Professor Andy Frank has a question for you:
What if there were a full-size sedan or SUV that performed like a sports car, cut gasoline consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent, burned no fuel at all for the first sixty, eighty, or hundred miles—and cost about the same as a regular car?
“Everyone would want that car,” Frank says with a laugh. “People would go crazy for it. It would save them so much money. It would save us from oil dependence. It would go such a long way toward saving us, while preserving our way of life.”
Sounds like a very compelling vision for a car of the future, perhaps something to shoot for in the next ten or twenty years—except, it is not a vision. The car is sitting in Frank’s garage right now, or it is parked at his university, or tooling around the campus. One such car was even hidden somewhere in the bowels of General Motors years ago, after the company hired Frank to build a prototype, then made the stunning results disappear. Indeed, Andy Frank, a legend among designers of alternative-energy vehicles, has been building such cars for twenty years, starting when he was fifty-eight. He’s been battling a recalcitrant industry and confused policy makers to bring the cars into the mainstream ever since.
Frank invented and patented the plug-in hybrid—a vehicle with both electric and gas power sources that can also be plugged into a standard electrical outlet to get those sixty or more gas-free miles. His concept, quite simply, can help save the country and the world from oil dependence, skyrocketing energy costs, and environmental ruin. “It will happen,” he says with surprising serenity, given his long years of frustration. “It will happen because the price at the gas pump will finally make it happen.”
At his warehouse and lab at the University of California–Davis, the professor of engineering and his students take inefficient Detroit iron and turn it into green miracles—vehicles powered by big electric motors and small, gas-sipping engines the size of a motorcycle’s, which nevertheless outperform the originals. His years as a teenage hot-rodder show in his insistence on not sacrificing performance for efficiency: His modified sport utility vehicle can get zero to sixty in ten seconds, three seconds faster than when it left the factory floor. Yet the cost of operating his customized cars would be about the same as a regular vehicle’s gasoline costs—if it were still 1978, that is, and gas still cost seventy cents a gallon. That’s what comparatively cheap electric power and using hardly any gas can accomplish: Frank’s cars can cover so much more distance than a standard car on the same amount of gasoline that it’s as if his fuel cost seventy cents a gallon.
Frank’s plug-in hybrids are models of efficiency, from their dearth of moving parts to their onboard computers to the regenerative brakes that make electricity as the car stops rather than wasting energy through friction and heat. His revolutionary design for a continuously variable transmission that merges the electric and internal combustion power into a seamless drive train has only twelve moving parts; the standard Detroit automatic transmission has 700. The plug and a beefy battery pack tucked under the floorboards separate Frank’s cars from standard hybrids available to consumers as of 2009, such as the wildly popular Toyota Prius. The Prius improved efficiency by using both gas and electric motors; it got forty-seven miles per gallon, making it the most fuel-efficient mass-produced car on the market in 2008. But it had no plug (yet), so its range as an electric-only car was very limited. The sixty-mile to hundred-mile all-electric range Frank builds into his plug-in hybrids is crucial to their green credentials and allows them to drive rings around the Prius: Because 80 percent of Americans drive fifty miles a day or less, Frank’s technology allows most drivers to travel to work or to the store or to drop the kids off at school entirely without burning fossil fuels and without visiting the gas station except to pump up the tires. Using a modest-size solar collector, as Frank does, to provide the plug-in power makes the system completely carbon-neutral, and eliminates the cost of charging the batteries. One of the main sources of climate-changing greenhouse gases—car travel and its dependence on oil—would be nearly eliminated if America and the world drove Frank’s plug-in hybrids. And the car’s fuel costs, once the solar panels were paid for, would be zero.
If the automotive industry adopted ideas on their merit alone, Americans would already be driving plug-in hybrids en masse, but other factors—corporate fear of change, the auto industry’s unwillingness to appear to embrace emissions regulations, and the oil industry’s unsurprising opposition to weaning Americans from oil—led Detroit in the 1990s to bet on inefficient, dirty, but popular sport utility vehicles rather than Frank’s unproved, clean hybrids. That doesn’t mean the industry doesn’t take Frank seriously: You can’t ignore an inventor who uses a bunch of college kids and some off-the-shelf parts to turn a Ford Explorer into the efficiency equivalent of a 100-mile-a-gallon motor scooter. For decades, carmakers in America and Japan, as well as the federal government, have hired Frank, consulted with him, given him grants, capitalized on his ideas, presented him with awards, studied his designs, and had him build prototypes that worked fabulously, accomplishing everything he promised—and this has been his downfall. His cars are too good.
