CHAPTER FORTY

ears passed and the world evolved. I had become hyperconscious of the damage fossil fuels had done and continued to do to planet Earth, our home and the home of our children’s children. I was becoming obsessed. Although I had gained knowledge about biofuels, I knew there was much more to learn. My friends Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Dave Matthews were all part of Farm Aid and we all had started running our touring vehicles on it. Domestically produced and renewable, biofuels were a reasonable, if partial, solution to our dependence on foreign oil. But they had their own set of problems, too.

An argument that biofuels, such as ethanol, disrupted food supply was gaining momentum, but there was another side to that story. Sales of corn for food were holding steady and had been for years, indicating that people were not losing their food supply to fuel. The corn used for ethanol was not used for human consumption; it was used to feed cows, especially in factory farms, which are another one of the largest sources of CO₂ greenhouse gases. Naturally cows are grazing animals, not corn eaters, but polluting, corporate factory beef farmers still complained that ethanol production raised the price of corn. In addition to corporate factory beef farmers, behind every campaign against ethanol, Big Oil was lurking, lobbying, and working the back rooms of Washington.

And there’s still another side. Biofuels were relatively new, still in their infancy. What we were using was the first generation. Interestingly, when government started to support biofuels with subsidies, business increased and reached the growth goals that were set. At that point, rather than continuing to support the new industry’s growth by mandating a further increase in ethanol content in motor fuel from ten to fifteen percent, the government stopped the subsidies. Folks who had invested in biofuels began feeling the pinch, and business started to decline. During that same time, oil subsidies continued unabated. The strength of corporate lobbying at work in Washington was killing the biofuel industry.

It was in this climate that I suddenly woke up one day and was a dinosaur. Looking at my huge collection of gas-guzzlers, I realized that I was in love with something that needed to be replaced, something that had become obsolete. I had turned to biodiesel but I knew there was a lot more I could do.

I talked to a friend, Dale Djerassi, my intelligent and stimulating neighbor who I have known for a long time. He argued for the viability of electric cars. He made strong points with lots of good reasoning behind them and took me to see Tesla, a new company just getting ready to produce its first electric car. The building and operation they had was impressive. I saw the batteries, motors, and bodies they were using and took a ride in one of the first prototypes with Martin Eberhard, the founder. That car was the Tesla Roadster, not available at the time, an extremely fast car with excellent handling and efficiency. Although it was a bit small for me, I was impressed with the power and the battery configuration Tesla had developed. As a result of that visit, I started thinking that maybe electricity and biofuels could work well together.

In 2007, when I decided to repower the biggest gas-guzzler in my car barn, I thought about which guzzler would be the perfect candidate. At the same time, I searched around on the Internet and found a man who made biodiesel muscle cars. His name was Jonathan Goodwin and he lived in Wichita, Kansas. I called him. We spoke for a while, and he was very enthusiastic. I liked his energy.

I can sometimes become so obsessed with a new idea that I lose perspective and start dreaming really big. Predictably, I was always very enthusiastic. That has been good and bad, and has produced mixed results over my life. I wanted to raise awareness of electric transportation and I was very high on the project, naively thinking we were going to change the world.

We settled on a plan to build a series hybrid, different from a regular hybrid because an electric motor always provided power to the wheels. The internal combustion engine would only generate electricity for long trips. For daily commutes, plugging it in overnight would eliminate the daily need for liquid fuel of any kind.

I talked to my friend Marc Benioff, a successful businessman and philanthropist, about the project. Always full of great ideas, he suggested that I make a movie about the conversion. Larry Johnson, my partner in Shakey Pictures, was ready to make the movie about repowering the American dream as soon as he heard about the idea.

Looking over my collection of old cars, I saw my 1959 Lincoln Continental. It was the most outrageous car of them all and would be perfect. It looked great on film, as I knew from Greendale. I reasoned that a big American classic car like that would attract the most attention as an electric car and would provide the most exposure. When it was new it got nine miles per gallon. Nobody thought electric cars could be big. Or old.

Larry and I planned our trip to Wichita and made an appointment to meet with Jonathan Goodwin. Our initial plan was to film the trip to Wichita in the Continental, do the conversion, and drive the car back to California to have Roy Brizio finish it after the repower was done. There was a lot of dreaming going on. By my reasoning, Jonathan was the expert for the electric repowering and Roy was the right man to finish and detail the job. His shop was convenient to me and his level of work was legendary. He was just inexperienced at the electric repowering side of the project. That was my plan, although I had not yet met Jonathan Goodwin and really had not done any research about his experience with electric conversions.

Before we left, there was a family birthday party for Pegi’s grandma at her home that our whole family attended. I took the Lincoln down there. I showed my young niece and nephews the Continental and told them it was going to be converted to an electric car. Having never even seen a car like the Lincoln Continental before and thinking about it being electric, they just stood there shaking their heads. At the time, there were no electric cars on the market.

After the party ended, Ben Young, Amber, and Pegi all went back to the ranch in Ben’s van. I took the Continental and picked up Larry and the crew, which included Ben Johnson, Larry’s son, and Will Mitchell, who followed behind the Continental in a van we rented and filled with cameras, lights, and other equipment.

My old friend Larry and I were very comfortable cruising in the old convertible. It was what we both lived for—making movies, traveling, and having a good time. It was mid-September 2007. We left for Wichita and a future beyond our imagination.

The sun was setting on the second day as we hit the outskirts of Vegas. The neon lights were already on. They are on twenty-four hours a day. The van raced ahead and caught a lot of shots of the old convertible cruising into town. With a chrome license-plate holder that said BEVERLY HILLS MOTORCARS on it and several worn decals on the windshield, we could just feel that the car had been there before. None of the old decals said “Las Vegas, Nevada,” specifically. In the right front seat, while he was holding his camera and shooting, Larry did his voice-over, kind of a newscaster-interviewer personality, shooting me driving the car with the splashy backgrounds of Vegas floating by behind. We were having a blast even though we were not smoking or drinking. We stayed focused, busy doing what we loved. It took a lot of concentration to drive the old Lincoln in a straight line, as it was a little out of alignment and tended to wander on the road.

As we passed by, Larry commented on the many new buildings and empty lots, as well as a huge dark old hotel that was no doubt about to be blown up and replaced by a new one. The giant building was where Elvis Presley had played his first Vegas shows. Such was the way of progress in Las Vegas. Out with the old and in with the new.

The Continental rumbled along, taking this in, no doubt noting that it was much older than that aging hotel, now slated for demolition. We were beginning to feel that the Continental had a soul, memories of the past and feelings about where we were going and what we were doing. Spending a lot of time with a car can do that. The Continental had a fiery spirit about it, and we could feel it.

Like it was a key to the past, a magic memory potion, older folks just opened up when they saw this car. It drew them like magnets. When we arrived at the Hoover Dam, one person who remembered the Continental when it was brand-new was instantly transported back to the past. He enthusiastically led us to the edge of the parking lot where we had stopped and pointed over the wall to the reservoir’s cement bottom, hundreds of feet down.

Speaking with a deep Alabama drawl, he said, “Back then, this all used to be full of water right up to the edge here,” pointing just a few feet from where we stood. “Carp were right here swimming around the surface. They used to be visible from right here. We came and looked at ’em every time we passed through.”

He paused as if he were looking directly into the past, and we all stood there, staring a long way down, hundreds of feet, at the dry concrete floor. Things were really different now. The old Continental was a little worn-out and aged, but it was still here with us. The water he talked about was gone.

There was a little moment of silence, and then we said good-bye, walking back to our cars. After a while, Larry and I started the Continental and left for Kingman, Arizona. Again, we filmed the turning of the key, the accelerator being pressed, and the tailpipe for fumes. A lot of soot was coming out during start-ups, causing a floating black cloud.

Outside of a Napa Auto Parts store in Kingman, Arizona, we watched an oil-tanker train roll by for what seemed like forever, while Will and Ben were replacing a headlamp in the old Lincoln. An employee came out and stood, watching the tanker train with us. “Four or five of those go by every day,” he commented.

