Bold Designs, Exotic Fuels Seek to Curb Oil Appetite : Cars: Dramatic progress has been made in mileage, pollution. But much of public just isn’t interested.
Volvo still trots out the TCP 2000 on occasion and puts it through its paces, like an aging racehorse. The stubby, feather-light vehicle was one company’s laboratory response to the 1979 oil crisis.
Pulling out all the technological stops on the internal combustion engine, the Swedish auto maker developed a car that seats two comfortably--three not so comfortably--and gets up to 100 miles per gallon when the wind is right.
The TCP 2000 was never offered for sale. Nor will shoppers find in showrooms Audi’s world-record adaptation of its mid-sized Audi 100 luxury sedan. That car recently traveled almost 3,000 miles through Europe without refueling--an eye-popping 133 m.p.g.
These and other projects are not for the masses. The Volvo used lightweight engine materials that corrode easily, for example. The Audi’s rear seat was torn out to save weight, and professional drivers turned off the engine when going downhill.
But while these experiments in auto technology remain tantalizing, others even now are showing oil-saving potential on the world’s highways.
An estimated 300,000 vehicles powered by natural gas cruise the streets of Italy. Brazil, the biggest automotive market in Latin America, runs nearly half of its cars on corn. And California, already home to methanol-powered cars and buses and natural gas and propane fleets, has lured the electric car to the very brink of commercial production.
In the aftermath of a war that spilled blood for oil, the availability of such automotive technology once again joins the question of what the United States should do about the machines that account for 40% of the nation’s oil appetite.
Around the world--and especially in California--environmental regulations are jump-starting clean-air technologies. Lower consumption of petroleum will be a significant side benefit of reducing air pollution.
And now, the war in the Persian Gulf oil fields, some argue, makes imperative a frontal assault on the car’s oil guzzling ways.
Along with the car’s environmental and safety risks, its energy consumption is seen by a top General Motors engineer as serious enough to warrant another “moon shot” that would combine the resources of U.S. industry and the government’s network of 720 research labs to find breakthrough technologies by the year 2000.
“These issues are not going to go away,” Donald L. Runkle, General Motors vice president for advanced engineering, told an industry audience in January. “They cannot be swept under the rug, and they will not yield to the conventional rhetoric that has surrounded them for the last 20 years.”
But to date, many of the nation’s political leaders and business executives seem content to tinker with the automobile--and with the oil-based economic system in which it operates. They would offer incentives here and impose standards there, while preserving the uniquely American privilege of cheap gasoline.
The chief obstacle to dramatic progress, many say, is not technology, but rather the preferences of politicians and the public.
“It’s not the engineers who design cars, it’s the people,” says Paul MacCready, a pioneer in wind and solar technology whose Monrovia, Calif., company, AeroVironment Inc., developed an electric car for General Motors. “If there’s a political will, these goals are very reachable. But oil is so cheap that trying to conserve it is absurd.”
Whether or not the Persian Gulf War leads to meaningful political action to curb oil use by cars and trucks, environmental concerns seem sure to make a difference.
By requiring a “zero-pollution” car in 1998, California’s clean-air standards effectively are forcing the first marketplace production of the electric car in modern times. And they have touched off a competitive free-for-all--and a lobbying war--among oil, natural gas, methanol and other producers, all scrambling to carve out a share for their fuels in the new California environment.
Not to mention the rest of the world, for the ripple effect from Sacramento’s actions is broad. German auto makers Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz and BMW have established a research consortium solely to figure out ways to meet the California emissions standards.
“We believe it will become the world standard,” an Audi spokesman explains.
Such talk pleases California regulators.
“We use our standards to force technology, not to reflect existing technology,” said Bill Sessa, spokesman for the California Air Resources Board. “There is not a single manufacturer in the world that doesn’t have half a dozen R & D (research and development) projects going on.”
The focus of the research ranges from squeezing still more efficiency from the internal combustion engine to refining battery technology and solar add-ons for the electric car to experiments with hydrogen auto fuel, a decades-away proposition with big possibilities and big problems.
There are still gains achievable from better aerodynamics; wind buff MacCready notes, for instance, that auto stylists have largely neglected the undersides of cars. The use of plastics, magnesium, aluminum, low-alloy steels and other lightweight materials will multiply in the 1990s. Electronics are revolutionizing transmissions. And such technologies as multi-point fuel injection and torque-converter lockup are spreading rapidly through the auto fleet, each contributing to better fuel economy.
But much of the immediate action is in fuels that can displace oil.
California regulations, and less stringent regional requirements of the federal Clean Air Act, phase in ever-tougher emissions standards, leaving it up to vehicle manufacturers and fleet owners to meet them.
The result has been a rush to a variety of fuels, all of which burn more cleanly than most gasolines. Some are in themselves less energy efficient, their chief advantage being that they are not oil. Their advantages and drawbacks reflect not just technology, but also the hard realities of politics and economics:
* Methanol--said to cut emissions by half--can be made from natural gas, coal or decaying organic matter. A blend of 85% methanol and 15% gasoline can be--and is--sold through ordinary pumps at some service stations. The auto industry is gearing up to produce “flex-fuel” cars to handle gasoline or methanol; Chrysler will be able to build 100,000 a year by 1993.
A favorite of the White House, the California Energy Commission and auto makers, methanol is popular because it can be readily distributed and requires few vehicle modifications. Importantly, it is about to be substituted for chronically dirty-burning diesel fuel in the fuel-efficient, durable engines that power California’s trucks and buses.