Oil companies, he says, don’t want a world where drivers visit the gas station once every two or three months—or less. That’s why Frank believes the oil industry is so eagerly backing the hydrogen fuel cell car, endowing university programs to study it, and persuading government to support it—because it is a technology that is decades in the future. And, he says, if it ever matures, the oil companies would still control the fuel supply. The allure of fuel cells is their theoretical cleanness: They chemically combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, with water vapor as the only tailpipe emission. There are several catches, though. At present, the only practical method of extracting large amounts of hydrogen for use in cars is from dirty fossil fuels—hydrogen’s clean image is just that, an image. Further, making hydrogen requires large amounts of electricity—as much as four times the amount of power that the hydrogen produces in a fuel cell. As Frank puts it, he can power four of his plug-in hybrid electric cars with the same amount of electricity one hydrogen car sucks up each time it is refueling. And refueling is a problem, too—even if fuel cell cars were mass-produced, there is no national infrastructure for shipping, storing, and pumping hydrogen into people’s cars. Finally, hydrogen fuel cells are expensive and use scarce materials, such as platinum. Yet American car companies are only too happy to go along with this idea. Why should carmakers retool their assembly lines for a switch to plug-in technology that exists today, Frank says, when they can appear to be good environmental citizens by researching the distant possibility of hydrogen and providing some expensive prototypes for movie stars and corporate chieftains to drive?
“They like hydrogen, because it’s thirty or forty years away,” Frank says with a dry laugh as he scrambles around the basement garage of the Petersen Auto Museum in Los Angeles, where he and his university crew are showing off their latest prototype, a hybridized Chevy Equinox code-named Trinity that can handle a sixty-mile commute without burning any gasoline. “You know what we say in this business: Hydrogen is the fuel of the future. And it always will be.”
Frank is probably the most patient inventor this side of Thomas Edison, who famously tried 6,000 prototype lightbulbs before finally coming up with a practical model. But now, at age seventy-five, although he looks twenty years younger, Frank says he’s done with waiting. Between pressure on government and industry to take firm steps to alleviate climate change, and the price of gasoline hitting all-time records in 2008 before a recession sent prices tumbling, Frank says his time has come. More than ever, he is in demand as a speaker and consultant, and it appears that some car companies are moving forward with plug-ins. Several models are scheduled to be on the showroom floor by 2010, although they fall far short of the performance Frank has proved is attainable. China may be the furthest along, setting the pace in a new industry that Detroit could have commanded fifteen years ago.
“They’re taking baby steps, but at least they are stepping in the right direction nonetheless,” Frank says with a small smile that quickly fades. “But I have one worry: that it’s coming too late.”1
Andy Frank has been saying for years that oil is not a need but an addiction—with all the deadly, irrational, and self-destructive behavior that the word “addiction” implies. People used to react as if that were crazy talk, but it is an idea that has gained currency. Even America’s oilman president, George Bush, started talking about the nation’s addiction to oil toward the end of his time in office, though, perversely, his prescriptions for dealing with that dependency always revolved around making the addiction and its consequences worse, not better. Bush’s economic stimulus package, adopted by Congress in 2003, summed up the nation’s energy policies at the start of the twenty-first century: It left Americans with a maximum tax credit of $4,000 for buying a zero-emissions electric car, versus a $100,000 tax deduction for buying a vehicle over 6,000 pounds, which included the ten-miles-per-gallon GM Hummer H2. By 2008, the deduction for the Hummer had dropped to $50,000; but with a base price of $52,000, that meant taxpayers could foot almost the entire bill for the purchase of one of the most fuel-inefficient, greenhouse-gas-spewing cars in the world—the ultimate subsidy for Americans’ oil addiction.
The 2008 subsidy for buying an electric car that burns no gas at all, that weans its owner from addiction, and that emits no greenhouse gases: zero. (Hybrids with no plugs were granted a tax credit of up to $3,400; but in practice, the credits for most models were much lower, and credits were phased out for the most popular and most fuel-efficient hybrids.2)
It is this sort of incentive—resulting from a combination of federal policy, industry lobbying, partisan politics, corporate malfeasance, and consumers’ hostility to change—that has made oil, and specifically gasoline, the most addictive substance on the planet, and has kept it at the center of our economy and our lives long after it could—and arguably should—have been relegated to a minor role as an energy source.
Addiction’s cruel power lies in creating the illusion that the addict cannot survive without the desired substance, be it heroin, nicotine, or gasoline. Given the omnipresence of oil-powered systems in American society today, with the most toxic mode of transportation ever conceived embedded in every aspect of our daily lives—mowing the lawn, doing the shopping, going to work, doing our work—it is almost impossible to imagine an alternative. The automobile and oil industries, often aided by government, reinforce this perception by continually making the case that there is no viable substitute if we are to sustain the American way of life. This apparent truism has been used to oppose every regulatory effort in the last four decades to replace or improve the automobile in order to reduce smog and (more recently) to reduce global warming, to improve efficiency, or to make cars safer, just as manufacturers opposed regulations requiring seat belts and air bags.