The train was well over a mile long and every car was the same. Long black oil tanks on wheels rumbled by, clickety-clack, boom-boom, boom-boom. We watched silently. The headlamp was fixed and the Continental breathed a sigh of relief. “That feels good,” she said quietly.

We headed for Route 66, my old friend the Mother Road, where America traveled west in the fifties. This was the road I had traveled in the old hearse to California! When we finally got rolling on it, we saw a lot of old gas stations boarded up and surrounded by steel fences. Closed motels, abandoned in the sun, stood with open doors creaking in the breeze. A large Standard Oil Products sign could be seen from about a mile away, the paint peeling from it as it barely stood on two giant steel poles and gave slightly to the wind.

Tumbleweeds rolled by a deserted adobe fuel station and gift shop covered by Indian graffiti. Navajo was painted on the adobe wall. Windows on both sides of the old structure were smashed out and gone. I drove the Continental off the road and watched a tumbleweed rolling over the sand behind the station. The desert vista was clearly visible through the broken building. This had been a big fuel stop, really a lot more than just a gas station; this was a travel center with all kinds of articles for the traveler, including a big family restaurant, but it was all gone now except for the ruins.

Back when gas was cheap, people drove all over America, chasing their dreams and taking family vacations in their new cars, stopping for the night with their kids and staying in motels along the way; motels decorated like Indian teepees with swing sets out front and nearby drive-in movies. I thought to myself, one day all of these gas stations will be gone. Things that are taken for granted today can easily be gone tomorrow. Time can do a lot. I wondered what would replace gasoline. We traveled on toward Colorado and then through the Rocky Mountains.

• • •

STAYING ON TWO-LANE highways really gave us a trip full of feasts for the eye. Small mountain towns and awesome mountain peaks covered in snow flew by between gas stations and fill-ups. When we finally got through the Rockies, we arrived at a place called Trinidad in a rainstorm and sustained our first mechanical failure: a windshield-wiper arm had dislodged itself from its revolving post and was badly stripped so it could not be reapplied.

Larry’s exuberance was unique. I can still remember his voice as he described Black Jack’s Steakhouse in Trinidad, a former brothel with bedrooms upstairs. Larry had found it and he was very excited, reading aloud from the menu with great enthusiasm. Checking in, we each had our own rooms named after ladies of the night, and some of them had four-poster beds. My door had LILY written above it. I had a four-poster.

We ate steaks downstairs that night where there was a good salad bar and a real bar.

Upstairs on the floor with all of our rooms, there was a kitchen at the end of the hall where Internet reception was good. Later that night, we were all there with our computers, communicating with home and planning the trip. A lady walked in and asked us how we were doing. One thing led to another. She told us that Trinidad was the sex-change capital of the United States; she was in town for her operation and had originally been a man but was unhappy leading a man’s existence.

Larry told her what we were doing with our car, that we were going to electrify the old Continental, changing it from gasoline to electricity using a biofuel generator, noting that she, too, was making a big change, and asked if we could interview her. “Sure. I am an ethanol scientist and I am very interested in what you are doing,” she said. It was during the interview that she told us she thought we should ask permission from the car before we made the big change. That made sense to us, although we had never thought of it before.

• • •

I HAD BEEN GIVING her dashboard an occasional pat and talking to her for a few hours when I asked her for permission to make a change to her drivetrain. Traveling down a Kansas highway at sunset, the idea came as a bit of a surprise to the old Lincoln. We had begun to think of her as feminine. Larry filmed as I talked to her about what we were planning to do, explaining what a great future it would bring. We got the feeling that she was nonplussed by the idea. Shortly after that, the Continental had electrical problems and we lost all lights except the headlights.

The next day, when we finally arrived in Wichita and met Jonathan Goodwin, nicknamed “Johnny Magic” by his Wichita friends, we found he had a very impressive garage. We were optimistic about getting the car on the road as a series hybrid. Work started immediately, and after a few days Larry and I went back to California with Will and Ben and left the Lincoln in Wichita with Johnny Magic, thinking we would be back soon and everything would be done. Before we left I told the old Continental her new name was going to be Lincvolt. We figured the repowering of the Continental would take a few months.

Johnny Magic had a way with metal

Had a way with machines

One day in a garage long ago

He met destiny

In the form of a heavy metal Continental

She was born to run on the Proud Highway.

—“JOHNNY MAGIC”

It was a big dream. In the end, nothing for the repower was ever completed in Wichita, but there was a lot of experimenting. Delay upon delay piled up. The months dragged by. The years dragged by. We kept filming and trying to complete the transition, but nothing seemed to work. We made mistake upon miscalculation, attempting to build a clean, efficient drive system to power a big car. Two and a half years into the project, after trying many different ideas, ranging from water-gas power to vaporized fuel systems and giving them all a good shot, trying in vain to get high mileage, all we had was proof that an onboard generator could recharge the batteries while we were driving down the road. A proof of concept. Lincvolt was still just an idea, not a working car.

We left Jonathan Goodwin’s garage in Wichita and moved the project back to Brizio’s in California in early 2010. During this time, I had toured the world playing concerts and completed three records, traveling back to Wichita with Larry and our crew in between.

With gasoline priced at $2.35 per gallon, vacillating wildly from year to year on its overall steady climb, I had recorded a song called “Fuel Line,” featuring the choruses “Fill ’er up” and “Keep fillin’ that fuel line.” I was writing and performing a lot of songs about Lincvolt and the subject of electric powered cars. Fork in the Road, the album we made, was released in 2009. A lot of people were pissed that I made an album about that subject and I got bad reviews, but it was what was on my mind and I can be obsessive. Being obsessive is not such a bad thing for creativity.

• • •

TIME CONTINUED to pass for the project, mostly in trying to find the right generator system for a heavy car, and by 2010, with work going on at Brizio’s installing a turbine generator, I found myself in Hawaii with Pegi, getting some rest. I flew back to California for a short trip to be with my friend Conan O’Brien on his final Tonight Show. Upon my arrival in Los Angeles, I learned Larry Johnson had passed away from a heart attack. My lifelong friend was gone without warning. It was shattering news.

I kept thinking about Larry, processing the fact that he was gone. I saw him in the hallway of my hotel, heard his voice in the lobby. Pegi took it particularly hard. It took Pegi and me several months to recover and get back on our feet. Larry was very close to both of us in different ways. Ben Johnson, Larry’s son, took over finishing the Lincvolt picture with me and we kept on rolling. That’s what Larry would have wanted, so that’s what we did.

You’re in heaven with nothing to do

The ultimate vacation with no back pain

And all we do is work work work.

You’re on vacation

We’re workin’

You’re in heaven

I’m workin’.

—“YOU NEVER CALL”

A while later, one night on the ranch, it was a full moon. Billowing clouds were rolling by and we had a good fire going in the junkyard. Ben Johnson and I were shooting a scene. Some Canada geese flew over, honking in the sky, as I was talking about Larry’s long history with the Lincvolt project with Dave Toms, an old Canadian friend of mine. Nearby, junkyard cars sat listening in the moonlight.

I noticed the 1951 jeep pickup right where I had left it years before. The jeep pickup’s paint had worn over time to show the original construction-orange color in more places, giving it a rich patina. Weeds grew up all around it. The light from the fire played on the windshield. The jeep was talking to me. It was saying it missed Larry.

One time on the road, Ben Johnson and I sat in Lincvolt’s front seat and talked frankly about how to treat Larry’s passing in the movie we were making. It couldn’t have been easy for Ben, yet he just kept looking and trying to figure out the best way for us to go forward. He had the same quality as his father, had the same focus, patience, and energy, and was born to do his own life’s work and, like Larry, he would do it in his own way.

Again I hit the road on tour, doing a solo show across Canada. In summer of 2010, I was on the Trans-Canada Highway. While I was somewhere between Cypress River and Winnipeg, Manitoba, on that old road, a sweeping steel guitar came down from the clouds. I got the word from Pegi that my old friend Ben Keith had died on the ranch. It was the end of an era for me and my music.

I was devastated by the loss of Ben, known as “Long Grain” to his friends. I played “Old Man” solo that night on the same guitar I had used on the original recording in Nashville the night I met Ben. I looked over to my right to where he always sat with his steel, still hearing his sweeping tones in my heart.