Federal law favors methanol by giving auto makers fuel-economy “credits” on their regular cars for the first 100,000 “flex-fuel” cars each builds. President Bush wants to remove the ceiling.
But there are obstacles to methanol development. Methanol threatens the oil industry’s market share, is toxic and would require tens of billions of dollars in new refineries. What’s more, it would probably be most economically produced in the unstable Middle East.
* Compressed natural gas has gained favor after massive lobbying by natural gas producers--which include many oil companies--and by gas utilities, notably Southern California Gas Co. Cleaner than methanol, it has the existing production and pipeline infrastructure that methanol lacks. But it requires cumbersome fuel tanks that make it best suited to trucks and commercial fleets.
GM has jumped into the production of natural gas-powered trucks, again to meet California standards. And broad experience with natural gas vehicles in Italy, Australia and Canada seems to have eased safety concerns about fuel-tank explosions.
“You know what traffic is like in Italy?” asks Joseph Colucci, head of fuels research at General Motors Research Laboratories. “If it isn’t gonna happen in Italy, it isn’t gonna happen anywhere.”
* Ethanol--like methanol, an alcohol fuel--is produced with the help of some much-criticized U.S. subsidies won by the corn lobby. Service stations in the Midwest routinely sell an ethanol-gasoline blend. The Bush Administration’s National Energy Strategy talks optimistically of research breakthroughs that will slash ethanol’s costs.
At the moment, methanol is expensive compared with gasoline, natural gas is cheap and ethanol’s true price is buried somewhere under the subsidies--equations that could change with supply and demand.
A new factor that also will be taken into account is the increasingly detailed knowledge of regional air-quality problems and of engine emissions. Some talk about developing not just “Los Angeles cars,” but “Denver cars” or “Phoenix cars” or “New York cars”--all calibrated and fueled to address local environmental conditions.
The sometimes conflicting demands all point to a need for numerous fuels and engines--combinations that are being examined as single systems for the first time. And that’s probably a good idea, anyway, as the nation laments its dependence on the oil riches of the tempestuous Middle East.
At FEV of America Inc. in Southfield, Mich., engineers are developing turbo-charged “flex-fuel” engines and two-stroke engines that will run on pure methanol. They are converting diesel truck and bus engines to run on methanol blends and natural gas. And they are pursuing such hot current technologies as variable-valve timing, said to be worth a 15% gain in fuel economy.
The company, a subsidiary of a West German firm, uses fiber optics to peer into cylinders as the engine runs.
“We’re trying to push the state of the art,” says Gary W. Rogers, president of FEV. “But the engine has been here for 100 years. There might be something under a rock that’s a magic new technology, but I’m always a little skeptical.”
Rogers figures that various realistic engine improvements could account for fuel economy gains of 10-15% in five years, not counting progress elsewhere in the car or changes in customer demand.
The question of what can be accomplished with the gasoline-powered car has once again transfixed Washington lawmakers, who are debating a bill requiring each auto company to increase its average fuel economy 40% by the year 2001. (See accompanying story).
On the heels of the first energy crisis in the mid-1970s, Congress first enacted a fuel-economy law that pushed auto makers to downsize their cars and eventually double their fleet fuel efficiency. But now, as then, there is little political interest in using high gas taxes to foster sales of gas-miser cars.
The President’s new energy strategy rejects the big gasoline-tax hike economists deem necessary to discourage people from driving, saying the oil savings are outweighed by the penalty imposed on the poor. A 50-cent-a-gallon tax increase would cut oil consumption by about 500,000 barrels a day, analysts say--less than 10%.
How about an extra dollar a gallon? That would still leave gasoline cheaper than in Europe or Japan, where high taxes are an important reason that cars are more efficient and auto-related energy research is further along.
Even those who think such taxes would work--if there were built-in protections for the less affluent--do not detect the political will to impose them.
“I can see phasing in a steep gasoline tax over five or 10 years, completely offset by a cut in Social Security taxes, and exempting alternative fuels,” says a key congressional energy staff expert. “It’s a dynamite program that you’d think Democrats would accept. But I can’t get my boss to listen.”
Yet without dearer gasoline, evidence shows, there will be little incentive for motorists to buy the most fuel-efficient cars. An executive at Honda, which is introducing a new Civic next year said to get 65 miles per gallon on the highway, told a Senate committee last month that the little car will probably account for less than 1% of sales.
Fuel economy, he explained, is a low priority for car buyers.
Yet if the federal government fails to act on automotive fuel efficiency, it might find itself trailing California regulators in that arena, too.
Gov. Pete Wilson, a supporter of tighter fuel-economy standards, says that absent federal action, he will ask Congress to clear the way for California to set its own fuel economy standards, just as the state has been empowered to impose tighter emissions standards.
With such control, the state might require auto makers to withhold some models from the California market or do whatever marketing handiwork is necessary to sell the necessary “mix” of cars to achieve higher overall fuel economy in their California fleets.
A more likely result, says Charles Imbrecht, chairman of the California Energy Commission, is enactment of a so-called “feebate” plan like one nearly approved in the state last year. Under such a plan--which apparently requires a federal go-ahead--the state would charge a fee to people who buy less fuel-efficient cars and give rebates to those who buy fuel-stingy ones.