The argument of necessity is so convincing—indeed, so seemingly evident—that it is easy to forget that neither gasoline nor the internal combustion automobile was an American invention, nor was either responsible for most of civilization’s great achievements. Without them, humanity somehow managed to invent democracy, geometry, physics, atomic theory, subways, representative government, Hammurabi’s code, the Ten Commandments, Beethoven’s Fifth, the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the theory of evolution, the Stradivarius, the printing press, ocean liners, locomotives, calculus, clocks, vaccinations, gunpowder, rockets, eyeglasses, pasteurized milk, beer, contact lenses, telescopes, microscopes, generators, lightbulbs, batteries, radio, telephones, and chocolate, and also managed to determine that the world was round, to circumnavigate the globe, to settle the western United States, to lay the transatlantic cable, to reach the north and south poles, to scale the Matterhorn and Mount Kilimanjaro, to abolish slavery in Europe and America, to electrify the cities of the world, to record music and movies, to discover the principles of genetics, and to build an American electric rail system of trains and trolleys with nationwide reach that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, carried 12 billion passengers a year.
Gasoline, then an insignificant petroleum by-product—often simply burned off as waste during the production of kerosene for lamps—was sold in small bottles to treat lice infestations in children’s hair.
At the end of the nineteenth century, among the earliest and most popular cars were battery-electric vehicles, and by 1900 they held both speed and range records over rival external combustion steam-driven cars, and over their new internal combustion, gasoline-burning competitors. Early electric cars were the first to reach a speed of a mile a minute, and the first to achieve speeds higher than 120 miles an hour. The Electric Storage Battery Company (forerunner of the battery giant Exide) operated a fleet of electric cabs in New York City, with a system for quickly swapping exhausted batteries for charged ones so cabs could be quickly returned to service. The first car race on a track in America, held in 1896 at Narraganset Park in Rhode Island, pitted five gasoline-powered racers against one electric, the Riker, in a one-mile sprint. The electric car won. Even Henry Ford, who collaborated with Thomas Edison as the famed inventor developed a state-of-the-art battery for powering autos, publicly expressed the belief that electric cars needed to play a big part in motoring into the twentieth century. As he launched the most popular and revolutionary car of the age—the gasoline-powered Model T, which debuted in 1908—Ford chose electric cars for his wife and son.
Electrics were clean, quiet, and mechanically simple, and they were extremely efficient—about 90 percent of the energy put into their batteries ends up being used to propel the car, with only 10 percent wasted. Gasoline cars were loud, noisy, mechanically complex, emitted clouds of toxic exhaust, and were—and are to this day—incredibly inefficient. In early cars, as little as 13 percent of the energy produced by burning gasoline was actually used to propel the car—the rest was lost through waste heat, friction, throttling, idling, and powering ancillary systems such as the water pump. Modern cars do better—they manage to use about 20 percent of the energy from gasoline while wasting 80 percent. (This means that out of $4.50 a gallon—the cost of gas in the summer of 2008—as much as $3.60 was being blown into the atmosphere, while only ninety cents went toward moving the car.) At the turn of the twentieth century, electrics were as common as gasoline-powered cars, accounting for nearly one-third of all car sales. But by 1905, the tide had turned: Electrics accounted for only 7 percent of new car sales, whereas 86 percent of cars bought in America that year were gasoline-powered. The dirty, inefficient technology beat out the clean, efficient technology, with lasting consequences—for our environment, our economy, and, once our oil addiction impelled us toward foreign suppliers, our national security. But this was a choice, even though it has come to be viewed as inevitable.
The common explanation for the triumph of internal combustion vehicles over electric vehicles is that market forces went to work, consumers considered the options, and the better car won. According to this view, early internal combustion cars and gasoline, even with their admitted drawbacks—noise, pollution, and unreliability—made for faster, more capable cars with longer ranges. Batteries of the era are said to have been too heavy and to have performed poorly, making electric cars painfully slow and limited in range, requiring a recharge after only a few miles, whereas gasoline cars kept chugging on down the road. This conventional wisdom about electric cars also appears in contemporary objections by the oil and automotive industries: poor batteries; short range; market forces know best. But the conventional wisdom on this historic market decision is wrong, and the conditions that made gasoline cars the logical choice in 1910 no longer exist today.
Internal combustion won less on its innate merits and more on cost and infrastructure: Electricity was expensive in 1900, and gas was cheap. In 1900, electricity cost twenty to forty cents a kilowatt-hour—so it was far more expensive in 1900 than it was in 2000 (even without considering inflation). By contrast, gasoline was a nickel a gallon at the beginning of the twentieth century. (The price differential is even more stark when we adjust for inflation. In constant 2007 dollars, electricity a century ago cost the equivalent of up to ten dollars a kilowatt-hour, compared with contemporary rates of ten cents for the same amount; gasoline prices a century ago were the equivalent of $1.27 a gallon in 2007 dollars.) With the lead-acid batteries in use at the time, it would cost the 2007 equivalent of twenty-five dollars to travel fifty miles in a 1900 electric car, whereas a gasoline powered vehicle could do it for less than four dollars.