With Long Grain gone, and his steel guitar silenced, it is hard for me to do all those songs we did together and not hear that steel echoing in my soul. Now I do them only as solo performances. I don’t want to hear anyone else attempting to play Ben’s parts on those songs with me.

• • •

LINCVOLT, now more than three years into the project, was equipped with a Capstone turbine at Brizio Street Rods. She was sounding like a quiet jet. However, as unique and cool as she was with her futuristic Batmobile-like sound, we could not yet go on a sustained journey, one of our primary goals. We had a maximum range of just over a hundred miles before we ran out of electric power and had to stop and regenerate. The system did not have enough power to regenerate more than what we were using when the car traveled at highway speeds. Everything we tried had taken a lot of time, and we still seemed to be aimlessly drifting, our lack of experience catching up with us.

After climate change brought us Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil disaster, we were on a Gulf Coast benefit tour, playing concerts with super-low ticket prices, traveling along the Gulf of Mexico and working with Tyson Foods, gathering food that folks brought to the shows, and donating it to food banks to bring some help to the devastated area. The gulf had lost both its fishing income because of the oil in the water and the tourist trade because of the tar on the beaches.

After the Gulf Coast tour, still filming Lincvolt, and carrying her in one of her tour semitrailers that doubled as a gym and garage, we headed north toward Milwaukee and Farm Aid, and then on to Michigan. We hit Detroit as the country continued reeling from the economic downturn that began in 2008.

In Detroit, my friend Bob Krepsky, official historian at Ford Motor Company, introduced us to Bill Ford, and we were invited to tour the old Wixom plant, where our Continental was built back in 1959. There we were introduced to the man who had headed up all Lincoln builds at the factory for years, Gary Cooper, and he showed us the facility. Mr. Cooper rode shotgun with us as we eased Lincvolt through the giant multi-acre plant to roll along the Lincoln assembly line one last time. It was an emotionally intense visit.

The giant Wixom Assembly Plant, where our Lincvolt Continental began her life of service, was being demolished around us. We moved slowly along the floor in the Continental. As we edged through the sparks that cascaded down on the cement floor from the metal torches of the demolitionists working above, giant pieces of steel fell from the ceiling, clattering loudly throughout the massive building. The welders did their work. Outside, Ben Johnson captured a shot of flocks of blackbirds circling over the plant. The sun was setting. It was a solemn day in Motor City. Times had changed.

The “mound” was historic. It was used to proudly display the latest models coming out of the Wixom Assembly Plant and was located out at the far edge of the plant’s expansive parking lot. One of Lincvolt’s sisters definitely had had her big moment on the mound, as did many other seminal cars of the fifties and sixties. Mr. Cooper made sure the old spotlights were turned on as Lincvolt climbed to the top of the mound. We were exposed to passing freeway motorists, and cars were honking their horns in salute, witnessing the beautiful old Lincoln Continental resting in the bright spotlights below a windblown American flag. Everyone knew the plant was closing. This was a moment of pure emotion and sense of history. Larry Johnson would have loved to have captured it. His son, Ben, shot it.

It was 2010. In the elections, the politics of change were being tested. Many politicians were denying the scientific fact that global warming was a man-made problem. Some even maintained that it wasn’t happening at all, and they were gaining power in Washington, ignoring science and practicing their politics of denial. They ridiculed President Obama repeatedly for even trying to address the issue. That CO₂ was threatening the climate’s stability was dismissed as a myth.

When Lincvolt appeared at a trade show that year in Las Vegas called SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association), I spoke about the future of electric cars with batteries charged by clean, domestic biofuel. We had to transport the car there by truck because it could not handle the distance to make the trip. We had been working for three years to make an example of a successful electric biofueled car. I knew we could get there if we just kept at it, but costs were mounting and time was passing.

The car was beautiful and it was electric. People were intrigued by it but its generator still ran on gasoline. We were still trying. It had proved to be endlessly fascinating, rewarding, and challenging, but we were definitely not there yet.

Needing a rest, a few weeks later, Pegi and I were together at a retreat in the desert, a place Larry had shown us, where he had often visited for relaxation and rejuvenation. Very early on the second day of our vacation, the phone rang in our room. It was an anxious call from Ben Johnson, telling me that a fire had destroyed the car. The sound of his voice told the whole story. Sitting in bed, I Googled the news and watched TV coverage of Lincvolt burning on my laptop.

The announcer did not know that Lincvolt had caught fire because it was left charging with an untested system. He was talking about me being a rock star and this being my warehouse, a much more interesting story, but I could clearly recognize the chrome and taillights of Lincvolt. Flames danced on the chrome as the plastic taillight lenses melted.

I couldn’t believe what had happened, but I had seen it with my own eyes. I was in shock. Pegi and I left the retreat and headed home immediately to see the damage firsthand. A terrible fire had ravaged the warehouse. For a while I was hard on myself. I had really let the car down. Now Lincvolt had the stigma of being an electric car that had burned, but the fire was not the fault of electric cars. It was our own fault for not being careful and following safe procedures. No one was there to monitor Lincvolt in case a problem developed, and she was left charging with an untested system. It was our fault, not the car’s. It could have easily been averted.

There was still a lot left in the warehouse that survived or only suffered a few paint ripples from the extreme heat, including Taylor Phelps’s 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse. That was November of 2010. It was a devastating loss and we were reeling from it. It was then that I realized the fire might have been a blessing in disguise. I learned that the insurance money was almost enough to rebuild the Continental completely, and with all of the new information we had gathered over the past three years and the people we had met, we could finally do it right.

• • •

MY SOUL MATE PEGI bought me a parts car, a 1958 Continental convertible with identical matching metal, as a birthday present to replace the melted and deformed parts of the original car’s body. After that, Roy Brizio named the car “Miss Pegi,” and we had a custom chrome plate engraved with MISS PEGI to replace the old Continental emblem that had melted into the original dashboard in the fire. Roy’s suggestion to name the car Miss Pegi was a very thoughtful and sensitive idea. He understood the connection between a guy’s car and his wife or girlfriend. Roy had probably learned that from many years of experience working with fanatical hot rod guys and people like myself.

Starting over, I called Bruce Falls at AVL. Bruce was a professional when it came to building series hybrids, a person I knew and respected. Bruce, too, saw that the future of transportation was electric. He had seen it long before we did and had made it his life’s work. When we talked, Bruce explained to me that none of the generator systems we had tried over the years were anywhere near big enough to maintain the giant Continental’s energy needs, so the car’s range would always have been extremely limited. He suggested a Ford Atkinson four-cylinder engine as a generator, the same flex-fuel engine used in the Ford Escape Hybrid. I was excited. Now we were finally going to be able to build the real thing.

• • •

WHEN WE ADDED the next-generation biofuel to our new generator system, we finally succeeded in creating the system we had been searching for. I had done a lot of research and found cellulosic ethanol, a fuel of the future being made at a pilot plant in Scotland, South Dakota, by POET. This second-generation biofuel, made domestically, provided a very large reduction in CO₂ emissions compared with gasoline. It did not have a negative effect on the world food supply. The biomass used for this fuel was corn stover, the waste of food crops, nonfood crops, and other waste. It was a sensible solution. Our world has an abundance of waste.

I kept reading, probing, and learning about biomass. Interestingly, speaking for the USA at a world conference on biofuels in 2005, Thomas Dorr, the undersecretary of the US Department of Agriculture for the Bush administration, had said: “In fact, not too many years down the road, once we get cellulosic ethanol up to speed, just about everything on a farm except the machinery, the buildings, and the proverbial squeal of the pig will be a potential energy source. From the sunlight glinting on the fields to the wind rippling through the trees, to the corn stover that today mostly rots in the field; tomorrow it will be powering our vehicles.”

Paul Wolfowitz, former leader of the World Bank Group and an early Bush administration proponent of the war on Iraq, added: “In the long term, the manufacture of ethanol from cellulose offers one of the greatest hopes. This technology, which is so far only developed on a pilot scale, uses new catalysts and enzymes to speed up natural processes. The advantage is that it does not rely on valuable crops. It can use waste products such as straw corn stalks or agriculture debris.”

