The vision of a practical electric car had floated like a poltergeist through the upper echelons of GM for decades. Billy Durant, GM's founder, was still buying up every available maker of horseless carriages in Michigan and beyond to make his unwieldy empire even bigger when the company, in 1912, produced an electric-powered truck. No thought was given at the time to the salubrious effects of electric vehicles on the air; the air was clean. The plan, instead, was to challenge gas-powered trucks. By then, as it turned out, the internal-combustion engine had all but ended the first golden era of the electric automobile.
Inventors had tinkered with battery-run cars since the 1840s, but the golden era, and the struggle for dominance between gas- and electric-powered cars, had begun in earnest at noon on June 11, 1895. That was when twenty-two horseless carriages set off from Versailles along France's poplar-bordered Route Nationale, headed from Paris to Bordeaux and back, for a widely publicized round-trip race of more than 700 miles. Most were fueled by gasoline, a few by steam, two by lead acid batteries. Charles Jeantaud, a Parisian carriage maker, drove an electric-powered surrey all the way to Bordeaux, exchanging battery packs along the way at prearranged stops; had he not suffered a hot rear bearing, he might have finished the course. Camille Jentzy's bullet-shaped "La Jamais Contente" took an early lead at 65 miles per hour, but discharged its batteries in less than an hour. Eight gasoline-powered and one steam-powered car made it back to the finish line; the winning car, gasoline fueled, rolled to the finish in 48 hours and 48 minutes, having traveled at an average speed of 14.4 miles per hour.
Though the race made clear their limited range, electrics were soon being produced with great success, particularly in America. Gas cars were loud, smoke-belching brutes whose cranks could snap up and knock a man senseless. Besides, they had gas, stored in tanks, right under a driver's seat. "You can't get people to sit on an explosion," observed Colonel Albert Pope, the largest maker of electric cars of the late 1890s. Steam cars were prone to explosions, too. Electrics were silent and clean, they had no cranks, and they ran slowly but reliably on city streets, which made them especially appealing to women--wealthy women whose husbands could buy them an electric for the small fortune of $3,000 so that they could more comfortably view the great houses of Newport, or shop along Broadway's Miracle Mile. Playing to that market, carmakers outfitted their newest models with running boards for liveried footmen, leather and brocade interiors, and cut-glass flower vases.
The electrics' range--few went more than 50 miles on a charge--grew more annoying as roads began to extend from the cities and touring became the new American adventure. Spare cans of fuel could be stowed aboard a gas car; electrics were too fragile for dirt roads, there was nowhere to plug them in, and recharging took a whole day. Touring was also very much a male endeavor, and the roar of gas cars, their ruggedness, even the challenge of cranking them were part of the sport. Advertisements for electrics stressed their appeal to women, and for this reason too, men eschewed them.
Still, for some time the outcome was unclear. In 1900, more electrics were sold in America than gas-powered cars. Despite the vogue for the latter, electrics were widely assumed to be the car of the future--as soon as their range problems could be resolved. So confident was Thomas Edison of their potential superiority that at the peak of his success, in his early fifties, he devoted a decade of his life and most of his fortune to a search for more effective battery elements than lead and acid. The nickel and iron pairing he settled on failed in cars, but led to the nickel and cadmium batteries in universal use today in flashlights and a hundred other devices.
In retrospect, the race was lost in 1908 when Henry Ford's Model T rolled off the first automotive assembly line at a working man's price of $850. Overnight, the Model T created a vast new market. Until 1912, electrics held their own smaller, high-end market. That year, though, Charles "Boss" Kettering's electric starter replaced Cadillac's crank. As its use spread to other models, even rich ladies found gas cars preferable to electrics. One by one, the electric carmakers of the day--Woods, Baker, Studebaker, Columbia, and others--sold their last models, mostly to stubborn dowagers who used them to ride in elegant silence the private roads of their great estates. As for GM's electric truck, sold with either lead acid or Edison's nickel-and-iron batteries, it was pulled out of production in 1916.
As old electrics languished in museums, the gas-powered automobile had a more profound effect on the world than any other invention of the twentieth century. Airplanes, telephones, and television might seem greater marvels, but the car redefined society itself. In America, it transformed established East Coast cities; forced a national network of roads; created suburbia; shaped the newer cities of the West; moved goods; accounted for 40 percent of the gross national product with a matrix of materials and processes unrivaled in their number and complexity; employed one in seven citizens and, not least, gave Americans most of their greatest pleasures: mobility, speed, fast food, drive-ins, the promise of freedom, and backseat romance.