Availability also favored internal combustion. Gasoline was quickly and easily stocked by stores all over the country, and a 1913 gas station building boom met (and increased) demand. In comparison, electrification was slow. Most Americans couldn’t afford to have their homes wired early in the century; electricity in the home was not commonplace until after World War I, when rates declined and availability increased, and even then it was mostly limited to cities. Rural electrification did not begin in earnest until the mid-1930s. But claims that the technology of electric cars was inferior appear to have been more propaganda than reality. The top speed of one model popular early in the century, the Baker Electric, was thirty-five miles an hour, about the same as the most popular car of the era, the Ford Model T. The Baker could travel fifty miles on a single charge, and 100 miles with Edison’s new batteries. In theory, gasoline-powered cars could go much farther on a tank of gas (the 1908 Model T got better miles per gallon than the 2008 Ford Explorer), but in practice, early gasoline cars tended to overheat or break down and on average needed to pull over every twenty miles or so to be worked on.3 If anything, the effective range of early electric cars, as well as their reliability, was superior.
It is true that early lead-acid batteries—the same technology used today to start gasoline engines, though current versions are significantly improved—were not well-suited to the rigors of providing the main power for vehicles. They were heavy, bulky, and filled with corrosive chemicals. Edison and his battery team conducted thousands of tests on numerous different battery chemistries—reminiscent of his long trial-and-error search for the perfect incandescent lightbulb filament—before perfecting, in 1910, a nickel-iron alkaline battery that he believed would prove decisive in persuading consumers to choose electric cars. These nickel-iron batteries seemed never to wear out, were much lighter in weight, and could be charged twice as fast as lead-acid batteries, while offering 233 percent more power output. Most important, they offered a seemingly spectacular range when used in a car. In one of Edison’s tests, a passenger car traveled 244 miles on a single charge—an accomplishment that would still be considered a breakthrough today. Henry Ford boldly announced to The New York Times in January 1914 that he and his friend Edison would soon be producing a new line of affordable cars, costing the same as his Model T, powered by Edison’s revolutionary battery. “The car we propose to build will contain a battery equipment weighing 405 pounds and the entire car will weigh but 1,200 pounds. It will run for 100 miles. The cost will be about $600 to the public. How does that compare with the great, heavy, and expensive electric cars?”4
Edison and Ford envisioned a network of curbside charging stations, in which a coin-slot mechanism would deliver a metered electric flow—General Electric had actually introduced such a device, calling it an “electricant,” or electricity hydrant. Edison had a grand vision of combining the electric vehicle with another new product, a portable home power plant. Driven by either renewable wind power or a small gasoline motor, the personal power plant would charge a pack of his new batteries and thereby power an entire business, a house, or—with several plants hooked in series—a block of houses. Edison argued that these mini power plants, small enough to be kept in a cellar or toolshed, would be cheaper and easier than building large central stations and thousands of miles of electrical grids. The addition of windmills would decrease the need for fossil fuels—and provide free charging for the Edison-Ford car. The vision was brilliant and technically feasible; Edison powered a large house in West Orange, New Jersey, as a prototype, not far from his own home. “The Powers of Darkness have suffered another rout. Thomas A. Edison, their implacable and indefatigable foe, has devised a final scheme for their undoing,” the Times exulted in 1912.5
Edison also attempted to impress the world with his new car battery as well, arranging for a 1,000-mile endurance ride with two electric cars: a Bailey Electric and a Detroit Electric. Each car was equipped with his new batteries and each routinely traveled more than 100 miles on a charge as they drove through four New England states and climbed Mount Washington. The New York Times reported in its headline, “Edison Battery Is No Longer a Myth.”6
Had this vision of the “Edison Suburban Residence for the Twentieth Century” coupled with a practical electric car taken hold 100 years ago, the world would look very different today—and the fast-approaching catastrophe of global warming easily could be a far more distant concern. Edison’s and Ford’s ideas for the early twentieth century are very similar to the prescriptions scientists and environmentalists now say we desperately need in the twenty-first century. With the addition to Edison’s home power station of solar cells—which were mere novelties in Edison’s lifetime, though he saw great promise in them—the parallel would be complete.
But it was not to be. The idea of home power plants did not catch on, as the initial investment of $500 for the smallest of the devices and $3,000 for the largest was beyond the means of most households at the time. Ford and Edison’s electric car project fell victim to a series of delays and misfortunes: manufacturing and quality-control issues; a devastating fire that swept through Edison’s factory and laboratory complex; then the advent of World War I, bringing a navy contract that monopolized Edison’s entire battery production capacity. By the time the war was over, the moment had passed.7 Electric cars powered by old and sometimes shoddily made lead-acid batteries had by then tainted the marketplace, as did the unscrupulous practices of some electric car businesses.8 By 1920, just as electricity costs began to drop, the major car manufacturers, including Ford, abandoned any remaining plans for electric cars, along with some promising experiments with hybrids.
