokesperson for Audi, acknowledges that
because the U.S. government isn’t demanding higher fuel-economy
standards, Audi isn’t inclined to bring its fuel-efficient models
stateside. "Most Americans aren’t that concerned with fuel economy,"
notes Johnson. "And unless gas prices go up or CAFE standards are
raised," he says, referring to corporate average fuel economy rules,
"Americans probably won’t get interested." Diesel engines are 20 to
25 percent more fuel-efficient than conventional gas engines, but
they emit higher levels of nitrogen oxides and particulates, a known
carcinogen. Audi has worked to reduce these emissions, and its A8
and A2 models both meet new European emissions standards (though
Europe’s rules are not as strong as those in the United States).
It’s a little hard to figure out the Jekyll and Hyde personality
of Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler—Detroit’s Big Three
automakers. Ford alone has ten entries at the Bibendum. All are
forging ahead with alternative fuel technologies. At the same time,
however, Detroit’s alter ego has been systematically killing off
every major legislative effort to increase fuel economy.
Among the most impressive of the U.S. entries is a Ford
hybrid-electric Escape SUV. With a V-4 engine, the Escape reportedly
can travel nearly 500 miles on a single tank of gas and gets 40
miles per gallon, making it the most fuel-efficient sport-utility
vehicle in the world. The hybrid Escape will be available to
consumers in 2003.
General Motors comes to the Bibendum a little skittish. In 1996,
after spending nearly a billion dollars in research and development
on a two-seater electric vehicle, GM rolled out America’s first
plug-in car, the EV1. With faulty batteries and a range of only 100
miles, the big idea was a flop and only 700 were sold or leased. At
the Bibendum, the company went in the opposite direction, touting a
new technology for its gargantuan GMC Sierra pickup truck. According
to GM engineers, its "displacement on demand" engine saves fuel by
using only half of its eight cylinders during normal driving
conditions. All cylinders kick in when the driver needs extra power.
Under the best of circumstances this technology can bump up fuel
economy by 3 miles per gallon, to 17 mpg. (That’s not much, but if
this increase were adopted by all SUVs and pickups in the United
States, it would save 49 million gallons of oil a day—7 million
gallons a day more than the Bush administration says it could get
from drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.) Displacement on
demand will be standard on all 2004 Sierras and Chevy Silverados—a
good thing, since they both made the ACEEE’s Green Book list of the
12 "meanest vehicles for the environment" in 2002.
At GM’s press conference, Chief Environment Officer Dennis Minano
announces that his company "wants to remove the auto from the
energy-environment-fuel debate." I ask Minano whether he couldn’t
make this happen more expeditiously by actively supporting (or at
least not fighting) higher mileage standards for cars and trucks.
"The next transportation revolution won’t be aided by government
mandate," he says a little curtly. I think he prefers talking
torque. "GM does not support a legislated increase in [fuel economy]
standards."
That, it turns out, is an understatement. While GM’s Dr. Jekylls
show off eco-friendly autos—they have hydrogen and natural-gas
concept cars as well as pickups at the event—the Mr. Hyde contingent
is challenging California’s zero-emissions-vehicle mandate in court.
The rule GM is fighting requires that by 2003 a certain percentage
of new vehicles sold in California have zero, or at least very low,
emissions. Car companies—particularly American automakers enamored
of SUVs—would need to start rolling out highly fuel-efficient cars
in big numbers to offset their sales of gas guzzlers in California—a
state that accounts for 10 percent of all auto purchases in the
United States.
At first, other car companies declined to join GM’s suit against
the people of California, afraid perhaps of bad PR (though
DaimlerChrysler has since signed on). But the likelihood is high
that Ford is cheering on its American competitor. (Last March, for
instance, Ford CEO William Clay Ford Jr. traveled to Washington to
personally lobby Republican John McCain of Arizona to back off a
proposal that the senator and Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts
had introduced to increase fuel economy. McCain demurred, but the
auto industry managed to keep the proposal from ever being brought
to a vote.)
"The Big Three make most of their money on Chevy Suburbans, Ford
Expeditions, and the like," says longtime Detroit-watcher Richard
Truett, an engineering reporter for Automotive News. "And they are
going to protect those nest eggs as best they can." In other words,
Detroit is hedging its bets. It’s banking on strong SUV and truck
sales to keep competitive so it can invest in future technology. GM,
for example, already spends $100 million a year on fuel-cell
research and development. "GM and other carmakers would be the first
to agree that they need to do a better job making cars cleaner and
more fuel efficient," says Truett. "What they won’t agree with is
government entities arbitrarily telling them what to do." (Yet the
Big Three don’t mind getting hefty government subsidies to
innovate.)
Both industry executives and politicians say they have to respond
to the world as it is—to consumer demands, corporate bottom lines,
job-security issues, and voting habits. The future, on the other
hand, has no constituency; it barely has a language, but it gets the
point across. The most graphic recent example was the
12,000-year-old ice shelf the size of Rhode Island that broke away
from Antarctica—disintegrating, said scientists for the British
Antarctic Survey, at an astounding speed under the impact of global
warming.