By the late 1960s, though, smog had entered the language and settled ominously over America's cities, and automobiles were to blame for two-thirds of it. Over the next two decades, cars became nearly 95 percent cleaner, due to increasingly stringent state and federal standards. Yet ever more of them took to the roads, so that gains in air quality began to seem ephemeral while the country's addiction to foreign oil grew with alarming implications. In Southern California, where smog was at its worst, engineers, policy makers, and politicians struggled with how to resolve the dilemma. In January 1987, a few were startled to get help from a man who seemed more a part of the problem than the solution.
The inter-office envelope sent from Roger Smith's office in Detroit one early January day in 1987 to Howard Wilson, a vice president at GM-owned Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles, contained an invitation passed along from Australia. No note was appended to it, not even a scrawled word or two to indicate how Smith might feel about the enclosed. But Wilson would have warmed to it however it arrived.
The invitation was to join a first-time race across Australia, from north to south, Darwin to Adelaide, by purely solar-powered cars. While solar cars might never find a practical use--not even the most efficient solar cells imaginable would ever generate enough electricity to power a two-ton pickup--the race might show that the future for electric cars, designed more efficiently from what could be learned on solar cars, and packed with enough batteries to propel themselves without benefit of the sun, could be closer to a reality than most of the world imagined.
Close to retirement, Wilson was one of those rare older men who delight in the future, envisioning technological marvels without seeming to worry that they themselves might not be there to witness them. A solar car race intrigued him; it might also help him do the job he'd volunteered to take on eighteen months before when General Motors bought Hughes Aircraft from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for $5.7 billion. Despite Roger Smith's boast of the deal as a "lulu," GM's latest acquisition had come under harsh scrutiny from analysts and shareholders who asked what GM could gain by buying Hughes just as the aerospace industry was declining. Smith talked excitedly of space-age technology that might be transferred to automobiles, but no such transfer yet seemed apparent between a military contractor that spent billions on a single satellite, and a company that made cars by the millions. That was the job that Hughes's chairman and CEO Malcolm Currie had given Wilson: to see where the transfers might be.
A handmade solar car would be a far cry from putting Hughes technology into a new Chevrolet. But it would send the right signal, send it fast, and cost relatively little. Of course, GM's top executives would have to be assured a GM-Hughes solar car could win. Wilson thought he could make a pretty good case for optimism. Hughes made solar cell panels for satellites; no other company in the world knew the technology better. A lot of work, too, had been done at Hughes with batteries. Not with the everyday, lead acid variety, but with high-energy silver zinc packs. Silver zinc was too expensive and short-lived a battery pairing to be a serious prospect for cars, but for one very light car, in one six-day race, it might do the trick.
What Wilson needed was a skunkworks--a small, dedicated team outside the walls of either GM or Hughes that would know how to design and build a solar car, get it to the race on time, and win. One name kept coming up as Wilson checked around: AeroVironment, a small R&D firm in the San Gabriel valley founded by Paul MacCready.
Among engineers, MacCready was legend, a modern-day Wright brother and Leonardo da Vinci in one unassuming package. A Cal Techie whose fascination with aerodynamics had at one point pushed him to become the world's soaring champion, MacCready in 1977 had designed the Gossamer Condor, a pilot-pedaled flying machine of aluminum tubing, balsa wood, piano wire, and space-age plastic wrap, and sent it into the air to win an international prize for sustained human-powered flight. Two years later, a pilot had pedaled MacCready's Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel; in 1981, his sun-powered Solar Challenger had flown back the other way. By then, MacCready had been named Engineer of the Century by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. As it turned out, one of MacCready's best young engineers, Alec Brooks, had toyed with entering the Australian race himself, but realized he hadn't the funds to pursue it. He was very interested. And so was MacCready.
Emboldened, Wilson flew to Detroit one day in early March. Lloyd Reuss, as newly named head of North American car operations, was the man he had to win over. Brimming with enthusiasm, Wilson made his pitch. Reuss listened, said little, sat back, and frowned. "I don't see what a car race in Australia has to do with selling cars in the United States," he said. He was afraid GM would have to pass.
