The Auto’s Road to the Future

Scientists and engineers around the world are creating radical technologies that could revolutionize the automotive industry.

But there’s a catch. No matter how dramatically the family car is altered, it’s supposed to act, look and perform about the same as the cars of today, but with equal convenience, far greater efficiency and far lower emissions.

In a sense, we are on the cusp of a revolution that isn’t supposed to feel like one--or cost like one, either. But rest assured that the car you buy in the decades ahead will be a very different beast.

The internal-combustion engine that has been the mainstay throughout the history of the auto industry will undoubtedly be around for a while, but it is undergoing something of a transformation itself. Experts predict that its role will diminish as time passes. It has sealed its own fate by leaving too much room for improvement. For example, it needs a lot of power some of the time, thus making it inefficient most of the time.

“You’ve got an engine that is designed for the 10% of the time that you are accelerating,” said Ed Wall, coordinator of the U.S. Department of Energy’s role in a joint federal-industry program called Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. “So you’re driving at 17% efficiency.”

Those performance figures have led to a deplorable waste of natural resources, along with the kind of air pollution that prompted California to lead the nation in mandating “ultra-low” emission standards.

Although there is considerable debate about the exact course this revolution will take, many experts agree that the immediate future should see significant improvements in the internal-combustion engine through “direct-injection” fuel systems and more. Unlike the fuel system used in today’s cars, which deliver gasoline when the piston is on its down stroke, a direct-injection system forces fuel into the combustion chamber at the precise time needed for maximum combustion efficiency.

But simply improving the gasoline engine won’t satisfy the needs of the future, and many experts believe hybrid vehicles will play an increasingly important role in the next decade. These vehicles will draw the best from two different worlds, relying on a combination of high-tech gasoline or diesel engines for clout and electric motors for efficiency during normal driving conditions.

Hybrids can recharge their batteries while operating, thus vastly improving the range that now limits pure electric vehicles.

But as promising as hybrids may seem, many experts view them as a transitional phase in the march toward the true car of the future, which will be powered by fuel cells.

Long the dream of automotive engineers, fuel cells use hydrogen to generate electricity through an electrochemical process. Hydrogen is broken down into protons and electrons, and the electrons are channeled into a stream that provides the electricity to run the motor. The protons then combine with oxygen to form water, the only waste product.

Such a benign system could satisfy all our needs, but until recently, it faced a nearly impossible hurdle. Where does a body go to fill up the fuel tank with hydrogen?

There is no mass distribution system in place that could supply the hydrogen needed to fuel vast numbers of such vehicles. And the creation of such a system without a ready market is out of the question.

But you can get gasoline just about anywhere, and researchers have found the answer to their dilemma right under their noses. The Department of Energy, working with Arthur D. Little of Cambridge, Mass., and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, announced what it called a “major breakthrough” last year that would allow the existing infrastructure to support vehicles powered by fuel cells.

The researchers found that hydrogen could be extracted from fuels ranging from gasoline to methanol. With an onboard processing unit, the driver of a fuel-cell car could pull into any gas station and fill up.

The waste from the conversion process would include about half as much carbon dioxide as a typical car emits today, but other pollutants, such as particulates and nitrous oxide, would be almost negligible.

Patrick Davis, a program manager for fuel-cell technology at the Department of Energy, said such a vehicle would go at least twice as far on a gallon of gas, with far lower emissions, because the gas would be used only to produce hydrogen to run the fuel cell. Davis added that such a vehicle would easily meet the strict controls adopted by California last month.

“That’s the Holy Grail we’re all reaching for,” Davis said.

The new process removes “fuel infrastructure as an issue” because owners would be able to get fuel just as easily as they can buy gasoline today, Davis said. “That’s pretty critical.”

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There are still some technological hurdles to be overcome. The processing unit that extracts hydrogen from other fuels is too big, thus requiring too much space on the vehicle, for example, but Davis says that’s chiefly because it is first-generation technology designed more for research than for practical deployment.

The ability to extract hydrogen from other fuels paves the way for the introduction of fuel-cell vehicles within a decade or so. Once there are thousands of such vehicles on the road, the infrastructure will probably change to accommodate them.

In time, Davis said, it might be possible to buy hydrogen as easily as it is to buy gasoline today, if enough cars with fuel cells are on the road, and that would eliminate even the carbon dioxide emissions.

In the meantime, other technologies will undoubtedly come on line, including lithium-ion batteries that could offer performance in an electric car that would rival that of an internal-combustion engine.

All of these innovations face technological barriers, but progress is being made today on many fronts. Before long, the car you may be driving really won’t be your father’s Oldsmobile.

Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at leedye@compuserve.com.