Charities Dream Up Fuel-Efficient Cars to Tempt Companies to Build Them

Picture sleek, sporty cars getting as much 100 miles per gallon. Imagine full-size SUV’s with twice the fuel efficiency of

current models and more safety features.

While no dealership sells these wheels as yet, a pair of charities want to do more than dream about them. They are spending money to explore how to design such cars.

“The technology is out there,” says David Friedman, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Cambridge, Mass., nonprofit group that has spent more than five years trying to develop a “clean car.”

“Part of what we do is to give consumers the knowledge they need to start pushing for more choices, and to get legislatures that same knowledge so they can start requiring automakers to give it to people,” he says.

Car manufacturers often say that raising the fuel-efficiency standards would force them to make smaller, less crash-prone cars instead of the large SUV’s consumers want.

To counter this argument, four years ago Mr. Friedman’s organization used a $200,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to design its own “virtual” SUV called the Guardian.

The scientists’ group says the concept vehicle could get as much as 36 miles per gallon and provide improved safety features. The vehicle uses existing technology, such as a device that can stop and start the engine during idling.

While the full complement of such technologies may initially add as much as $2,300 to a vehicle’s sticker price, drivers could save as much as twice that amount in the long run through fuel savings, the group says.

And government incentives or rebates could ease the initial cost burdens. Mr. Friedman compares the auto manufacturers’ reluctance to improve the fuel economy of many of their vehicles to their initial resistance to seat belts and, later, air bags, both of which were eventually embraced by consumers and required by law.

Automakers are “stuck in the past,” he says.

85% Ethanol

Last March a $25,000 grant from the Energy Foundation helped the charity develop a second virtual vehicle, a minivan called Vanguard.

Fueled by a mixture of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, it is designed to meet the most stringent of California’s proposed auto-emissions regulations and help bolster the argument that such regulations are feasible.

Like the Guardian, the minivan uses existing technology, much of it already in use by automakers, if not in the combinations envisioned by the charity.

“At the end of the day we’ll gauge our success on whether we are able to keep California’s ability to set its own global-warming pollution standards alive,” Mr. Friedman says.

The charity feels assured that automakers have seen its vehicle designs. Indeed, in April Mr. Friedman had a meeting with Robert Lutz, vice chairman for product development at General Motors.

Although the meeting was mutually deemed “off the record,” a GM spokesman was rather dismissive at its conclusion, telling The Detroit News that “the challenge with environmentalists is that there is a complete lack of business and technical experience from which they can draw conclusions.”

Mr. Friedman is unbowed. “They attack our credibility because they are backed into a corner,” he says.

$300,000 Grant

The Rocky Mountain Institute, a Snowmass, Colo., nonprofit group focused on energy policy and resource conservation, has been in the auto-design business even longer than the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In 1993, after two years of research paid for with $300,000 in grants from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the institute unveiled the “Hypercar,” a series of lightweight, aerodynamic vehicles designed to be made out of carbon composite materials and capable of getting as much 100 miles per gallon.

The sleek vehicles use hybrid gas and electric engines and are designed to perform as well as conventional autos. Eventually, they could be powered by hydrogen fuel cells, a still-emerging technology, the charity says.

“I didn’t much like the traditional notion that to make cars very efficient you have to make them squinched, sluggish, unsafe, ugly, or unaffordable, and then it’s the government’s job to intervene through subsidies or mandates to get you to buy a compromised vehicle you didn’t really want,” says Amory B. Lovins, a physicist who co-founded the institute and serves as its chief scientist.

To encourage automakers to use new engineering concepts, the institute placed the Hypercar designs in the public domain rather than seeking a patent on them.

No individual Hypercars have ever been built employing all the new, often costly technological advancements. The institute feels that developing mass-production techniques are key to making a vehicle that could sell between $30,000 and $50,000.

Even without a vehicle on the road, Mr. Lovins is confident his concepts have had an impact on the industry.

“The nonprofit sector is a very disproportionate source of technical, policy, and business innovation,” Mr. Lovins says. “Without our contributions, we would have a far more impoverished portfolio of ways to deal with oil.”

Gary S. Vasilash, editor in chief of Automotive Design & Production magazine, says car companies have been “assessing” Hypercar concepts.

“Perhaps the biggest effect that Amory Lovins and his colleagues at RMI have had on the auto industry has less to do with specific technology and more with showing potential opportunities that can be derived from thinking differently about how cars are designed and engineered,” Mr. Vasilash says.

“This work could have been done, in principle, by the auto industry, but such large organizations are typically not very agile and tend to proceed incrementally rather than transformationally,” Mr. Lovins says.

He adds: “Being a nonprofit with an entrepreneurial bent lets us be agile and uninhibited.”