Ecologist Amory Lovins's "supercar" concept may represent the biggest change since the microchip.
For a man whose mission in life is teaching society to save energy, Amory Lovins burns an awful lot of his own. He is constantly on the move, talking fast, writing fast, lecturing fast. "I'll be at the Commerce Department in the morning, the White House in the afternoon," he says in response to an interview request. "Maybe we can fit something in at two." To listen to Lovins, a widely published energy consultant, is to encounter rapid-fire sound bites that might as well be spewing from a tape recorder whose speed's been jacked up. These are bites rich in facts and figures, flavored with a turn of certainty.
What you remember most about Lovins are the surprising angles from which he comes at things, and above all the metaphors, the crystallizing phrases. They catch the imagination by reshaping the way you think. And they may be this energy guru's ultimate legacy. For he is not in the utility business, he is not in the automobile business; he is in the perspective business.
The term for which Lovins is most famous is negawatt. It suggests that saving a unit of energy has the same importance as generating a unit of energy – and with far fewer negative side-effects. The concept left an imprint on utility companies, many of whom hire Lovins and his staff as consultants. By extension, the negawatt points to a future Lovins envisions, a future in which the electrical grid exists not so much for the delivery of power from central generators to individual users, but as a system of exchange not unlike the telephone network.
One phrase Lovins favors these days, although he devised it nearly two decades ago, is "the oil field under Detroit." It refers to his negawatt idea about the potential savings that could be wrought by building better automobiles. "Drilling for oil under Detroit" translates to building a better car – a "super car" or "ultralight hybrid" that can save five million barrels of oil a day.
After some two decades striving to reshape electric utility policy and make individuals aware of how to save energy at home, Lovins is taking on the automobile. He is preaching a new generation of super cars – as different from today's cars as microcomputers are from typewriters – that will get anywhere from 150 to 300 miles per gallon, saving in the process perhaps half of the three billion barrels of oil used annually in the US by cars and light trucks.
Lovins believes that super cars can help us cut 20 percent of our CO2 and other emissions that contribute to the so-called greenhouse effect, and at the same time save the world US$200 billion a year.
Lovins is not talking about creating tiny cars, but rather vehicles offering "the interior space of a Chevy Corsica in the exterior dimensions of a Miata." He has named his mother of all ideal cars the Gaia. Built from lightweight and expensive material, it would weigh abut 1,200 pounds (a little less than GM's experimental Ultralite), have half the drag of today's typical car, and get about 150 miles per gallon. His advanced designs go even further: the Ultima could weigh as little as 800 pounds and get about 300 miles per gallon.
Of course some in Detroit have an answer to Lovins's visions: humbug. What's the point of saving gas, they point out, when gas is so cheap? "You can't justify premium materials when gasoline is a buck a gallon," points out Richard Klimisch, vice president of engineering affairs at the American Automobile Manufacturers Association. "The consumer just isn't going to pay those prices. The kinds of things that Amory is talking about aren't even happening in Europe, where gas is five bucks a gallon."
The Sixty-Watt Dog
That dog is a bull terrier named Nanuq who lives at Lovins's Rocky Mountain Institute, in Snowmass, Colorado. Lovins's wife and partner, L. Hunter Lovins, is president of the institute. Lovins calculates energy consumption so scrupulously that he has even figured out how much Nanuq's canine metabolism burns: a constant sixty watts, a pittance compared to the energy buzzing through the institute's edifice. That building, itself constructed to illustrate exemplary forms of conservation, does more than conserve energy, it creates it. There are 16-inch-thick walls, special windows sandwiching argon gas, and solar panels on the roof; combined, these features give power back to the local utility on weekends – Lovins gets a check each quarter for the power the institute generates.
The Rocky Mountain Institute – in whose lobby sits an iguana beneath a banana tree – is the green think tank. With a budget of nearly US$2 million and a staff of 35 full-timers, it is supported by contributions, consulting fees, and in small part by the earnings of its subsidiary, E Source, which provides advice on improving electrical efficiency to hundreds of utilities, businesses, and governments. The institute produces technical papers and specific plans for improved agriculture, architecture, and regional planning – in virtually any area where energy is a factor. staffers at the Rocky Mountain Institute advised Wal-Mart on its new Eco-Store, which uses passive solar heating and other ideas.