To justify its humongous vehicles, Detroit has recently resorted
to scare tactics. Shortly before the debate in the Senate on
increasing fuel economy, for instance, ominous commercials began
appearing on TV suggesting that soccer moms would lose their SUVs
and that farmers would lose the pickups they need for work.
"The auto industry and front groups such as the Coalition for
Vehicle Choice try to scare people into thinking that fuel economy
will mean that folks can’t buy the vehicle they want, and that the
cars they can buy will be unsafe," says Ann Mesnikoff of the Sierra
Club’s Global Warming and Energy Program. Research from the National
Academy of Sciences shows, however, that technology currently exists
to improve fuel economy without changing weight or other vehicle
characteristics. The research also shows that in certain cases, such
as the biggest SUVs on the market, overall safety could even be
improved if those vehicles lose some weight.
Mesnikoff points out that the duplicity of Detroit’s refusal to
upgrade their fleets is shortchanging consumers. "The American
people deserve better safety and fuel economy. Detroit should spend
more time putting in better engines, transmissions, and aerodynamics
and less time putting out lies," she says.
Dan Becker, who works with Mesnikoff in Washington, is troubled
by the spring shenanigans that kept Congress from voting to increase
CAFE standards: "The Big Three ignored their technologies with a
vote that increases our oil dependence and pollution. Their ads were
dishonest and dishonorable at a time when the American people are
looking to Congress to reduce our consumption of oil."
As Detroit stalls, Japanese automakers are zooming ahead. Honda,
for example, is well represented at the Bibendum. Its Insight zipped
around the Fontana track, clocking 57 mpg. The first hybrid in the
U.S. market (Toyota followed shortly with the roomier Prius), 5,000
Insights were sold last year. Honda also displayed its Civic GX, a
natural-gas car named by the EPA the cleanest-burning internal
combustion engine in the world. Ahead of the pack once again, the GX
is already available for $22,900.
"Fuel economy is all about technology," says Becker. "The
Bibendum demonstrates not only the technologies of tomorrow that
will give consumers better fuel economy, but the technologies
already on the market. Honda and Toyota, for example, have shown
technological leadership by beating the American automakers to the
market with fuel-saving and clean hybrid vehicles, while the Big
Three have shown their ability as leaders against change."
In a spring episode of the NBC series The West Wing (sponsored in
part by Volkswagen, Mercedes, Buick, and Saturn), Jed Bartlet was on
a rant about the need to free the country from foreign-oil
dependence. "We must control our destiny through innovation," the
fictive head of state proclaimed. It was a dramatic moment, one that
left me a little melancholic about the absence of a real leader with
the courage of such convictions. In the void, there is TV, and the
Bibendum.
At the Las Vegas Hilton on the last night of the event,
journalists, corporate executives, mechanics, and engineers gather
for an awards ceremony. The only standing ovation of the evening
comes for a workhorse bus. For three days, the zero-emissions
hydrogen-fuel-cell ZEbus, built by Ballard Power Systems of
Vancouver, British Columbia, tootled around, giving journalists
joyrides in parking lots and on the road trip to Vegas. On the Baker
grade, the ZEbus was a little sluggish—like 100 percent of the other
public-transit buses on the road—but its exhaust pipe spewed only
water vapor and it got up to 70 mph on the flatlands. It doesn’t win
an award, but it is applauded for congeniality.
As the room quiets, someone dressed as the Michelin
Man—apparently unable to see through the eye holes in his
marshmallow suit—runs into a waiter carrying a tray stocked with
glasses of cabernet. The goblets smash on the floor as red wine
makes little rivulets down the front of the white rubber suit. Time
to Drink, Bibendum!
My buddies from the Westport team win three awards for their
natural-gas Ford Focus: two gold medals—one for handling and one for
quietness—and a silver for fuel efficiency. The team, sunburned and
exhausted from the day spent stranded in the Mojave Desert, sits
together at a table, relaxing and drinking beer. A new optical
sensor has been located, and the team will install it tomorrow. Then
they’ll get back in their natural-gas-powered Focus, which is still
at least two years from production, and spend four days driving to
Detroit. Out of 20 refueling stops on the cross-country drive, 16
will be made at stations selling natural gas (otherwise they’ll
refuel from a team pickup carrying storage tanks). They will have a
flat tire along the way, but nothing more dramatic. They will
deliver their prototype for evaluation to enthusiastic engineers and
executives at Ford, who will then air-freight it to Ford’s diesel
lab in London. They will return to Westport Innovations in Vancouver
and get back to work on the car of the future. All this is to come.
They’ll deal with it later, after a little gambling and a belated
birthday celebration on the Las Vegas Strip.
Marilyn Berlin Snell is Sierra’s writer/editor. Up
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