The discovery that people connected to the Bush administration had been advocating cellulosic ethanol seven years before I knew it existed was a real eye-opener for me. I was surprised. It goes to show that the world is not black and white. The farther you look, the more you see.

With the help of Ford Motors, we had the motor specially set up in Detroit to run on one hundred percent cellulosic ethanol for our generator. Setting the engine to run on this specific fuel got a lot more energy out of it than the compromised E85 vehicles. They sacrificed energy to be able to also run on gasoline and E85. Both fuels suffered from this idea. Our generator did not. This biogenerator, coupled with a larger fuel tank, gave Lincvolt a range of well over four hundred miles. Because it was maximized for second-generation biofuel, the motor would barely run on normal gasoline at all. It didn’t want to anymore. Neither did I.

Although I had no interest in using gasoline myself, I did see the immediate need for a carburetion system that could recognize the type of fuel and adjust automatically, allowing several different fuels, including gasoline, to be used freely. I saw that as a key piece in the mass transition to renewable fuels, allowing people the freedom of choice they deserved.

Brizio Street Rods brought it all together. Roy Brizio organized the rebuild. We used my birthday gift from Pegi and repaired the fire damage to Lincvolt’s body at Camilleri’s Auto Works in Sacramento. Shavers Auto Interiors created a masterpiece. When the car went back to AVL for a last tune-up and calibration of the new electric drivetrain, Miss Pegi was born.

It was the end of 2012. During the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, President Obama’s support of electric vehicles became a political issue for his adversaries, who got most of their funding from the oil company lobbyists. They said uninformed and negative things about electric cars in general. They painted the president’s conviction as folly, a waste of time, something America was not ready for. Obama cars.

After Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast that year, the realization of global warming’s effects and the fears of more storms started to take hold. People in New England states actually started cutting down the beautiful, big trees around their houses in fear of the next superstorm, prompting a front-page news story in the New York Times.

Climate chaos continued to produce unprecedented tornadoes in Oklahoma, historic flooding in Europe, the US, and Canada, and record-breaking heat waves around the world. The predictions made by scientists of the world and Al Gore’s 2006 documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, were resonating.

Weather forecasters on television discussed the extreme conditions as proof that the worst winter on record was right now, but they stopped short of mentioning climate change and drawing a connection—the connection science had verified—and were followed by a commercial that was for a gas-burning, CO₂-spewing car. It wasn’t until 2014 that I saw a major television network fully acknowledge climate change and its impact. It was ABC.

On our journey across America we visited Utah, and in Canyonlands National Park we met inspiring and dedicated activist Daryl Hannah, who traveled with us on part of our journey. Daryl had been studying biofuels and carbon abuse for longer than I had, and had taken a similar path, with some of her own cars running alternatives to fossil fuels, to make an example of what could be done with the kinds of cars America loves; a Trans Am and an El Camino. She was interested in Canyonlands because oil companies were looking at that national treasure as an oil sands opportunity. After a few days of meeting people and learning about the history of the oil companies in the area, we traveled on, discussing the challenges and wondering about the solutions. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, all of us together, enjoying the beauty of Canyonlands, and continuing our dedication to preserving and protecting Mother Earth.

• • •

WHEN WE RETURNED to California, during post-trip maintenance by Bruce Ferrario at Four Star Automotive, something very weird happened. Bruce finished his work and washed her for the drive back to Brizio’s, but Miss Pegi would not start. Turning her key would result in a normal start but then her power would go dead. Click, click. CLICK. The first two clicks meant she was on. The third click meant she had turned herself off. It was like she changed her mind. When he finally got her going for the short trip back to Brizio’s, Miss Pegi stalled right on the road halfway there. This was highly unusual and totally unexplained. The next day, when we came into Brizio’s shop to see how she was, everything was fine. She was running perfectly.

After we drove to Southern California, Bruce Falls looked for the problem, but there was nothing obvious. He would have to see the car while it was exhibiting the problem, to locate and diagnose it. It was an unsolved mystery.

At that time, we changed fuels to straight cellulosic ethanol, rather than the E85 blend, and completed testing Miss Pegi on one hundred percent cellulosic ethanol, finding even more CO₂ emissions reductions compared to gasoline, and we had improved again. Miss Pegi had gotten even cleaner!

As a reborn E-Lincoln she was very fast and sure, handling the tight curves and mountain roads near the ranch incredibly well. She was as ready as we could make her for the fossil fuel–free journey to Washington and the final filming of segments of our movie. We were all in high spirits, anticipating a great finish, although that unsolved mystery was still there.

The first day of our gasoline-free trip across America to Washington got off to a late start and was uneventful. After staying overnight in Sacramento, about ninety miles from the ranch, we started up the long grade over the Sierras. I noticed that the battery-power level was falling as we climbed the Donner Pass into Truckee. Checking the generator, I saw that it was running, but when I looked to see how much power it was making, I saw zero. Miss Pegi was slowly running out of her precious reserve power.

I decided to conserve energy and travel slower on the shoulder until we reached the next exit. Less speed equals less energy used over the same distance. At that point, the California Highway Patrol began to assist, traveling behind us with their blinkers on. A few miles later at the next exit, we pulled off and stopped. Someone recognized me. A small crowd gathered and soon cameras were out and everyone was taking pictures of Miss Pegi, the highway patrolman, and the rocker.

I called Bruce Falls and told him what had happened with the generator. He said we should reboot the car by turning it off and on and then try again. We did. The generator came on and started charging, but as soon as I started to drive, Miss Pegi’s batteries started to lose charge. The highway patrol escorted us to headquarters to park the car in a secure place and regroup. No one wanted to leave Miss Pegi by the side of the road.

I noticed that the generator would charge the batteries as long as the car was not moving. I ran Miss Pegi’s generator in the highway patrol lot for a few minutes and we recharged the batteries while she rested, making enough power to easily reach the summit and then glide down to Reno, easily recharging the batteries with regenerative braking on the long decline.

The highway patrol had been very helpful. There were many more cameras. As I stood in the lot, a couple of patrolmen and -women approached and we took a few more pictures, one with a little guitar that I signed before we headed out for Nevada. As we left, Miss Pegi seemed to be enjoying all the attention.

We arrived in Reno and checked in at a big casino hotel. Slot machines rang out as stale air settled on the giant gaming-hall floor. Folks shuffled in and out, working people getting a break and enjoying their time off. We had parked outside across the street at an electric car–charging station provided by the hotel. From my room on the fifth floor I could see Miss Pegi parked in the lot beside a new Tesla Model S sedan. Times were changing.

I had arranged for Bruce Falls to ship us a data recorder. A data recorder connects to the car’s computer and records everything the car does. The next morning we would connect the data recorder, capture the generator event as it happened, and email the data back to Bruce at AVL for analysis. Miss Pegi Continental was really becoming a twenty-first-century car!

In the morning, we met four ladies from Petaluma who were traveling in the Tesla. We took a few pictures with them and interviewed them for the film. They were characters, traveling in their electric car to go gambling in Tahoe. Miss Pegi enjoyed showing up the Tesla, while the Tesla pretended not to notice. We laughed a lot about that.

When we connected the data recorder and took off to the interstate, climbing back toward Truckee, the generator malfunctioned right away, running but not charging the batteries. This time we captured the data and sent it back to Bruce, who analyzed it and discovered that the fuel pump was not working correctly and that the motor was starving for fuel.

It was all making sense.

Miss Pegi was once again the center of attention.

Roy Brizio had found Jerry Price for us. Jerry verified that the fuel pump in Miss Pegi was completely trashed, crammed with debris and broken beyond repair. It turned out that my vintage pumps at Feelgood’s had delivered contaminated fuel, the cause of Miss Pegi’s original wound. My pumps were installed incorrectly.

It was Sunday, and when the service department at Jones West Ford, Reno’s biggest Ford dealer, couldn’t locate the part, they gave us a used Ford Escape Hybrid to remove the fuel pump from in order to replace our broken one. The good folks at that Ford dealership had been extremely helpful and generous.