A similar pattern—based on factors that had nothing to do with technological merit—devastated the extensive electric trolley and interurban light rail systems that commanded billions in ridership in the early 1900s. In 1921, when Americans wanted to go somewhere, they used rail 90 percent of the time, mostly electrical rail systems and streetcars. Only one in ten Americans owned a car in 1921. And the reason was simple: Almost every town in the country with more than a few thousand residents had a trolley service, and together, the nation’s 1,200 local and regional electric light rail systems covered some 44,000 miles. Mass transit was convenient, cheap, and plentiful.
That same year, General Motors suffered a loss of $65 million, and the company decided—quite logically—that trolleys and light rail were part of the problem. Converting those clean electric systems to mass transit that used General Motors’ fossil-fuel buses became a serious and sensible business priority. A front company called National City Lines—backed by General Motors, Mack Truck, Firestone Tire and Rubber, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum—began buying up the nation’s trolley and light rail lines in the 1930s and 1940s, shutting them down and replacing them one by one with gasoline and diesel-powered buses. The collusion was so blatant that the companies were indicted in 1947 and later convicted of conspiring to monopolize trade and commerce in the purchasing of buses, tires, tubes, and petroleum products—a plot, according to the lead federal prosecutor on the case, “to deprive the American public of their splendid electric railway systems.”9 But the $5,000 fine ultimately imposed in no way deterred the immensely wealthy corporate conspirators, and their goal was achieved.10 Major cities such as Los Angeles saw irreplaceable light rail and trolley lines closed down, the rights of way abandoned and built over, where once they connected all the suburbs, beach towns, and downtowns throughout Southern California. Only a few cities, such as Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago, held onto their old electric lines. Retired trolley cars were stacked up in junkyards and fully functional electric passenger vehicles were scrapped. Half a century later, Los Angeles would spend billions of dollars trying to re-create a few segments of the old light rail system it had so cavalierly abandoned in the name of modernization.
The failure of the electric car, of Edison’s home power plant, and of trolleys and light rail was not inevitable or even sensible. Such technology and infrastructure could have saved the nation and the world from the spiraling oil prices and climate change of the twenty-first century. Instead, the marketplace did what it was supposed to do—maximize profits for investors. This is the real magic of the marketplace, and in many instances, that magic has served the country well. But it is not the role of the market, or the business model of General Motors or Standard Oil, to safeguard the environment voluntarily or to make wise decisions about public transit, particularly when such efforts might diminish profits. In the absence of incentives or mandates from the government to push the private sector toward serving the greater good, it is madness to expect such a balance. This is why the United States trails behind the rest of the industrialized world in combating climate change; why the nation is pursuing corn-based biofuels that industry loves but that will produce even more greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels they are intended to replace; why even China has more rigorous fuel economy standards for its cars; why immensely profitable oil companies get more than $100 billion a year in corporate welfare and subsidies; and why behemoth sport utility vehicles get generous tax breaks while nonpolluting cars get little or nothing.
The most sweeping attempt yet to break with this history by creating a new mandate for clean vehicles occurred in the state with the nation’s worst air quality, California. In 1990, government officials decided there was only one way to beat the smog that was causing increased cancer rates and record amounts of childhood asthma, and literally eating away historic buildings: order carmakers to build clean cars. And by clean, California meant cars with zero emissions.
California wanted a ZEV—the zero emissions vehicle—for which there was only one possible option at the time: the return of the electric car.
In a grand experiment of market manipulation, the major car companies would have eight years to design and deploy electric cars. At first they’d have to put out only a few hundred. But by 1998, 2 percent of the cars they sold in California had to be ZEVs. In 2001, the figure would become 5 percent; in 2003, 10 percent. At that point, there would be 150,000 clean, cool, low-cost, high-performance electric cars on the road, and the members of the powerful California Air Resources Board figured market forces would do the rest. Who wouldn’t want a car that cost only one-fifth as much to operate as a regular gasoline-powered car, and has virtually no maintenance costs?
The mandate came with an incentive to carmakers: Meet the ZEV deadlines, they were told, or they would be barred from selling any cars in California, the biggest car market in the western hemisphere.
The industry criticized the mandate as unrealistic and too costly, and the major carmakers sued to block it. But the protests were not, at least at first, convincing anyone, because the idea for the ZEV program began not with government officials, but with the leading carmaker in the world at the time, General Motors. The company had boasted of developing a revolutionary electric car, a breakthrough in technology and design. At the annual Los Angeles Car Show in 1990, the chairman of GM himself touted the new electric car as the wave of the future. He personally demonstrated a prototype battery-powered car called the Impact, with the sleek look of a sports car and the ability to travel 120 miles on a single charge. “We are going to put the Impact into production. We’re dedicated to doing it,” an excited Roger Smith, then GM’s chairman, announced. The California air board, desperate for a solution to smog, understandably took Smith at his word, and the idea of mandating the ZEV was born. If GM could do it, every major carmaker could, the air board reasoned.