Amory Lovins is one part Buckminster Fuller, one part Ralph Nader, and one part Mr. Peabody. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, he moves easily from the circles of academia to those of science, business, and government. He can field utility executives and scientists like Paul MacCready, creator of ultralight aircraft and automobiles, as easily as he can Ken Baker, vice president of the research center at GM. Lovins delights in pointing out that saving energy also means saving money – an equation that tends to bridge the gap between Sierra Club types and Fortune 500 executives. Cartoonists would have to scrap their standard electric globes if they wanted to represent Lovins's ideas – only halogen bulbs (the small, flat, elegant gadgets that save energy and last longer) could symbolize his epiphanies.
Lovins is less involved in designing specific vehicles than in shaping ideal specifications. The auto project team, which also includes Rocky Mountain Institute staffers John Barnett and Eric Toler, builds no prototypes and tests no engines, but its reports are built on specific engineering tests from around the world.
Ready for Reinvention
In turning his attention to the car, Lovins reflects a widely held sense – or at least a suspicion – that the automobile is ready for reinvention. The Clinton administration's "clean car" consortium, pushing Detroit to produce cheaper, safer, and more fuel-efficient vehicles using some technology from the military, underlines the new national atmosphere. So does state legislation in California demanding new thinking of manufacturers: by 1998, 2 percent of vehicles sold in the state must be zero-emission vehicles – essentially, the law mandates electric cars.
Lovins's rise was first signaled in 1976, when an article of his in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs charted an alternative energy policy he called the "soft path." In 1982 he set up the Rocky Mountain Institute, which, in years to follow, was funded in part by consulting fees earned from utilities eager, in those days of rising oil prices, to show themselves responsible and innovative.
Today Lovins reaches a wide audience; his ideas have shown up in publications as diverse as Popular Science and Good Housekeeping. In 1993, he won a $280,000, five-year MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. He appears before Congressional committees and at such international gatherings as the 1993 meeting of the European Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy in Rungstedgard, Denmark, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual convention.
The Rocky Mountain Institute is advising some twenty organizations, from car companies to utilities and venture capitalists, on the subject of super cars.
Having bested the utility execs, Lovins has now put the auto moguls on alert. Detroit, he argues, must eat its young, must move beyond its own current best designs in anticipation of the coming super cars. Even auto makers concede that some change in the basic nature of the car is imminent. It will be sort of like what Nicolas Hayek did with time when he created Swatch. The analogy is apt: Hayek has formed a joint venture with Mercedes to create a Swatchmobile, a responsible city car for Europe, combining Mercedes engineering with Swatch marketing. Such a reinvention of the car would have the impact of replacing post-and-beam construction with the balloon frame, or the cavalry with tanks, or tubes with transistors.
The Logic
The Lovins pitch begins by pointing out how much fuel is wasted in today's vehicles. Only 2 percent actually hauls the driver – the rest is wasted in pushing through the air, overcoming friction, or moving the vehicle and its engine. To alter such statistics, Lovins advocates cutting weight (by using synthetic composites), cutting aerodynamic drag, and cutting energy lost to the friction between tire and road: what engineers call "rolling resistance." (Such changes are hardly heresy in Detroit: car manufacturers cut their miles-per-gallon averages over the last decade by replacing old-style bias tires with modern radials.) Other key elements are "hybrid" power plants combining small diesel or gasoline engines with electrical motors or mechanical systems to capture the kinetic energy lost in braking – that force that causes your coffee cup to fly off the console at red lights.
The key elements of the super car are the combination of fiber composite bodies with hybrid engines. They are as large and powerful as contemporary gasoline vehicles. Combining these factors leads to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, Lovins argues. With these technologies "one plus two equals ten," he likes to say. "Adding hybrid electric drive increases efficiency by about half. Building a car with an ultralight body doubles its efficiency. But doing both together can boost a car's efficiency tenfold."