After the repair was done at Jerry’s, we went to Jones West Ford and had pictures taken with the courteous staff. Miss Pegi enjoyed her photo shoot there immensely with the staff all taking pictures around her striking beauty, her chrome shining in the morning sun.

Then we were back on the road and all was well again, although we had lost a few days. Soon we were out of Nevada and well into Idaho, but we were not yet out of the woods. According to Bruce Falls, we may have done more unseen damage. He was still worried that running Miss Pegi while she was starved for fuel had overheated and possibly damaged her. That stuck in the back of my mind.

• • •

AMID ALL THE NUMBERS and emissions calculations there was something new that I found hard to explain. I was starting to have a relationship with Miss Pegi. Every morning I would polish and clean her beautiful metal and chrome lines, caressing her classic American Metal Dream shapes with soft cloths. She was truly one of a kind, beautiful in form and function, performing flawlessly in her completely new way, a truly magnificent machine. And she was definitely feminine. She loved attention and would do things to get it. Having a lot of guys standing around trying to figure out why she would not do something seemed like it was fun for her. She was unpredictable and predictable at the same time. If you did not do the right thing, she would always let you know.

It felt so good to be on the road again with Miss Pegi in her element, the open highway, cruising along in the quiet natural splendor. The countryside was beautiful, especially Montana’s majestic mountain ranges, and we continued onward to the great prairies, crossing rivers, passing peaceful serene lakes and green-carpet meadows. Turning north toward Alberta, we crossed the international border the next day. The enchanting scenery and vastness of North America was a feast for our eyes. We savored and captured some awesome traveling shots as the miles rolled by.

Every morning I would get up to clean and polish her beautiful rims, accenting her graceful metal lines, making sure Miss Pegi was ready for the road again and looking good. Those were my peaceful times, meditative morning beginnings that I really enjoyed as I rubbed off the insects and grime that we had accumulated over the miles.

Grating on my mind was the CO₂ of all of the cars and trucks we saw every single day. I knew it was a vast amount, and I knew trying to change that would not be easy. Not easy for anyone. We had a habit. I thought about it long and hard. Miss Pegi had a convincing message. She proved you didn’t need to use fossil fuel to move from place to place. Nothing spoke like the presence of the car. She existed.

• • •

LOOMING ON THE HORIZON was an unknown. We had heard about it: the Highway of Death. That was the name the locals had given to Highway 63, which ran north from Edmonton to Fort McMurray, the nearest Alberta town to some of the dirtiest oil on planet Earth. Oil from there polluted so badly that it made Alberta equal to the country of Switzerland in CO₂ emissions.

Alberta was naturally beautiful, a Canadian jewel, but when we rode on the Highway of Death we found that it had earned its name by being an extremely dangerous two-lane road often occupied by giant double-wide loads that traveled in both directions while busily supplying the oil industry. When these trucks met on the road it was unbelievable that they almost always missed one another.

Along with the giant double-wides, hundreds of fast-moving, newly purchased pickup trucks owned by the oil workers flew by, passing whenever they could. Their drivers had toiled long hours for wages to take or send money back home to their families, alongside temporary foreign workers who stayed in camps of dwellings made out of storage containers. They were the hard workers.

For me, it was an unsettling journey. The fight against CO₂ abuse was turning personal. In my heart I knew that CO₂ emissions must be scaled back, way back, and social awareness of this danger to the earth was a key to reversing the trend of abuse. I also knew that many hardworking people depended on this dirty, oil-harvesting activity as their source of livelihood. If I fought back on CO₂ and oil companies, I was directly hurting these working people. That bothered me. I struggled to find a balance with it.

I respected them but was compelled to go against those hard workers because they were digging us into a hole that future generations would have tremendous trouble climbing out of. I am talking about my own grandchildren.

• • •

CO2 EMISSIONS are disproportionately large in tar sands extractions, the most inefficient and wasteful way to harvest fossil fuel on the planet. It is this oil that will flow through the Keystone XL pipeline if it is approved by President Obama. A new study in the USA concluded that the pipeline would not add to the CO₂ emissions meaningfully, reducing pressure on the president to make a decision that might be unpopular with oil interests. Anyone with reasoning power could see that this study was not valid. Why would the oil companies build anything that was not going to increase the flow of oil? I can’t ignore the fact that it was being built to carry the dirtiest oil on the planet—oil with three times the carbon emissions of conventional oil—to the world market through a tax-free zone in Texas, virtually ensuring none of the wealth from it went to America except for the few temporary jobs to build it. Such misleading information is common in a corporate government overrun with oil lobbies. And then there’s climate change to consider. This was an opportunity for the leader of the free world to stand and deliver. It was a real world-history moment.

Once we safely arrived in Fort McMurray, we could smell petroleum in the air and taste it in our throats. It was in our eyes and in our nostrils even though we were still some twenty-five miles away from the nearest tar sands site, which happened to be the only site open to the public. All of the other ones in the area were verboten. Those roads just disappeared into Alberta’s pristine boreal forests on their way to what could only be described as a series of ugly scars on the history of Canada, a lasting testimony to what men blinded by quick money will do.

Fort McMurray had boomtown features: exceptionally high-priced food, bars and prostitutes, money and drugs. The most recent years had seen huge growth, which caused traffic jams for miles. Odd for a rural town. I wondered how the original residents felt. Mixed feelings, I imagined.

We had hired a helicopter to film Miss Pegi from the sky as she traveled around the only tar sands development operation that we could get access to. The pilots were very nice folks who did a wonderful job for us. They usually worked for the oil companies, and went back to doing that as soon as we left.

As Miss Pegi approached the oil sands operations site on the perimeter road, we passed the many poisonous tailings ponds (some as large as lakes) that surround each development area. Those ponds were where the oil companies stored the poisonous water left over from the process of extracting oil from the sands. The water was originally from the river but now it was poison. The flawed idea was that the poison in the tailings ponds would be absorbed into the land and somehow go away. Air cannons were firing constantly to stop wildlife from entering the poisonous water and killing themselves. When I noticed metal scarecrows installed in the toxic lakes to further discourage the wildlife from entering, I was reminded of a story a First Nations woman had told me the previous day about a family of bears that tried to swim across a tailings pond, only to die a few hundred feet from shore.

There were 182 square kilometers of toxic and deadly tailings ponds already in Alberta. I had learned that many of the tailings ponds from the other operations sites were located close to the Athabasca River and were silently leaching into its freshwater. The danger of one of these tailings ponds breeching and filling into the river was unspeakable. Everyone knew it could happen. Two months after my visit, the first one did.

Ancient Canadian treaties, now broken, gave the local First Nations peoples the right to hunt and fish in these lands to sustain their life. Native descendants were now dying of cancer. The great Athabasca River was polluted, enough to make the fish the First Nations people used to eat deformed and inedible, and the water they once drank undrinkable. According to the First Nations peoples, animals that used to be their food were now all too sick to eat.

The oil companies had fought long and hard to avoid the blame for this injustice, but science and discovery had proven their guilt. The giant oil interests continued to fight on with their vast resources, contending that they were not responsible for the devastation they caused. Doctors who identified rare cancers among First Nations peoples living near the area were discredited with false stories that were later debunked. But the damage had been done to the physicians’ reputations. Some physicians were hesitant to treat victims of diseases connected to the industry as the oil companies intimidation and fear spread.

First Nations peoples were dying of cancer at elevated rates. The Edmonton Journal and CBC reported that many of the physicians’ and scientists’ stories were true, and quoted notable groups such as Queen’s University in Kingston and Environment Canada, who in a joint study looked at core samples from six lakes within ninety kilometers of the oil sands. The authors focused on cancer-causing chemicals that are released when things are burned. They can occur naturally, but burning petroleum leaves a unique fingerprint, so the scientists were able to trace the source: the Alberta tar sands development. The Alberta Cancer Board found elevated rates of rare malignancies 280 kilometers north of Fort McMurray.

Miss Pegi floated silently through it all, shining in the sun, her ultimate power source.

Daryl Hannah joined us again, bringing information about the First Nations peoples and the impact of the tar sands on their community and land. She traveled with us and interviewed some of the First Nations people to help us gain another perspective for the film. It was then that we realized that the best way to slow the reckless oil sands CO₂-intensive development in Alberta was to tell people about the ancient treaties between Canada and the First Nations. Canadians needed to be aware of the terrible secret that these historic and binding documents, part of Canada’s constitution, were being broken by their government.

