Business Insight Zone

This New Yorker article — typically smart, given that it’s written by Elizabeth Kolbert* — reviews a couple of current books that address the directions the car industry might take, and why it isn’t yet taking them:

Running on Fumes: Does the “car of the future” have a future?

The review sketches some of the multiple challenges confronting Detroit’s Big Three: climate change, ever-better competitors, financial hardship, and so on. But for thinking about the future — or the potential right-now-this-instant — of the American car business, check out this Fast Company article:

Motorhead Messiah:
Johnathan Goodwin can get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental, cut emissions by 80%, and double the horsepower. Does the car business have the guts to follow him?

The article is chockablock with the Goodwin’s successful experiments, which might not be ready for mass production, but which should make Detroit (and the world’s other car makers) sit up and listen. Do read the whole thing, but here are some choice tidbits:

Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that’s up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it’ll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin’s secret ingredient. Whenever the truck’s juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it’ll recharge a set of “supercapacitor” batteries in seconds. This means the H3’s electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What’s more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it’s time to fill the tank, he’ll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease–as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double–from 300 to 600. . . .

Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. . . .

Goodwin’s work proves that a counterattack [by Detroit on its overseas competitors] is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that’s also clean, well, he’s there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways . . .

Goodwin’s feats of engineering have become gradually more visible over the past year. Last summer, Imperium Renewables contacted MTV’s show Pimp My Ride about creating an Earth Day special in which Goodwin would convert a muscle car to run on biodiesel. The show chose a ‘65 Chevy Impala, and when the conversion was done, he’d doubled its mileage to 25 mpg and increased its pull from 250 to 800 horsepower. . . .

“Most people try to make things more complicated than they are. . . . Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to.”

Maybe it’s not that simple, given that Detroit operates with realities — costs, scales of production — that don’t hamper Goodwin’s experimentation. But the inventor’s point is still apt: the Detroit car makers could do very much more in this vein than they now do. But they will only do it when they make the hard choice to move in that direction, instead of continuing in the ways that have brought them to the plight they’re in today.

Relevant Hoover’s profiles:

• General Motors
• Ford
• Chrysler

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* Recommendation: read Field Notes from a Catastrophe.