As Wilson left, chagrined, he noticed Bob Stempel at his desk in the adjacent office. Stempel had just been promoted to executive vice president of Truck and Bus, a title that included GM's overseas business. Perhaps, thought Wilson, GM's Australian operation, Holdens, might find more reason to back a solar car. Blithely, he asked if Stempel had a couple of minutes to spare, slipped in, and shut the door behind him. Fifteen minutes later, he emerged with Stempel's approval to spend $75,000 on a three-week feasibility study.
What, he wondered later, might have happened if Stempel had been away on business that day? Nothing, he felt, at least nothing in the manner and timing of what did happen. No Sunraycer, no Impact, no California mandate, no worldwide race to build electric cars.
Paul MacCready was the first to say he knew nothing about the auto industry in March 1987. Nor, for that matter, did any of the young engineering zealots he gathered to consider Wilson's challenge in the glass-walled offices of AeroVironment. But whatever design they chose would have more in common with MacCready's human-powered flying machines than anything out of Detroit. Like them, it would have to be as lightweight and aerodynamic as possible to make the greatest use of a modest energy source. Almost none of the materials used on a gas car would have any relevance here; all would be too heavy. Nor would any of the vehicle shapes that the team began to consider bear any similarity to standard automobiles.
Alec Brooks, assigned to head up the study, shared MacCready's love of aerodynamics and energy-efficient vehicles. A slightly built, intense introvert with two degrees in civil engineering, he had graduated from building model airplanes to sailplanes and extra-light bicycles. Brooks was MacCready's protégé. There were those who would say the two even looked like father and son, each so diffident, so cerebral, daydreaming in theoretical abstractions but building their visions as vehicles that rode, or flew, or in the case of Brooks's Flying Fish, skimmed pedal driven across the waves as the world's fastest human-powered watercraft.
Brooks knew that in the short history of solar cars, most had relied on some form of direct-current motor to channel the sun's energy to the wheels. The sun's energy was converted by solar cells into direct-current electricity that could be stored in a battery and simply passed to the motor as needed. But DC motors used so-called brushes--bits of carbon on either side of a copper cylinder called a commutator--that created friction, limited motor speed, and led to wear and tear.
Newer alternating-current motors did away with the brushes and commutator. Instead, current could be fed by electronic switches: no friction, far greater speed. AC motors were also lighter than their DC counterparts. The catch was that the DC current from the batteries had to be inverted, or "chopped," into alternating current for the motor. Whether an inverter could be made to do this for a solar car was unclear. Inverters to date were heavy things that sat on factory floors and enabled robots or machine tools to operate at variable speeds by supplying them with variable amounts of AC. A few small inverters had been attempted for electric cars--an engineer at GM named Paul Agarwal had made one in the 1960s for an EV called the Electrovair. But electronics then had been crude and too expensive, and Agarwal had given up in disgust. Brooks needed a new perspective, from some young, brash engineer not afraid to think creatively. For that, he knew just whom to call.
Brooks had first met Alan Cocconi at Cal Tech, where the two spent much of their time in the university workshop, Brooks building human-powered motion machines, Cocconi crafting ever more ambitious, remote-controlled planes. As a student, Cocconi had earned mediocre grades. After college, he had worked as a freelance consultant in analog electronics,* acquiring neither fame nor wealth. Yet among the engineers of AeroVironment, Cocconi's was the mind to match. In analog electronics he seemed to have no equal. In any other field of engineering, all he needed was a bit of time to quiz the resident experts before getting up to speed. He wasn't a team player, and to Brooks's annoyance, would not be persuaded to join AeroVironment full-time, or even to take an office there. But as a freelancer, he was willing to help.
Cocconi thought he could design a DC to AC inverter light enough for Sunraycer. He thought he could make it work in reverse, too, to employ a nifty concept called regenerative braking. When the driver took his foot off the accelerator and the wheels began to slow, they would feed mechanical energy back into the motor, which now turned in reverse, acting as a generator. The generator would send the energy as AC electricity back through the inverter, which reformed it as DC and stored it in the battery pack. Regen, as the engineers called it, thus recouped energy even while acting as a brake. Sunraycer would need front disc brakes as well, but most of the braking could be regen.