We met with the local tribes and chiefs and vowed to do a series of concerts across Canada called “Honour the Treaties,” to raise awareness and funds for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation legal defense as they took on the oil companies and the Canadian government, a government currently led by a science denier and treaty breaker, Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

After a few more days in Alberta, we left the area and journeyed southeast across the border toward Washington, DC. I had an appointment there to speak to the National Farmers Union about biofuels. I knew I would have a lot to say about Fort McMurray oil sands and the coming end of the fossil fuel age, and I thought about it all the way down there.

I was polishing away early one morning in a motel parking lot, making Miss Pegi shine in the sun. A pile of rags was growing on the asphalt. Miss Pegi’s chrome was done and the sun was fully up. I could feel the heat. Then I was on her rear fins, working and thinking that, on our present course, by 2050 the world would use seventeen terawatts more energy than it is using now. That’s twice as much as today. We would have to look to the sun for energy, master-storing it and converting it to electricity, and using it to power civilization.

As I scrubbed Miss Pegi’s windshield clean of bugs and dirt, I remembered an article in the International Herald Tribune headlined “Polar Thaw Opens Shortcut for Russian Gas,” about one of the first energy projects to take advantage of the thawing in the Arctic. Global warming had melted enough Arctic ice to open up new direct polar routes to ship natural gas from Russia to China to create more CO₂! “If we don’t sell them the fuel, someone else will,” a Russian Novatek spokesman had said with a shrug, ending the article.

Working on her driver’s window, I started making plans. In the film we were making, activists like Daryl would have a chance to speak, and folks who disagreed would have a chance as well, just to keep it real and interesting with opposing points of view represented, kind of like responsible journalism used to be before corporate sponsors chose the news and controlled the topics.

Looking through her passenger window as I cleaned and polished it, I saw Miss Pegi’s beautiful dashboard and instrument panel, her repurposed gauges illustrating electric energy levels. I marveled at how much less maintenance electric cars would need with their simple technology and reduced number of parts; no transmissions to adjust, no manual brakes to wear out, less to pay to gasoline stations. That servicing would all disappear with a future of bioelectric transportation.

Polishing the chrome above where her old tailpipe used to be, I could vividly remember the smell and soot that stained the ground whenever I started her up, leaving her very tangible carbon footprint behind. As I polished away, I was getting intense, obsessing on ideas and starting to get into a big loop of repetition, feeling a bit angry about how hard it was for responsible people to change their lives and make their own choices. Why were today’s cars not smart enough to run on different fuels like Henry Ford’s Model T was? Why couldn’t they analyze the fuel that was on board and adjust carburetion for that fuel with twenty-first-century sensors and computers? People need freedom to choose at the pump.

I got a new rag and dipped it in the chrome polish.

I was polishing feverishly, almost removing the chrome as I obsessively tackled it, thinking to myself: If you don’t use a fossil fuel in your car or truck today, the warranty will be invalidated. There was one exception; flex-fuel (E85) vehicles, but it was practically impossible to find flex fuel on the freeway system. A Big Oil monopoly existed on the federal interstate system. Where was freedom of choice? Why couldn’t I buy an alternative fuel on the interstate? Where was the legislation to make a clean alternative available at all of those service areas along the federal highway system?

I did need to take a break from this thinking.

I was pleading to imaginary car dealers, “Please, someone sell me a great new car.”

Suppose I could buy a new car capable of burning different fuels that sent an email to the owner every month to say how it was doing: reporting CO₂ emissions for the month based on the fuel it was using and driver habits and what service it needed. Why not send that email to the carbon tax division of the Energy Department, too? Tax CO₂ emissions. Reward conservation. Charge for abuse. There are easy ways to determine whether the driver is being (a) responsible, (b) very responsible, or (c) abusive. Motivate drivers to use cleaner fuels and save the planet for our grandchildren with capitalism.

I was sure freedom lovers would fight that idea.

Hey! Was I running for office? What was I thinking? Rub, rub, polish, polish. That bumper was looking tremendous! There is nothing like polished chrome. A diverse fuel market, carbon taxes, and rewards for responsible driving could maybe pay for infrastructure repairs and rebuild American roads, which would employ hundreds of thousands while helping to save the planet.

It was capitalism! (If I didn’t want to make waves, I didn’t really have to tell anybody about this. I could just think it to myself, couldn’t I? Of course not.) I was talking like a socialist or something. There were many bad words to describe my thinking. I should have just turned myself in.

Folks may think that idea will never work, but it already has been accepted by more than two dozen of the nation’s biggest corporations, including the five major oil companies! They are planning their future growth on the expectation that the government will force them to pay a price for carbon pollution. They see it coming. Coca-Cola recently announced that global warming was hurting the company’s bottom line because of a lack of water in some countries. Hurting the bottom line? Could carbon abuse be un-American?

I stood up and looked at my work. Miss Pegi was radiating beauty in the morning sunlight, practically blinding me with the brilliance of her chrome and eggshell paint. What a beauty she was, inside and out. I could have this forever. Forever? What did that mean? What would it look like?

So there I was again, thinking about my grandchildren.

I wondered, Am I worrying too much? Am I too concerned about CO₂ and global warming? I didn’t think so.

• • •

TRAVELING ALONG THE HIGHWAY, toward Washington, DC, on a beautiful day with the top down, I decided to try driving faster, maybe cruise at seventy-five miles per hour like many of the other cars. Miss Pegi did not have to be slow, although I usually liked to travel about sixty because that uses around half of the fuel of seventy-five miles per hour and produces about half of the CO₂. Tracking these numbers was fun for me, but I needed to be careful not to go too far and bore the hell out of everyone. What a great conversationalist I was turning into.

Miss Pegi rode like a dream. It was like she always wanted to be going that speed. Seventy-five miles per hour! She was built for this. She was clean! I was grooving along, driving on future fuel and being responsible. This was cool!

As I traveled, I thought about the things I would say to the National Farmers Union in Washington. As an advocate for renewable fuel, I was scheduled to talk about biofuels and the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) in a positive light. The standards were coming up for a vote and oil interests wanted them to go away and for the amount of ethanol used as an octane booster in gasoline to be reduced or eliminated. Big Oil’s solution to octane boosting was a cancer-causing chemical that they own themselves. They like that better. They wanted to shut the door on biofuels.

Driving along at seventy-five miles per hour, like there was no tomorrow, I smelled fuel. Looking at the dashboard instruments I saw that the generator had stopped and was automatically trying to restart. I realized Miss Pegi was out of fuel. I slowed her down to save energy and cruised to the next gasoline station on electric power alone. She had no problem reaching it. She still had about forty to forty-five miles’ range left. Going fast had quickly charged her generator to the maximum so I had full electric range.

It was a hot afternoon and we had electric power to spare as we silently pulled into the shade next to the only gas station in Reliance, South Dakota, and filled up with some cellulosic ethanol we carried in the chase vehicle. We had started calling it “Freedom Fuel.” The owner of the station, a man named Lowell, came over and was watching us. The guys got out their cameras. We started to talk, and told Lowell what we were doing, how clean Freedom Fuel was, and why we were using it instead of gasoline. Lowell said that all the farmers in the area would use Freedom Fuel if they could, but there was no place to get it. We talked about that unavailability for a while, about America’s reliance on fossil fuels and no choice available for alternatives at the fuel stations along all the highways. It was a good talk, and we felt that Lowell would be selling and using clean renewable Freedom Fuel if and when he could. We shook hands and drove away, with Lowell standing by his gas station listening to the sound of an electric car quietly pulling away into the future.

Going slower again, about sixty-two, I was watching the fuel gauge like a hawk, but of course it didn’t matter. It had never worked right and still wasn’t. How had we missed that? I had to calculate miles and speed in my head as we traveled along to come up with an approximate amount of fuel remaining in the tank. When we were going seventy-five miles per hour, twice as much fuel was required compared to sixty miles per hour, and I had miscalculated that badly. Maybe I was having too much fun! I made a note to get that gauge fixed as soon as we got back home to Brizio’s.