And the carmakers did build the electric cars. They did so reluctantly but well. General Motors’ prototype Impact went into production as the EV1. Ford had the little bubble-shaped Think! Toyota converted its smallest SUV into the RAV4-EV, which had a 150-mile range on a single charge, using relatively low-tech batteries—nickel metal hydride models not very different from Edison’s old batteries. There were others, too, though the EV1 and the RAV4 were the most popular, beloved by the few who could get them. There were waiting lists with thousands of names.
The new electric car divisions that were established within the major car companies may have done a superb job in creating these vehicles, but this did not seem to please the leadership at the automakers. Roger Smith left GM the same year California issued the ZEV mandate, and there appeared to be far more hostility than enthusiasm for electric cars among other auto executives. One of the most curious episodes in automotive history unfolded next, as car companies sought to undermine their own new products. First the car companies all refused to sell the electric cars. They would only lease them, and then only after a lengthy, intrusive application process. The electric car marketing and advertising were so inept that the poor quality could only have been purposeful—one television spot for the EV1 appeared to be promoting doomsday, not a cool new car.11 And yet customers flocked to the paltry number of electric cars that trickled into showrooms starting in 1996. Celebrities such as the actors Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, and Ed Begley snapped them up, and several prominent figures began to promote the idea of buying an electric car as an act of civic virtue. After Hanks raved about his EV1 on the television show Late Night with David Letterman, the perplexed host asked just what Hanks thought he was doing with an electric car. “I’m saving America, Dave. That’s what I’m doing,” Hanks replied. The studio audience applauded wildly.
Despite the consumers’ excitement, as the deadline to increase production approached, the car manufacturers began complaining, after fielding only a few thousand, that their electrics were not practical, that American drivers would never accept the limited range, that the batteries were not good enough or durable enough, that they would go broke building vehicles nobody wanted. The carmakers minimized actual progress in battery technology that far exceeded their public admissions, particularly a new type of nickel battery invented by Ovonics—a company whose patents were bought by General Motors and whose batteries were suddenly no longer available to start-up companies working on new electric cars. The batteries had shown phenomenal promise, producing in one prototype sedan a range of 375 miles on a single charge.12
Yet, faced with corporate titans, teams of lawyers, and paid consultants, all insisting that a practical electric car could not be mass-produced, the political appointees and career bureaucrats of the air resources board blinked, first delaying the ZEV mandate at the automakers’ request, and then, in 2003, killing the electric car program entirely, bowing to the car companies’ eagerness to launch a new hydrogen fuel cell program. Instead of the originally mandated 150,000 nonpolluting electrics on the street in 2003, the car companies would have to deploy only 250 experimental hydrogen cars, with the number rising to only 25,000 by the year 2014. This was done over the objections of existing electric car leaseholders and a long line of scientists, including Andy Frank, who testified before the board that the carmakers were wrong about the batteries and wrong about hydrogen, and that it would be better if the ZEV program simply shifted a little to a “very low emissions vehicle” program—turning to plug-in hybrids rather than killing the electric car completely. His suggestions were dismissed, as was his (accurate) prediction that the carmakers would be back in a few years demanding more time for hydrogen, too.13
The electric cars were rounded up as their leases expired, carted off to the desert, and stacked in remote junkyards—just as the old trolleys had been piled fifty years earlier. Then the carmakers had those perfectly good, sought-after electric cars crushed and shredded into cubes of scrap. Only Toyota relented after repeated public protests and letter-writing campaigns, allowing some leaseholders to buy the cars they loved; and this one act of generosity showed that the car companies had lied about the durability and quality of the electric cars. Southern California Edison had bought a fleet of 320 of the electric RAV4-EVs, using them for heavy-duty work under harsh conditions and with frequent charging cycles. The original battery packs—the ones that were supposed to be too poor for the market and that would wear out too fast—were still in service in 2008, with 150,000 miles on them.
Ironically, the ZEV mandate was based on a mistake. The GM Impact that started it all was never intended by its designers as a model for a production car. Smith had just gotten carried away. Its designers had intended the Impact as a test bed for electric car technology—regenerative brakes, transmission, computerized controls—but that was supposed to be just step one. Once the kinks were worked out of the electrical systems, the EV1 was supposed to be upgraded to a plug-in hybrid.
“It would have been a great car,” Andy Frank says with a sigh. He has a picture of the one prototype plug-in hybrid EV1 that was built, a bright red sports car that could travel up to eighty miles on electricity alone, and on longer trips could get the equivalent of eighty miles a gallon. “It never saw the light of day, but that type of car was the way we should have gone. GM could have sold thousands and thousands of them. California could have eased into the plug-in hybrid instead of pushing for the all-electric car, and many of the objections would have just gone away. Range isn’t an issue then. The batteries don’t have to be perfect, just good enough. There’s a comfort zone. We’d be so much farther along.”
Frank should know. He’s the man GM hired to turn the EV1 into a plug-in hybrid—before it decided to kill the whole program and build Hummers instead.