On March 26, Brooks, MacCready, and Wilson went to Detroit to present their design for a solar car utterly unlike the awkward, flat-panel-on-wheels kind that had dominated solar races of the past. Theirs was teardrop-shaped, which made it far more aerodynamic, with a Cocconi invention called a peak power tracker that enabled the car's batteries and motor to draw optimum power from even those solar cells not fully exposed to the sun.
Bob Stempel, whose vote would decide the matter, had a revealing reaction to it. To him, the strongest appeal of the Sunraycer project was as a teaching tool. Why not make two cars, he suggested, one for the race, one as backup; twice as many schoolchildren could see it when the race was done. Brooks breathed a sigh of relief. That was the kind of question he wanted to hear.
When the twenty-three entries rolled off at the starting gun through the streets of Darwin on November 1, Sunraycer almost immediately took the lead with a speed of 60 miles per hour and never surrendered it. By the sixth day, as Sunraycer streaked across the finish line in Adelaide, it could claim to have had no breakdowns other than the fully expected stops for three flat tires. Indeed, MacCready would conclude that the car's one design flaw was too few flats. If the team had used tires with thinner tread, he reckoned, the diminished rolling friction would have shaved an hour from Sunraycer's finishing time of 44 hours and 54 minutes, more than compensating for a half dozen more tire-changing stops of about two minutes each. Such were the modest regrets in a nearly perfect race, run at an average speed of 41.6 miles per hour and bisecting a continent on the energy equivalent of five gallons of gasoline.
Sunraycer lent a sheen of technological daring to a carmaker widely viewed as stodgy. It toured hundreds of schools before finding a permanent place in the Smithsonian Institute. And that, given the unfeasibility of ever producing a practical solar car, was that, as far as most GM officers were concerned. To AeroVironment's young engineers, however, Sunraycer was merely the prelude, the test that could lead to the larger project GM might be induced to fund while the good feelings glowed: a concept electric car.
What AeroVironment's Alec Brooks had in mind was a sporty two-seater built from the ground up to be lighter and more nimble than any electric vehicle of the past. A car that could use a more powerful version of the solar car's inverter and AC motor, and accommodate a battery pack that had the power to propel a lifesized electric vehicle as fast or faster than a gas-powered car, as well as the energy to make it go more than 100 miles. Brooks already knew an EV could be designed to be far more efficient than a gas car--using 90 percent of its energy, versus a gas car's 15--25 percent. Because it had no engine, and had far fewer moving parts, it also would need far less maintenance: no oil changes or tune-ups, no broken hoses or radiators to refill. And powered by electronics and an electric motor, its life might be far longer than a gas car's--perhaps ten or twenty years. Brooks, for one, had no doubts about his ultimate goal: to prove that EVs of the future could be not only cleaner than gas cars but in most respects better; even, some day, cheaper.
In early 1988, Wilson and Brooks flew to Michigan to float the idea they had taken to calling Project Santana, for the Santa Ana winds which blow smog out of the Los Angeles basin. They saw it as a potential skunkworks, to be kept secret from all but those who had to know. That way, if it failed, GM wouldn't be publicly embarrassed. Next to Stempel, the most important ally to recruit was Don Runkle, who had helped oversee Sunraycer from Detroit. When Brooks explained that he hoped to make an electric vehicle that accelerated from 0--60 miles per hour in eight seconds, Runkle's eyes lit up.
"Now that would throw down the gauntlet, wouldn't it?" Runkle said. "No little incremental gains, just flat out for double or triple the mark." Even if the car remained a one-time experiment, it would still silence the cynics who jeered that EVs would never perform better than golf carts. How would Brooks get the drag coefficient down, Runkle wanted to know? How would he shave the tires' rolling resistance? The Californians talked and, with a growing sense of excitement, Runkle listened.
Runkle was the one who told Wilson and Brooks, perhaps a bit cavalierly, to talk to Baker to learn what they could from his ill-fated effort to launch the Electrovette. The man they met for dinner was huge, dressed in an extra-wide pinstripe suit. He told them about the day he took a GM vice president for a test ride in an Electrovette prototype. "Transmission got stuck," Baker said, wincing at the memory. "I had to walk a mile and a half back to the office with this VP cussing me out the whole time." He didn't miss EVs at all.