The next morning I was up polishing Miss Pegi’s rims in the sun. Everyone commented on how beautiful they were, simple yet elegant stainless steel with the name LINCVOLT emblazoned on each one. Soon we were on our way again, pulling onto the road, rolling along in a beautiful silence with the wind blowing through our hair and the top down. That day we met a farming family living in Iowa with a cornfield in their backyard and talked to the farmer and his wife for a while about the weather, filming. Suddenly the Lincvolt movie was all about climate change. His wife was looking out on the field behind their home.

“Things have changed so much I don’t know why people don’t see it,” she said, looking off into the distance, kind of talking to herself as well as us. “It has never been like this in all of our years.”

Farmers experience the effects of climate change on a daily basis more vividly than anyone else. They are on the front lines. Around the world, disappearing topsoil and unsustainable farming methods create the largest amounts of displaced CO₂ of all the known factors, including transportation. Living soil is the best carbon sink we have, and chemical fertilizers are destroying it. A carbon sink is anything that absorbs more carbon than it releases. It’s the balance of nature. Science is sometimes inconvenient.

Later, sitting at a rest area with the generator on, I heard a weird sound under the car. It sounded like something metal was banging around in the exhaust system. I called Roy. The next town we hit, we stopped to get our muffler replaced by a farmer and car guy Roy had contacted. We found his place, got Miss Pegi in his barn, and put her on a lift. When he saw how she was built, with all of the custom work underneath, he called a friend who owned a real muffler shop and made arrangements for us to go there. When we arrived, we found we had to get a new catalytic converter. By running on fumes after I ran out of fuel, we had burned a hole the size of a golf ball in Miss Pegi’s catalytic converter. That was hot. A piece of the converter had blown through and was caught in the muffler, rattling around. That’s what we had heard in the rest area.

When we called Bruce Falls to report on the converter, he repeated that he was worried there might still be more damage. Things were fine now, though, so we hit the road in the afternoon, Miss Pegi gliding like a dream on a mellow two-lane blacktop through the heartland.

Thinking about what I would say to the National Farmers Union in Washington, as I drove Miss Pegi east, suddenly it dawned on me that I was not Jimmy Stewart. This was not Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and probably no one would listen to me there once I started talking about the climate. I was becoming too used to second-guessing myself.

I sat in a long line of cars outside of the capital. A gentle rain had started to fall and the roadway was shining like a mirror, reflecting the shapes of the thousands of vehicles around me. I pondered how hard it would be to get someone to pay attention to CO₂ or second-generation biomass fuel. I made a promise to myself to speak anyway, so I could sleep at night knowing I had done everything I could. I had used my voice.

Eventually we found ourselves on a road that ran along the Potomac River. There were no buildings, just a line of pavement through an incredibly green wonderland. The rain had stopped and we were almost at our Washington hotel, cruising Miss Pegi through this endless verdant passageway. Everything was green. The after-rain mist was still hanging in the air. Several miles of this euphoric living green fantasy passed before there was a slight turn toward tall buildings. I saw a traffic light ahead.

At this point, I heard CLICK, and Miss Pegi’s motor lost all its power! The sound stayed about the same, but there was no power to accelerate. I slowly eased Miss Pegi’s massive form toward the shoulder, where she stopped in a perfect position just off the road. What could have happened? I remembered the unsolved mystery.

This was disconcerting, to be sure. I turned off the key, waited about a half minute, and then turned it back on, rebooting Miss Pegi like a computer. She liked that. Click-click, that familiar sound. Soon we were back on the street heading for the hotel, and I was really wondering what the heck was going on with Miss Pegi. Luckily, Bruce Falls was on his way. He was coming to Washington to help me introduce the concept of a Bio-Electric Transportation Model. We had an appointment with Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, and his staff. It was a valuable opportunity to get some input from them.

That night, outside the hotel, Bruce was working on Miss Pegi right where we had parked. The mystery problem had continued haunting us. It was consistent. Bruce said those relays clicking were protecting us from a threatening condition. He had to learn what that condition was. We had a scent. We were tracking.

Our meeting with Senator Reid and his staff went well. We had a chance to present our concepts and ask questions about barriers to implementation that we might expect. The senator and his staff were very helpful in directing us toward solutions to some of the legislative challenges that were surely before us, roadblocks to change. We had a second staff meeting in the Capitol the next day with our fuel supplier, POET Ethanol, an important potential partner in the Bio-Electric Transportation Model.

The next day our meeting with the National Farmers Union was scheduled, and we had always said that Lincvolt would be there. We were ready with our message. I had written it out:

There is no silver bullet to replace fossil fuel. It will take versatile combined systems and it can already happen now. With the Bio-Electric Transportation Model, electricity and biofuels born from the sun can ultimately become the dominant source of transportation energy, replacing fossil fuel. The economics of standardized car batteries being leased by the car manufacturers, then the owners, and then to public utilities after they are too depleted to function in cars, could drastically lower the cost of electric cars and fully extend a car battery’s useful life. The leasing model greatly reduces the cost of new electric cars by removing the cost of expensive battery purchase, up to $10,000 in cost reduction. Utility Electric power will be generated by many different means in the future, moving toward solar and renewable, and legislation is already in place to mandate battery storage for utility companies to enable renewable energy use. That is the versatility and freedom electricity enables.

For daily transportation, electric power and biofuels working together can make a substantial difference. Dramatically less liquid fuel is used by long-range bioelectric cars compared to standard fossil fuel cars because of the design of a series hybrid. The biogenerator is just there for rare long trips and emergencies outside of the normal daily commute average (thirty-three miles), a range that is completely covered by an overnight charge. That’s the model Lincvolt exemplifies.

At the Washington park, located near the Capitol, where I was speaking, the National Farmers Union was interested in seeing Miss Pegi, a bioelectric car that traveled across the country without using any gasoline. It was to be a big moment for Miss Pegi, but she had other ideas. She was demonstrating that unpredictability that we had come to know.

When the time came for me to speak, Miss Pegi was still back at the hotel on the side of the road with Bruce, being uncooperative. She always seemed to miss the last chapter of the plan, her big moment. I had grown to accept her for the way she was.

I spoke to the National Farmers Union about the clear choice between dirty fuel and clean fuel, but not from my notes. I shared my experience visiting Fort McMurray’s tar sands projects, referring to them as a wasteland similar to Hiroshima. There happened to be a Canadian minister of the environment in Washington that same day, touting how good the tar sands development was for the future. Our stories clashed and the oil interests began trying to discredit me and bury me any way they could. In Fort McMurray, radio stations banned my music. Conservative oil supporters broke out all of their anger. Although the name Fort McMurray is synonymous with tar sands development in the area, pictures of a beautiful Fort McMurray were shown on TV and in the press, intending to prove that it did not look like Hiroshima or a wasteland, but ultimately only proving that they did not understand a metaphor. A website, neilyounglies.ca, was started.

The desperate moves of the oil interests were counterproductive to their goals. It made folks in Canada aware that there was a real issue with the tar sands and CO₂, and it became a topic of conversation across Canada. That was just what the government and Big Oil didn’t want. The more they talked me down for not knowing what I was talking about, the more people read what I said, and it made it clear to a great many that some important facts were on our side.

Right after the National Farmers Union event, Miss Pegi started to run perfectly again. Turning the key now started the car, just as it was supposed to. All good. Again behaving perfectly as she had all across America and up into Canada.

It was foggy and drizzling a few days later when we arrived in New York City to stay at the Carlyle, a great old hotel in Manhattan with a parking garage below it. After a lot of maneuvering in close proximity to other cars, we parked Miss Pegi there, safely out of the rain and wind, ready to go in the morning to shoot her two last big scenes with media celebrities Bill O’Reilly and Stephen Colbert for the Lincvolt movie. We were all very excited about both Colbert and O’Reilly, knowing both of their strong personalities and viewpoints would add a lot to our story.