Even as a teenager, Andy Frank loved to take apart old cars, scavenging old parts, then putting everything back together better than before. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, “better” meant faster. It meant more torque, more horsepower. At the time, the only way to improve fuel efficiency was to pull out unused parts of the car—the deadweight—to make it lighter.
Frank had emigrated with his family from China at age seven, just before America entered World War II. The family settled in Pasadena, and Frank grew up at the center of California’s car culture. It was second nature for him and his high school friends to buy old cars, aged Model A’s or Model T’s, and juice them up for street racing—the hot rod craze. Once he put an immense Cadillac V-12 engine inside a 1936 Ford Phaeton that normally carried a motor only half that size and power. He would have needed a jet engine to make it any more powerful. “Well,” he says with his easy laugh, “you have to have fun with the stuff.”
His work today resembles his early exploits—he is still tearing apart cars, making them better, and calling it fun, although the primary goal nowadays is to shrink the gas engine to little more than a backup rather than make it roar and spit fire like a rocket. Since he started his automotive experiments in the 1970s, he has called his team of engineering students and volunteers “Team Fate,” a reference to the 1965 classic slapstick film The Great Race, in which one of the main characters, Professor Fate, goes to any lengths to build a superior, gadget-filled supercar to win an impossible road race from New York to Paris. To this day, when he takes pictures of the team with their latest automotive handiwork on display, Frank assumes his Professor Fate persona, smiling broadly beneath an absurdly tall black top hat.
“Everyone loves Professor Frank,” an engineering student, Andrew Shabashevich, observed after working all night to prepare Team Fate’s latest entry in the Challenge X competition. This is one of several marquee alternative vehicle contests sponsored each year for major universities and research centers by the U.S. Department of Energy and automakers as tests for future technology. “I mean, we must, because the hours are just insane. Worth it, but insane.”
Frank took a detour from cars after high school, earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at Berkeley, then working in the aerospace industry developing technology for the Apollo moon mission spacecraft and the Minute Man Missile program. But after earning his PhD in electrical engineering, he turned back to cars, initially as a young professor at the University of Wisconsin. There, Team Fate got its start, with a goal that Frank still maintains as his minimum for new designs: Build a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon and can go zero to sixty in ten seconds or less. He believes this combination of economy and performance is key to winning consumer acceptance.
Frank built his first plug-in hybrid in 1972 for the Department of Transportation’s “Urban Car Contest”—the first national competition to pioneer a new type of car with high fuel economy and low emissions. Frank’s was the only hybrid entry; it capitalized on and improved an idea from the early 1900s, when the first successful hybrid, the Mixte, was produced and then abandoned, by the legendary car designer Ferdinand Porsche (whose first car was all-electric). Frank had a completely different design, but he encountered the same limitations Porsche had faced. The best lead-acid batteries were still not up to the task, and modern nickel metal hydride and lithium-ion batteries were still decades in the future. Even more problematic were the control systems. The merging of the two separate electric and gasoline power sources had to be continually adjusted, moving from all-electric to various mixes of power, depending on driving conditions, speed, and the level of charge left in the batteries. Today, those tasks are handled by silicon chips and software that make thousands of small adjustments seamlessly; the driver does not even have to think about them. In the early 1970s, before the age of small personal computers, Frank had to cobble together mechanical solutions—clever, but inefficient, demanding constant attention from the driver. He shelved that research for the rest of the decade when the Department of Energy offered him grants to research mechanical flywheels in vehicles as a means of storing energy—an interesting line of research that taught him much about miniaturization of components and the use of lightweight composite materials. By storing energy in the flywheel instead of a battery, Frank’s flywheel hybrids increased fuel efficiency by about 50 percent, but the limit seemed to be about thirty-five miles a gallon, far short of his goal of 100 miles a gallon.
In 1985, Frank moved to the University of California–Davis, and started up the U.S. Department of Energy Center for Hybrid Electric Vehicle Research, where his work has been supported by Nissan, GM, Ford, and various government agencies as he produced one breakthrough vehicle after another with his team of students. One experimental vehicle set a world record for fuel efficiency in 1992 (3,300 miles per gallon). But his main contribution has been a series of consumer vehicles modified with modern battery packs tucked under the floorboards, scaled-down gas engines, and electric motors with a minimum of sixty-mile all-electric ranges. Frank holds thirty-five patents; these include his continuously variable transmission, which is crucial to his hybrid’s efficiency; and his take on the entire plug-in hybrid car itself.
In Frank’s vehicles, unlike all-electric cars, the range is not limited by battery charge, because on long trips, the small gas engine kicks in to keep the wheels turning—the battery is never allowed to drop below 20 percent charged. Even on those extended trips, when averaged out annually on the basis of typical American driving patterns, Frank’s cars get 100 to 200 miles to the gallon with a gas engine about as big as that of a medium-size motorcycle—yet powering a full-size Ford Explorer SUV that goes just as fast as (or faster than) the factory original. Owning such a car means going to the gas station no more than four times a year. This was the modification Frank performed on the EV1 for General Motors before the program was killed—at around the time General Motors went in a radically different direction, buying out the Hummer line from the now defunct American Motors and closing down the EV1 manufacturing line. In vain, Frank pleaded with the California air resources board to move its mandate to plug-in hybrids, but the board, transfixed by hydrogen fuel cells, had been convinced by the auto industry that modern battery technology was no more adequate than the electric car technology of a century earlier.
