Can Chrysler dazzle both the ecology fanatics and the gearheads with a LeMans race car based on once-supersecret technology made suddenly available by the collapse of the defense industry?
In a world of ever-tightening auto emissions standards, auto makers are racing to redesign their cars to be ecologically correct while still retaining the loyalty of hardcore gearheads. The Chrysler Corporation moved quickly this year to outflank its rivals - by turning ecological correctness from dreadful duty into something sexy, powerful, and fun. The company's strategy is embodied in the Patriot, a very low-exhaust-emissions, 200-mph, hybrid electric race car with which it plans to win next June's 24 Hours of LeMans in the north of France.
LeMans is the most prestigious endurance auto race in the world. For a manufacturer, winning it ranks above the Indianapolis 500, the Formula One championship, or the Daytona 500. For Chrysler, however, Patriot is not just a racing program, it is "first and foremost a technology program," insists Thomas Kizer, executive engineer for Chrysler's low-profile Liberty and Technical Affairs advanced research organization. Racing, he adds, merely provides "the pressure cooker for the technology."
For Chrysler, the third-largest US auto maker, making a big international splash is a major piece of what the Patriot program is all about. To ride out the ups and downs of the US auto market, the company badly needs a larger presence in Europe and the rest of the world. Winning LeMans with a breakthrough hybrid race car would provide instant glamour and dramatically boost technical credibility. In short, the Patriot program is a corporate image campaign.
But the story doesn't stop there. The Patriot will be powered by parts and pieces that until very recently were top-secret components of cutting-edge defense research projects, including the Star Wars missile defense system and the Seawolf advanced nuclear attack submarine. Perfectly legally, Chrysler's technology has been developed with millions of dollars in US taxes and purchased at post-Cold War bargain prices.
The Big Three auto makers and the federal government are now tied together in the Partnership for a New Generation Vehicle (known as the "Supercar" research program), a massive effort to provide US-owned car makers with the technology to produce traditionally sized vehicles with extremely low emissions and ultra-efficient fuel usage. "Every day we see new things from the defense labs where they have declassified item X or Y," says Al Turner, Patriot general manager and a veteran of special programs at both Chrysler and Ford. Most cutting-edge technology, Turner notes, has never appeared in conventional technical literature or patent applications.
In recent years, once-arrogant, defense-bankrolled labs like Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos have participated in what looked like technology bake sales. One invitation-only event was held in the General Motors Corporation Design Auditorium four years ago: in dozens of booths under the GM dome, eager researchers from government facilities, like so many used car dealers, buttonholed bemused auto suppliers.
At the time, most auto executives feigned only mild interest, but the last two years have seen contracts for everything from crash simulations on federal supercomputers to weapons-lab studies of manufacturing methods for lightweight materials. And the federal researchers are becoming better salesmen.
"If you want to see the neat stuff, you can go look for it at the patent office, but do you think it's going to be there? Hell no!" Turner says, waving a notebook filled with brief summaries of available but unpatented defense technology. Chrysler says it will eventually turn over most Patriot research data to the Supercar effort. But for now it plans to win LeMans.
Patriot's relatively conventional sports-car chassis will be powered by a completely unproven hybrid electric powertrain. First shown in January 1994 at the North American International Auto Show in its since-shelved Mark I version, it will defy racing tradition by débuting at LeMans. Chrysler is convinced it can dazzle both the ecology movement and the tire-smoke-sniffing gearheads of the world using once supersecret technology suddenly available and cheap following the collapse of the defense industry. The Patriot is a calculated risk. Until late this year, it will exist more in theory than in fact. The Mark I prototype only saw the road during a coasting photo-op.
Patriot is not a true electric car. As a hybrid, it evades the single major stumbling block of pure electric vehicles: a battery capacity that prevents even smallish cars from traveling much beyond 100 miles without a recharge. Small onboard engines acting as generators eliminate that problem but produce some hydrocarbon emissions. Chrysler has avoided the battery problem altogether in the Patriot design by using a flywheel (conceptually similar to a child's gyroscope) to store energy, rather than traditional, heavy chemical batteries like the ones found in electric cars.
The car body is being built by British race-car constructor Reynard (of Indianapolis fame) in Bicester, England, according to the rules used by both LeMans and the International Motor Sports Association, a US racing organization that runs events such as the 24 Hours of Daytona. Patriot will have a fairly conventional open-cockpit design not unlike current racing model Ferraris. It will make extensive use of exotic materials like carbon fiber but use proven racing suspension technology.
For the guts of the Patriot engine, Chrysler tapped SatCon Technology Corp., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Quietly spun out of MIT's Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in 1985, the 120-employee engineering research firm went public in late 1992. The company specializes in work on advanced flywheels, turbines, exotic electric motors, and magnetic levitation applied to machinery for semiconductor manufacturing. For Patriot, SatCon is developing the powertrain - the engine, transmission, and fuel system. SatCon's past contracts have involved such secretive efforts as the Navy's US$2 billion Seawolf high-performance nuclear attack submarine and parts of Star Wars. David Eisenhaure, president and CEO of SatCon, says that the pieces of technology going into the race car were originally designed for defense and NASA projects.
The ultimate test of the car's performance lies in how successfully the Patriot powertrain is engineered. "Lots of companies out there are doing math modeling of hybrid vehicles," explains Chrysler's Kizer. "But no one has ever put one together to do the job we're expecting it to do." SatCon is working on the details of the Patriot powertrain not only in its Cambridge headquarters but in an unmarked one-story suburban business complex a few miles from Chrysler's stunning new $1 billion headquarters, where SatCon collaborates with Chrysler engineers. In addition to Patriot, its researchers are working on technologies like fuel cells as future automotive power sources.