Still, Baker understood how critical recent advances in electronics might be, and offered to serve as an informal advisor. He told the California engineers why they should design their car with a tunnel of batteries down the middle, rather than packaging them in the rear. He explained why front-wheel drive would let them do more with regen braking than rear-wheel drive. Privately, he was intrigued that Runkle had sent them to him. If Runkle thought he was going to shunt Baker off to GM's next hapless stab at EVs, he should think again. Baker had lost enough career mileage as it was. He didn't need to make the same mistake twice.
Baker and Runkle agreed that Brooks was right to go with lead acid batteries. If the point of this project was to prove that EVs were feasible, lead acid was still the only practical, producible battery pairing around. In government and university labs around the country, battery developers were still playing with Baker's old nemesis, zinc. They were also playing with nickel-based batteries, and sodium sulfur, with lithium polymer and lithium ion and a hundred other pairings. All looked promising. All had looked promising for ten or twenty years. All claimed lifetimes of 1,000 cycles--1,000 times they could be discharged down to 20 percent of their capacity--and amazing energy, and even better power. All remained one-of-a-kind temptations, made by hand at mind-boggling cost, seemingly as far from production and a commercial market as cold fusion.
Lead acid worked, it was cheap, and a lead acid--powered EV could, in theory, go very fast indeed. Unfortunately, the science of lead acid batteries had progressed hardly at all since 1859, when Gaston Plante immersed lead plates in diluted sulfuric acid and proved he could conduct current repeatedly through them. Plante had positively charged one of his plates, making it lead oxide. The other was simply lead, which had a negative charge. His breakthrough was to create a flow of electrons from the negative plate, up out of the battery as electricity, then to feed the flow back into the battery, making the world's first rechargeable, or secondary, battery. Lead acid was reliable. But the chemistry of how it charged and discharged had seemed to defy improvement ever since.
In a gas car, at least, the chemistry of lead acid had long since ceased to be an issue. A gas car used only one battery, the battery was used only for an instant, and its current was quickly replenished by the generator that pulled energy from the engine and turned it back into electricity. In an electric vehicle, however, far greater demands were made of batteries. Instead of just starting an engine, they had to keep the car running. By the end of a 50-mile ride, they were deeply, if not entirely, discharged, which caused enormous stress to the electrodes and might quickly destroy them. Theoretically, an EV could cost far less to operate than a gas car: about 2.2 cents per mile in electricity, rather than 5 or 6 cents per mile for a gas-fueled car. But those savings would go out the window if an EV's battery pack proved short-lived.
Then there was the problem of gas. A flooded lead acid battery--one that used a liquid electrolyte of water and acid to conduct its electrons--released, as it discharged, hydrogen molecules that fizzed up like Alka-Seltzer bubbles and emerged as gas. A bit of space had to be allowed for that gas in the battery above the plates; and after some time, as the gas kept escaping, the battery's water, of which the hydrogen was one element, diminished and had to be replaced. Not long ago, drivers had had to water their batteries every few thousand miles. Now batteries were advertised as maintenance-free. In fact, the process was simply occurring at a much slower rate, so that the battery would not have to be opened during its "life" as a starter battery in a car.
Not so the batteries in an EV. Drastically discharged as they were, time after time, they also gave off more hydrogen and oxygen than starter batteries, and so had to be watered. Bob Bish, the battery expert from GM-owned Delco Remy who flew out to meet with Brooks and his team, explained that every EV battery engineer had experimented with automatic watering systems. They were, as Bish put it, a plumber's nightmare, freezing in winter, getting gunked up with acid. Electric cars had to have maintenance-free batteries, and with flooded lead acid that just wasn't possible.
There was an answer, but it hadn't been tried with electric cars, and remained in a fairly experimental stage. This was the gas recombinant battery. It was still lead acid, but instead of using a flooded liquid electrolyte, the electrolyte was absorbed into sponge-like glass and fiber mats between its plates. The recombinant battery no longer required any space above the plates for the gas to vent and the liquid electrolyte to reform. That meant batteries could be more densely packed and take up less space. A good thing, Bish realized when he studied Brooks's specs. Brooks wanted 900 pounds of batteries to give the car the acceleration and speed he wanted; Bish ran some figures and saw he could only fit 843 pounds in the space allotted.
Bish still had no idea if recombinant batteries would work in an electric car, or if they did, whether they would work reliably over time. He did know that even in theory there was only one way to pack thirty-two batteries with enough power to get the car from 0--60 in eight seconds. Bish had to devise the densest lead acid battery the world had ever seen.