There are additional potential benefits to widespread adoption of plug-in hybrids. Frank envisions using the cars as part of a home solar power system, storing the sun’s energy in the cars, and using them to power homes during the late hours, when household electricity consumption is low and the batteries can easily handle the load. Workplace solar chargers in outdoor parking lots would turn hybrid cars into mobile power generation stations. Stationary battery packs in the garage of a home could make an even more capable system—Edison’s suburban residence resurrected, with plug-in cars turning into power plants when parked.
“This is why we work so many hours on this project,” Frank’s student, Shabashevich, says. “We think this is the right path for the future of the world—the one where we actually have a future.”
For years, Team Fate’s cars have been a dominant presence in competitions sponsored by government and industry. The team’s hybrid Mercury Sable—code-named Coulomb—was lauded as the best application of advanced technology in the Department of Energy’s FutureCar competition in 1999; and the team’s hybrid SUVs have achieved first, second, and third place in four FutureTruck challenges. Time and again, Frank’s team has produced some of the most fuel-efficient and least polluting entries in the competitions, because this team is among the very few university research projects focused on plug-ins.
“This type of car, if mass-produced, can help us preserve our lifestyle yet wean ourselves from the oil addiction,” Frank says—and he has been saying this at every auto conference he could attend for the past fifteen years. “If I can build these cars with college students and parts that a medium-size machine shop can produce, you would think the big car companies could do it, too, economically and on an assembly-line scale. But I’ve been beating my head against the wall for a long time.”
Frank has had to fund his research with $60,000 of his own money to supplement his federal and industry grants—and provide food and living expenses for his loyal band of students. But the tide began to turn for his vision in 2006. Chelan County in Washington state, where three large hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River provide the cheapest electricity in America, sought a way to capitalize on its immense energy resources. Ron Johnson-Rodriguez, the county’s director of economic development, attended a conference on alternative vehicles, looking for ideas. Like most Americans, he was only vaguely aware that California had tried and failed to pioneer electric cars. When he asked what had happened with that attempt, he got an earful about the controversy. And then he was told: Go see Andy Frank.
He did. Johnson-Rodriguez walked through the engine-strewn warehouse-lab at the University of California–Davis, drove one of Frank’s cars, heard Frank’s ideas for an electric grid in which plug-in vehicles provided energy storage, and was sold. First Chelan County, and then Washington state, mounted a campaign to acquire a fleet of plug-in hybrid vehicles to realize Frank’s vision as a national test bed. And because car manufacturers had not yet produced a plug-in hybrid, Frank began helping the county create a center for converting conventional hybrids such as the Prius into plug-ins. Austin Electric in Texas, where wind power is being developed at a rapid pace, has begun a similar program with Frank’s help.
Frank points out that there are more than 800 million cars on the road worldwide. That’s enough cars to circle the world bumper to bumper—100 times. By 2050, the number of cars will triple. If the cars are not clean—indeed, if cars don’t start becoming clean now, today—there will be a climatic Armageddon, he says.
The rising price of gasoline, consumers’ declining interest in gas-guzzling SUVs, and the growing number of utility companies have finally forced Detroit’s hand. All the major manufacturers have announced plug-in hybrids, although their specifications all fall far short of Frank’s models; and Frank’s company, Efficient Drivetrains Inc., is suddenly in great demand, particularly in Asia. But he doubts the sincerity of the major Detroit carmakers’ commitment. After one presentation he made in 2007 to Ford’s executives, he recalls one senior technology executive saying, “Well, Professor Frank, that’s interesting. But what makes you think you have better technology than we have?…You’re only one guy and we have the best technology in the world. We hire people from MIT and Cal Tech. Why are you better than those guys?”
Frank was flabbergasted. Ford and GM were on record as saying that battery technology was still too poor to get more than a forty-mile all-electric range, whereas Frank and his college kids had turned GM’s own EV1 into an eighty-mile all-electric-range vehicle ten years earlier. “What was I supposed to say,” he quipped later, “that he had hired a bunch of dummies?”
Such attitudes are dying a difficult, slow death, Frank says. Sooner or later, his work will transform the way people drive, because the results are undeniable. His cars are better than anything in any showroom anywhere, and the word is finally out: Andy Frank’s cars can save the world.
“We will get there, finally,” he says. “But the wasted time and opportunities are very depressing if I let myself think about them. We could be so much farther along. We could already be in a place where foreign oil would be irrelevant to us—we could be there, right now. Fear of change, and stubbornness, that has been the enemy.”