The basic theory of the Patriot powertrain is fairly straightforward. Vaporized liquid natural gas (LNG) is burned to spin turbo alternators that will run at varying speeds. One of the alternators runs up to 60,000 rpm, while a second can spin close to 100,000 rpm. The turbo alternators generate electricity, and power not being used by the electric drive motor to power the car is stored as rotational energy in the flywheel. To reach top speeds of over 200 mph, the electric drive motor will draw power from both the alternators and the flywheel. If you're around a Patriot prototype, there's no mistaking the sheer muscle of the engine: it whines like a 747 idling on the runway.
One of the Patriot team's biggest concerns is ensuring that its high-powered hybrid is safe. The slightest accident in front of thousands of watchers from around the world could destroy Chrysler's credibility and negate the thousands of hours and millions of dollars put into the Patriot effort. Electric cars can be dangerous. At a race in Phoenix three years ago an electric car charged by experimental batteries crashed, triggering a bromine gas spill. The driver suffered what turned out to be relatively minor respiratory problems, but the crash set off a brief panic. No one was certain how much of a threat the gas, which quickly dissipated, represented. In the case of Patriot, engineers are plotting ways to deal safely with both the supercold LNG fuel and the massive amounts of electricity that will be available in the car.
To get up to speed on the complexities of fooling with LNG, Chrysler has been consulting with Los Angeles-based Cryogenics Experts Inc. (CEXI). Another Star Wars-funded company, CEXI has designed space-shuttle ground support fueling systems. CEXI experts say that what they have proposed for the Patriot is perfectly safe. The supercold gas will be loaded from tanks, using insulated hoses, at about the same speed as traditional gasoline. When LNG isn't handled with appropriate care, the frigid fuel causes water from surrounding air to condense, which in turn creates mini storm clouds. Chrysler's Turner is confident that he has the LNG under control. "You hear talk about fueling vapor but you won't see any storm clouds," he says. Then he adds, with a chuckle, "We might want to do that just to make it spectacular."
One of Chrysler's own point men on the Patriot project is Lee Carducci, manager of powertrain integration, who's also involved with the auto maker's equally exotic partnerships with Italian high-performance auto boutiques Maserati and Lamborghini. "I'm no big fan of Ronald Reagan, but he gave us our flywheel," grins Carducci, 32, saluting Star Wars. The flywheel he's referring to is a carbon fiber disc that spins in a near vacuum at speeds up to 56,000 rpm. It will operate like a traditional battery and a generator in a car. Components are being tested individually in a specially modified dynamometer cell in Chrysler's now largely abandoned old engineering facility in Highland Park, Michigan, where the flywheel has been the focus of suspicious study. "People have spun discs at high speeds in vacuums in laboratories," says Kizer, "but we're trying to bolt one into a car." Among other things, the flywheel has to be mounted on gimbals to isolate its gyroscopic effects from the handling of a speeding car turning corners.
Patriot's electricity levels are something else again. "The system controls about 800 volts," says Carducci, who is more comfortable with Formula One V-12 engines. "It's got about 864 amps. The power controller is transferring enough power to handle 300 homes in a subdivision." Carducci jokes he initially thought Patriot would need a transformer "20-feet high," but was impressed when SatCon came in with a box only 2 feet long and 9 inches high. "They said it was something just off the Seawolf program." The stored electricity requires great caution on the part of those working around areas such as the flywheel, for example, which will be spinning at very high speeds even when the car is stopped.
As various powertrain components demonstrate their individual reliability in the lab, they will be linked to each other mechanically for further testing. Eventually, the entire powertrain will be run by a computer-driven simulation of a typical racing lap at LeMans that will put it through the stresses of rapid acceleration and deceleration of the 24-hour race.
Because of the intense vibrations a car encounters at racing speeds, the Patriot team is subjecting to particular scrutiny three separate de-ionized water-cooling systems that handle the heat generated by the power controller, turbo alternator, and various bearings and stators. De-ionized water doesn't conduct electricity. Heat from one of the cooling systems will be used to vaporize the cryogenic fuel.
Using the noise and smoke of the auto-racing circuit to demonstrate ecologically correct electric motors is an ambitious gamble for Chrysler, especially since most automotive performance enthusiasts tend to view electric cars as thinly disguised golf carts. But this year's Chrysler team seems irrevocably intent on winning LeMans in 1995. "People think green is boring," says Chrysler's French-born engineering vice president, Francois Castaing, who is fond of challenging those who raise eyebrows over the unorthodox effort. "We're hoping to keep green and fun together, and convince people green cars can be as powerful as any of the world's traditionally designed racing cars."
Nobody outside the top ranks at Chrysler really knows how much all this might end up costing. The only public number is a $4.1 million contract to SatCon, but scores of highly paid engineers have already been enlisted to work full time on the Patriot project. To win LeMans in the mid '60s, Ford reportedly spent more than $11.5 million, and bought an entire hotel to house the army of people involved. "We'll spend whatever's necessary," pronounces Castaing, who seems certain Chrysler's team of engineering alchemists can mix racing, the green movement, and the defense establishment to create a revolutionary car for the future.
A win for Chrysler's ultra-low-emissions Patriot could enhance Chrysler's image both with the speed-crazed high performance crowd and with fans of more ecologically friendly vehicles. But a humiliating loss could leave the company consigned to technology's gag reel, remembered by future historians along with the guys on ice skates strapping rockets to their backs. Despite some initial skepticism, many racing enthusiasts are intrigued and even fascinated by the Patriot. "The whole thing sounds a little goofy," said one Indy racer, "but I'd drive it in a minute. The Patriot could produce a new generation of race cars. And a new generation of fans."