On a hot July day in 1988, Brooks and Wilson flew to Detroit to deliver presentations to all the top executives who would judge whether to fund the secret Santana Project. This was the summer so unremittingly hot it seemed apocalyptic. The greenhouse effect seemed all too real, the world all too fragile. Yet within his chairman's office, Roger Smith told his fellow officers he thought GM should pass on the project. Sunraycer had already provided all the PR GM needed in that department; why fund another one-of-a-kind car that wouldn't be produced?
Fervently, in the ensuing weeks, Stempel and vice chairman Don Atwood worked on him. Atwood, who at Delco Systems had helped design an early version of the inertial navigation system used on Apollo spacecraft, was especially persuasive; the electronics would work, he said, and eventually their cost would come down. Finally, in September, Smith gave the project his reluctant blessing, along with a budget of some $3 million and a fifteen-month deadline.
Now, around the AeroVironment team, the supporting cast changed. Hughes all but dropped out because the car would have no solar panels and because the one chunk of electronics it might need created, the inverter, Cocconi insisted on doing himself. Delco Remy, based in Indiana, became a new player because of the batteries. So did--with no small amount of resulting tension--GM's Advanced Concepts Center in nearby Newbury Park, California, to design the electric car's body.
The ACC was set up out in car-crazy California for the express purpose of encouraging its designers to shuck Rust Belt convention and indulge their creative muses. To Brooks's dismay, the very notion of an electric car fired the designers with visions of swooping curves and futuristic grilles. They sounded almost New Age-y as they spoke of design in terms of feeling; first came the feeling, then the shape. Aerodynamics, as far as Brooks could see, played no part in their designs at all.
First the ACC designers drew up a car that had wheels in huge protruding pods. Then they tried one with a long pointed tail. They tried rocket ship looks and barracuda looks. They made a cockpit that looked like that of a fighter plane. The one that most shocked Brooks had only two wheels--down the middle--with airplane-like landing struts on either side. For each design the GM designers made a small-scale clay model and tested its drag coefficient in the wind tunnel of nearby Cal Tech.* Brooks's goal for the car was 0.19, a drag similar to that of an F-16 fighter jet. Invariably, the studio's designs came in way above that.
Disgusted, the AeroVironment team began working up covert designs of its own. When the GM studio designers learned of the counterdesigns they grew so outraged that Don Runkle was forced to fly out to California to shake up the troops. There would not be two cars, he declared. There would be either one, agreed upon by both sides, or none. Runkle told Brooks that the AeroVironment designs looked terrible. But he agreed the car would have to have a better drag coefficient than any of the studio's designs to date.
With that, the design team glumly set about making the best of Brooks's aerodynamic demands and came up with the most successful design yet: a teardrop that did score 0.19. Its bottom lay only 5 inches from the ground and was sheathed by a bellypan like a turtle's that helped sweep onrushing air past it. Bellypans were hardly high tech, but carmakers had never used them before; with no premium on efficiency, they simply hadn't bothered. The pan could also be completely sealed because the car had no exhaust pipe. Above, air split by the car flowed smoothly along a sharply tapered rear, made possible because the rear wheels were set nine inches closer together than the front ones.
Cocconi, meanwhile, worked obsessively at home, month after month, designing and building the car's inverter--its electronic heart. Technically, he was building two inverters, one for each 50-kilowatt motor--the prospect of constructing a single 100-kilowatt inverter had daunted even him--though the two would be packaged in one attaché-like case. In a sense, these were simply scaled-up versions of Sunraycer's inverter. But in addition to handling far more power to push a far heavier car, they had to be capable of instant fluctuations of current as the car sped up or slowed down. The solar car, by contrast, ran mostly at the cruising speed it could achieve by gleaning maximum power from the sun.* Though Cocconi was using standard electronic processes and parts--a computer to design his maze-like circuit boards, then resistors, capacitors, and other electronic pieces he attached to the boards himself--no one had ever devised such an intricate yet compact and lightweight inverter before. When it was done, his one-of-a-kind case would weigh all of 61 pounds.
Cocconi labored over the inverter alone in a mustard-yellow ranch house on a middle-class suburban street in Glendora, a short drive from AeroVironment in the San Gabriel valley. From the street, the house appeared no different from its neighbors, though the proliferation of yellowing supermarket circulars by the front door suggested an absentminded resident within. Through the back door, which Cocconi favored, lay a sunroom filled with circuit boards, its bookcases crammed with electronic parts, its ceiling hung with model planes and helicopters. The sweat work was done back in the shed, where Cocconi kept two milling machines, a lathe, and a bending brake, among other heavy machinery, mostly to bend and cut metal.
