Vehicle Technology Options
Power Systems - Fuels - Materials - Design

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One option is to continue to optimize what we already have.  If we optimized existing power systems to the practical limits of conventional technology, we might be able to double efficiency from today’s 15% or so to perhaps 30%, before we run out of ideas.  At 30% efficiency, the average 20 to 25 mpg sedan would then get 40 to 50 mpg.  That’s about the best we can hope for with conventional technology, which will not solve the problem over the long term.

Just to hold our own against growth in demand, the world’s automobile fleet will have to be in the 80 to 100 mpg range in about 30 years. PNGV calls for an 83-mpg production-ready prototype by the end of 2003, which tends to put today’s efforts into perspective.  When we also consider that today, 80% of emissions are caused by 20% of the vehicles, by 2010 - certainly by 2020 - we should be on our way to winning the race against energy and emissions trends.

So to make the necessary gains, we have to move to a sustainable source fuel, we have to make the leap into much more efficient alternative power systems, and we have to build lightweight vehicles so we have less total mass to transport around the city.

I remember a conversation with a brilliant aerodynamic engineer, Eugene Gluhareff, some 20 years ago.  He was talking about a consulting project he had just finished where he had redesigned a folding aircraft ladder to cut the weight in half. In my innocence, I asked him how he did it - expecting some ingeniously clever design solution, because he was truly a brilliant designer.  He said: “Well I just took two ounces from here and one ounce from there, and when I was done removing a little weight from a lot of places, the new ladder weighed only half as much.”  So I do not believe that there is one grand, breakthrough technology that will provide the results we need.   Instead, it will come from the combined effects of many improvements - new fuels, new power systems, new materials and process, and better engineering throughout the vehicle system.

From this perspective in time, the front-runner technologies appear to be battery-electric and hybrid-electric power systems, ethanol and methanol motor fuels - both as a fuel to be directly consumed and ultimately as a carrier of hydrogen for fuel cells - and aluminum, magnesium, and plastic composite materials for lighter vehicles.