Two or three times a day, perfect strangers come up to me in the parking lot at the grocery store or the bank and ask about my hybrid car, a Toyota Prius.
Stranger: How do you like your car?
Me: I love it--it's great.
Stranger: Does it really get 50 mpg?
Me: No, it's doing mid-40s. My best tank was 49.
Stranger: How is it on the highway?
Me: Great, does 80 mph no problem. Small gas motor, but when you accelerate the electric gives it a kick. That's why it gets such good mileage.
Stranger: It looks pretty roomy.
I may not be a marketing whiz, but I definitely smell a trendhere. For those of you living in a cave, hybrids have both a gasoline and anelectric motor that operate together to drive the wheels. The gas engine chargesthe electric motor, which also captures energy from the wheels when the carbrakes. This means that, unlike an electric car, you don't ever plug it in. ThePrius drives just like a normal car, with one great twist: At low speeds or whenidling at a stoplight, the gas motor shuts off so the vehicle runs purely onelectric power, smooth and quiet. For this reason, the Prius is one of only twovehicles in the country rated as "super ultra-low emission."
Japan pioneered the hybrid technology. The Prius has been commerciallyavailable in that country for four years for about $20,000, and Honda also is nowselling a sports-car version, the Insight. Detroit, meanwhile, has been buildingbigger and bigger SUVs and fighting any policy that would raise fuel-economystandards and reduce urban air pollution and global warming.
Not that U.S. automakers had to fight very hard: Clinton and Gore never triedto mandate higher efficiency by tightening the "corporate-average fuel economy"(CAFE) standards, which have been in place, unchanged, since 1985. (SUVscircumvented even these limits because Detroit got them classified as trucks.)Instead, beginning in the mid-1990s, the administration poured around a billiondollars into a joint-industry research venture--the Partnership for a NewGeneration of Vehicles. The result? In the year 2000, Ford finally modeled aprototype of a hybrid sedan.
Hybrids have the near-term capability to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50percent and to reduce air pollution dramatically. But hybrids are only atransition step on the way to the real prize: the fuel-cell vehicle. Firstdeveloped as part of the space program, fuel cells produce electricity bycombining hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of a chemical catalyst--a reversalof the high-school physics experiment in which electric current splits water intoits component parts.
Over the next few decades, industry observers expect, fuel cells will replacethe internal combustion engine with a quiet, efficient motor that will emit onlywater vapor as a by-product. (Existing fuel-cell vehicles, such as the busescurrently operating in Chicago and in Vancouver, British Columbia, also run onnatural gas and are not yet pollution-free.)
Detroit took four years and several billion dollars to generate a prototypehybrid. In half the time and with less than $5 million in funding, Hypercar--acompany spun off from Amory Lovins's Rocky Mountain Institute--designed afuel-cell driven, zero-emission, Ford Explorer-size car that gets the equivalentof 99 miles per gallon of gasoline. The vehicle, dubbed "The Revolution,"recently passed a series of computer-simulated design tests, and Hypercar expectsto have prototypes on the road next year.
In the face of these new marketplace realities, Ford and GM promise to delivertheir own commercially available hybrids--in 2004. Maybe. By that time, ofcourse, Japanese producers will be marketing their second generation of hybrids,with eight years of production and service experience behind them.
A clean-energy future is at last emerging, in both consumer products andnational policies. But the "partnership" road pursued by the Clinton-Goreadministration led to a squandered opportunity. Detroit fell years behind foreigncompetitors in clean-car technology, and people around the world are paying theprice in the form of higher levels of urban smog and accelerated global-climatechange. Now Bush's decision to abandon the international global-warming treatymeans that U.S. industry is likely to face another period without a firm policysignal for rapid development of hybrid and fuel-cell technology.
Bolstered by a recent National Academy of Sciences study showing that a 40percent increase in fuel economy could be achieved with no net costs toconsumers, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California is leading an effortto widen CAFE standards to include SUVs and light trucks. But in earlyAugust, similar legislation was defeated in the House by a 100-vote margin.
Eventually, of course, the United States will face up to the reality of globalwarming and join with the rest of the world in requiring domestic carmakers toclean up their act. By that time, Detroit may find that it is too late to playcatch-up. Until then, I'll keep answering questions in the parking lot.