The comforts of ordinary homes held no more interest for Cocconi than the lifestyle they embellished. His living room was bare but for a stereo on the floor and two racing bikes; every Sunday that the weather permitted he rode ten miles uphill into the San Gabriel mountains, as intense and independent at play as he was at work. No real meal had likely ever been cooked in his narrow, gloomy kitchen. Forced eventually to tear himself away from his computer, Cocconi would sate his hunger with a can of sardines, his mind on his work as he ate at a dingy, formica-topped table that also accommodated a small black-and-white television. He had a girlfriend, but in his personal life, as with his work, he seemed to need a strong measure of independence. He was clearly too absorbed to be lonely; he seemed too absorbed to lead any other life but the one he was leading in this small house, navigating the boundaries of analog electronics--a life of the mind for which he had been prepared, to an unusual degree, since childhood, as the son of not one, but two, nuclear scientists.
By the time Cocconi brought his case over to AeroVironment, there was a car to look at, its curves captured in fiberglass body panels. Brooks and his team had agreed on fiberglass because the car was, after all, merely a proof-of-concept vehicle. But they wanted the fiberglass to have the contours, the feel, and even the weight of spot-welded aluminum. Aluminum body panels, the designers felt, were what a real electric vehicle would have some day.
Wally Rippel, a longtime EV advocate and friend of the AeroVironment team, worked freelance with a local motor house to design the induction motor and gears. At Delco Remy, Bish and a partner, Terry Poorman, froze battery cases and plates to 0 degrees Fahrenheit, then chilled electrolyte mats down to 40 degrees before sliding them between the plates.* The car that AeroVironment called Santana was coming together, but its schedule of creation had slipped precipitously. In July 1989, Brooks reported to Runkle that he would need more than five months to finish the job. He was in for a surprise. Roger Smith, the car's greatest skeptic, had grown so excited by its progress reports that he'd decided to unveil it at the L.A. auto show in early January. This was not, among his colleagues, a popular decision.
Did Smith realize, they asked weakly, what effect such an introduction might have on the harebrained California regulators? If GM said an electric car could be done, why, the regulators might make them do it, failing to appreciate, as usual, the difference between a proof-of-concept vehicle and a fully productionized car. Besides, why share the project's hard-won technological secrets? One after another of the car's enthusiastic supporters counseled Smith to keep Project Santana a secret, at least for a while. Stempel. Reuss. Runkle. Atwood. Cheerfully, Smith waved away their fears. "Most engineers would still be working on the 1971 Chevrolet if someone hadn't grabbed it away from them," he explained later. "I just figured it was time to get this thing out of the chute."
So began the real crunch, night after late night. The car's fiberglass frame and body were hand assembled, part by part. Molds for the car's windows were sent to the Pennsylvania supplier that would make them--then sent back again and again by Federal Express as Brooks discovered just how complex windows could be. First they failed to fit. Then, when he set them in their door frames, rolled them halfway down, and shut the doors, they broke. One night, Brooks broke four side windows and gave up. The Santana would simply make do with fixed glass.
At 1:00 a.m. on the morning of November 28, 1989, a strange sight rolled out of a back entrance of the AeroVironment building into a dark alley. A doorless shell of raw green fiberglass on wheels, it rolled with a slight whine, but no engine noise, to the end of the alley and back. It wasn't a car yet. But its batteries and inverter and motor all worked. Thrilled, the engineers took turns whipping around the parking lot with squeals of burning rubber. Every time it took off, the car pinned the delighted driver against his seat. A gas engine took a few long seconds to reach its peak power. This thing flew forward as fast as the current could reach the wheels, which was to say, instantly.
As soon as its doors were affixed, the car was taken by flatbed truck to GM's desert proving grounds in Mesa, Arizona. It weighed in at a remarkably light 2,200 pounds, including its 843 pounds of batteries. On the track, it jumped from 0--60 in 7.9 seconds--faster than such sporty gas cars as a Mazda Miata or Nissan 300 ZX--and quickly reached 75 miles per hour, the top speed allowed by its controller software. On a highway range test, it went 124 miles at 55 miles per hour; on an urban range test, one with lots of stopping and starting to simulate city traffic, it did nearly as well. That was extraordinary. A gas car had at least a 300-mile range on the open road. In the city, however, its range was sharply diminished as it idled at stops and used extra fuel to accelerate. Slowing, the Santana car recouped energy from its regen braking. Stopped, it consumed no energy at all.