The key is synergy, which for once means something quite specific and statistical. The lighter the car, the smaller the engine necessary, for instance, and the smaller the engine, the less weight. These magnify the advantage of each. Furthermore, Lovins is not afraid to take on conventional wisdom. He wants to jolt people out of an overfocus on the electric car. According to Lovins, California's zero-emission vehicles don't address the problem that emissions are not eliminated, but simply moved "upstream" to the plants that generate the electricity to charge their batteries. But Lovins credits the zero-emissions vehicle requirements with helping force electrical motors and batteries to a new level of technical maturity, essential for the hybrid systems he favors.
Composites – fiberglass, carbon fibers, and similar materials – are crucial components in Lovins's ideas. So far, most auto makers seem wedded to metal and willing to consider only the idea of replacing steel with aluminum. The shift from building with steel to building with composites may seem radical, but not to Lovins, who points out that from 1920 to 1926 the auto industry moved from 85 percent wood to 70 percent steel in producing car bodies.
Lovins doesn't champion some specific improvement in batteries or motors; he looks to various technologies whose combined effects are much more dramatic than their individual ones. An example is so-called "idle-off" hybrid power plants that turn off when the car idles, then switch on again when a red light turns green. Volkswagen is exploring such a hybrid system to power a possible version of its Beetle-inspired Concept 1. At first such hybrids seem unduly complex: they run both on gasoline-eating engines and batteries. Lovins points out that internal combustion engines still pack a lot more energy per pound of fuel than electrics do per pound of battery. The electrical part of the mechanism can store power for acceleration, where the internal combustion engine is least efficient. In effect, the electric system replaces the heavy and fuel-wasting transmission systems of traditional internal combustion cars.
Lovins does not see improving the auto in isolation. He advocates mass transportation, bicycles, and other means of reducing automobile use entirely. He advances the notion of "feebates," a combination of federal incentive and disincentive payments to encourage more efficient vehicles. These would go beyond gas-guzzler taxes to provide positive payments for the purchase of more efficient cars.
Researchers at Detroit's Big Three may listen to Lovins ("It's part of our job to reach for the future," says Ray Day, Ford's assistant manager of environmental and safety communications), but their CEOs worry more about today's market share. They still fight against every tenth of a digit increase in the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards for fleet fuel efficiency.
Whither Detroit?
But, Lovins says, such factors as the US's "clean car" initiative have helped foster a "leapfrog" mentality in Detroit.
"All the imaginative engineers are coming out of the woodwork," he says.
Ultralight hybrids, Lovins has written, "are not just another kind of car. They will probably be made and sold in completely new ways. Their industrial and market structure will be as different as computers are from typewriters, fax machines from telexes, and satellite pages from the Pony Express."
Auto making is the world's largest industry, and one in which change could have various side effects. The new super cars, for instance, might be produced only on demand, and maintained the way computers are today: by remote diagnostics and on-site service. But such concerns are still entirely theoretical. Today's car companies are as likely to build super cars as train companies were to build model Ts. Not so, retorts Ford's Day: "We are working on a super car. We're not going to rest on our laurels."
Who will be first to build a super car? Many cars offer one or two of the key technologies Lovins identifies; Esoro, a Swiss firm, combines several. Perhaps the "clean car" initiative, designed to bring military technology to Detroit, will drive innovation, but its goals are far more modest than Lovins's.
Because many of the technologies Lovins advocates use off-the-shelf equipment, they may require little in the way of economies of scale. (It takes thousands of stampings from a set of metal fender shaping dies, for instance, to amortize their initial high cost.)
By 1998 or so, Lovins expects super cars will be in production. "Who will do it best," he says, "is the imponderable."
When such cars are built, it may be by some company no one has ever heard of, some Zilog or Commodore of the auto world. Perhaps it will be Daihatsu, the company that produced a strange-looking electric prototype called DASH. Or perhaps the company that gave us the Beetle will give us its successor – a hybrid, low-fuel-consumption, low-cost small car in the form of the Concept 1. Perhaps it will be Mercedes and Swatch or a company like Renaissance Cars Inc. in Florida. Maybe these are the mammals scurrying around the dinosaurs' feet, as Rocky Mountain Institute staffer Eric Toler puts it. They might get stomped on. But they might take over the turf.