Sleeping well, we were up with the sun. After a hearty “Larry Johnson breakfast” at our favorite nearby restaurant, it was time to go. The garage was quiet and the attendant was very impressed with Miss Pegi, having watched over her for quite a few hours. When we explained that she was an electric car, he was fascinated and could not wait to see her moving. We planned our routes carefully as we mounted a camera inside on the dashboard for the shoot. We had all the right permits to get to Wall Street.

I got in the driver’s seat and turned the key. Click Click . . . CLICK. She was doing it again. It was uncanny. She was not cooperating, refusing to stay powered up. I remembered what Bruce, who had already returned to California, told me.

“The car has sensed a condition that could cause problems. It is protecting us.”

I tried rebooting. On the fourth try, she stayed on. I was very nervous about going out on the street, not wanting to get in trouble stalling in New York traffic, especially with all the pushback press we were getting about what I had said in Washington.

Exposure had kept growing, and I had requests to do interviews and radio shows, which we turned down, waiting for when I went to Canada with the Honour the Treaties tour. We really didn’t want to have video taken of Miss Pegi in trouble in Manhattan appearing in the media at that time. That would have made some of the Big Oil interests very happy and would have been extremely damaging for our message. We didn’t want that. There was no choice. We had to cancel our big interviews. It was not a good day for us.

Back in the garage a little later, I tried starting her again, and she was fine. Obviously we had to get Miss Pegi out of New York City somehow. We decided to drive her to New Jersey, load her onto her mobile garage truck, and transport her back to Bruce at AVL for a complete check to solve the issue once and for all. That was a risky thing to do, but she was now acting fine. We decided to go for it, but it turned out that there was something we had missed, a danger we had not considered.

The trip through midtown New York was fine at first with the taxis and traffic all around us. We made our way down the avenues. What a great city. It was my first time with Miss Pegi Continental in New York and it was exhilarating. Once again the center of attention and enjoying it very much, Miss Pegi was in her element, right at home. Traffic gave her a lot of room on the avenues, seeming to appreciate the beautiful old Continental. We turned on a crosstown street, and less than halfway down the block, she clicked off and stalled. I coasted her to the side of the street and luckily we did not hold up traffic. My heart was racing. Turning her key off and waiting a half minute, I tried to reboot the computer again. It worked. She liked it.

We were rolling again and I was a nervous wreck. Miss Pegi stalled two more times in heavy traffic on the way across town. We were on the edge. She seemed to not know whether she had a problem or not. Finally, she settled down and we went a long way with no more incidents. I was just starting to relax when I saw it. Something I had forgotten about completely and now was on my way directly into.

Trapped, we were slowly moving toward the entrance in heavy traffic and we had to go in. There was no way out of the flow. It was a done deal. We had to go in. Miss Pegi was already committed. I thought about all of the things that could have gone wrong to this point and this was the worst thing I could imagine. What if we stalled in the tunnel? What could attract more attention than that? I am sure my knuckles were cold white as I held the wheel, and we finally entered, lights shining on the walls as we slowly passed by. With every bump I wondered if she would stop. I was almost praying for a miracle. Just let Miss Pegi get through this tunnel one time. Please avoid stalling and getting national press. That would be bad for everything we are doing. The tunnel went on and on. Traffic was slow. How could I have missed seeing this coming? I thought of scenarios to myself: What if I’m between two buses and I have to stop? That will be pretty safe with one big bus behind us. As I thought of many other worse scenarios, I looked ahead for a light, a reflection of sunlight on the wall, any sign that the tunnel was ending. By then I was just hanging on, actually praying for a miracle. I saw the light. Miss Pegi finally had made it, emerging out into the bright sunshine.

The Secaucus Holiday Inn, where Miss Pegi’s mobile garage truck was parked, was only a couple of miles away. She headed right for it and up the ramp into her safe spot. Secure at last! A one-of-a-kind prototype vehicle of this kind needed a safe home on the road for maintenance and security, and I was never more thankful for Miss Pegi’s mobile garage than I was that day.

As I sat there composing myself, gathering my things from the front seat and console, I thought what a great experience the trip had been—all of the people, the problems we overcame, the scenery and beauty of North America—and I felt good. Then I looked at the dashboard one more time. The keys were hanging there in the ignition. The car was like a drug. I wanted more. I wanted to try the key again. I could still drive back to California! What would happen? I turned the key.

Click Click. CLICK. No go. I tried a few more times. Nope. She was not staying on. Each time she just said no. She had given up. We had to find the problem now. It was up to us to figure out what was haunting this car. It was our time to solve this and she was going to go back to the right place: AVL and Bruce Falls, where we could find it once and for all.

After we loaded her into the garage and locked her down with straps, someone showed me a magazine with a picture of a highway patrolman and me. Miss Pegi was behind us on the side of the road, looking good. The story was all about our breakdown back in California. There was no mention of driving across the country free of fossil fuels.

We still had a lot of work left to do to spread the word, what we had accomplished and why.

As for Miss Pegi’s mystery, we would find out the answer.

It was water.

There was a small hole where some outside moisture made its way inside the battery pack from the windshield cowling. Just a small opening, but any amount of moisture in her battery compartment would trip her sensors and make her shut down to protect her passengers. The problem had always happened after a rainy trip or a wash. Moisture would slowly make its way through the small opening and into the battery compartment. Water and electricity don’t mix.

I think she was grateful. She was a one-of-a-kind prototype doing what she had been designed to do, protecting herself from malfunction and keeping her passengers safe. Miss Pegi was just doing her job. It occurred to me that that was all she had ever done.

After going back to Orange County and getting into the car again, ready for the road, I drove home on Highway 101 through a torrential rainstorm and we had no problems. What a ride! I loved every minute of it; even the part where the windshield wipers stopped working. Miss Pegi was not done with me yet. We continued north with the rain falling intermittently and the wind blowing beads of water off the windshield.

• • •

WHEN WE VISITED CANADA AGAIN, supporting First Nations people with the Honour the Treaties tour, raising both legal defense money and awareness, we played a part in bringing light to the situation in Canada. Environmental abuse in the name of commerce had been slipping by Canadians unnoticed under the careful stewardship of the oil companies and the Canadian government.

On the last night of the Honour the Treaties tour, a young man stood protesting against me, holding his NEIL YOUNG LIES sign. Never shy about asking questions, my friend Snowbear walked up to the guy and asked, “What lies?”

“Well, that electric car for one,” said the young Canadian. “He never drove across the country in an electric car with no gasoline.”

On February 12, just three weeks after the Honour the Treaties tour ended in Calgary, Royal Dutch Shell PLC told regulators it was halting work on its mine in Northern Alberta’s oil sands and that it had no idea when it would revive the blueprints. To us this was welcome news, a battle won. First Nations treaties protected the native people, but they also protected the planet. We had maintained that Canada had to honor the treaties and keep her word.

As of this writing, President Obama has not revealed his final judgment on the Keystone XL pipeline, but oil interests are reasonably sure he will back them, and environmentalists are worried. The Keystone XL pipeline approval would enable strong pressure on Canada to break her ancient treaties and proceed with tar sands expansion. The jury is still out for me about what the president’s decision will be, but it will be his defining moment, the moment his legacy will be built on.

• • •

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, a boy growing up in Omemee with my family and my dog, the seasons came and went with rhythm, like clockwork. I have seen the changes over the years. Things are not the same now. They are losing the beat. I am doing what I can to hold on to it, preserve it. I didn’t know the damage I was doing with my cars, neither did anyone else, but now I do. I had my love relationship with big gas-guzzling cars for a lifetime, yet even I can see the writing on the wall. I am listening to the heartbeat of the earth.

Global warming is a threat like no other, slow-moving and deadly. Miss Pegi needs all the help she can get. This is the beginning of the end for the fossil fuel age. We have a long way to go, but we’re going to make it. Henry Ford had wanted to build both electric cars and cars powered by American farmers. That was a dream he started. I am still living that dream, behind the wheel of the unpredictable Miss Pegi, on the Road to Tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, a big rain had just brought welcome relief and green to California’s drought-ravaged landscape. I was driving silently through the forest with the top down, listening to some beautiful-sounding classical music. As we broke out of the redwoods and into open farmland, I felt good.

Heading into the sun, I was thankful to be alive and on my way home.