The show car's windows remained fixed, its suspension and handling were terrible, and it lacked amenities and such safety features as air bags. Despite these and other drawbacks, it worked. A paint crew sanded the car and gave it a first coat of silver, making it look that much more real so a video could be made the next day for the L.A. auto show. As it was rolled out in front of the camera, a GM PR man stopped the action and pointed to the license plate the AeroVironment team had added to its rear bumper. "The Future Is Electric," the plate announced. "That'll have to go," the PR man declared. "It's too strong a statement." The young engineers were taken aback. Did GM believe in electric cars, or didn't it?
On January 3, 1990, after two weeks of intensive sanding and repainting, the now sleekly silver show car was brought to Hughes corporate headquarters in Los Angeles where Roger Smith was to introduce it to journalists as a preview to the auto show. The backdrop was chosen to disprove critics who still claimed Hughes an awkward fit with GM, but the Hughes executives were somewhat embarrassed about that: Hughes had contributed nothing to the car.
During the car's transformation from ugly duckling to shiny show car, its name, along with its color, had changed. In the course of a routine copyright check, GM's lawyers had discovered that Santana was registered in Europe as a Volkswagen model. The AeroVironment team came up with alternatives, including, from Cocconi, "Escape," an acronym for Electric Sports Car and Pollution Eliminator. None was accepted.
Either Chuck Jordan, the GM vice president of design, or Don Runkle, both up at the Tech Center, came up with the name GM adopted--the credit, or blame, was never clearly attached to one or the other. Brooks and the rest of the AeroVironment team were dismayed by the choice, but there was no time to appeal it. The car was now the Impact, for the impact it would have on the world--a name that with its obvious double entendre immediately robbed the homely Edsel and hapless Studebaker of their distinction as the worst names in the history of automobiles. The next night, Johnny Carson would become the first, but by no means last, to ridicule the choice. "What next," Carson asked, "the Ford Whiplash?"
An hour before the event, Roger Smith and his retinue swept into the Hughes basement for the chairman's first look at the show car. Smith was delighted by it, but declined Brooks's invitation to give it a test spin around the basement. "I'm sure it'll be fine," he declared.
Brooks swallowed hard. The Impact did take a little getting used to; the regen braking would feel new. What if Smith got confused at the wheel and floored the wrong pedal? "Sir, perhaps you should just give it a whirl," Brooks suggested.
Smith seemed taken aback, but then shrugged and slid in behind the wheel. With Brooks in the passenger seat, he drove around the basement a minute or two. "What's that sound?" he said suspiciously. Brooks listened. There was some sort of scraping sound.
"You'll get that fixed by showtime, right?" Smith said. As soon as Smith and the others had left, Brooks slid under the car. The sound seemed to be coming from under the front wheels, but no obvious suspect presented itself. Hurriedly, a pit crew of mechanics jacked up the car and pulled off the wheels. Nothing. Only when the wheels were replaced did a mechanic notice one of the aluminum disc brakes rubbing against a tire. With a Swiss army knife he set to filing the disc. By the time Smith reappeared, the disc no longer rubbed.
The Hughes press conference was a great success--especially for Smith, who dominated it. The next day, the chairman appeared with the car at the L.A. auto show and again basked in the glow of public excitement. Never mind that the car was as far from being production-ready as a child's plastic model, that its very appearance as an aluminum car was an illusion, that it remained too unrefined for reporters to drive. After another tough year of dwindling market share and closing factories, Smith seemed almost intoxicated by all the approbation.
To the minds of the AeroVironment engineers, Smith also seemed to feel that GM had wrought this wondrous toy with only the barest assist from some unnamed R&D firm. Wally Rippel, for one, was shocked by the video accompanying the display. No credit was given to AeroVironment. The "GM engineers" shown in their white lab coats at the Tech Center were actors. The test-track scenes in Mesa showed other white-coated engineers who were actually Brooks and Cocconi, induced by the filmmakers to act as unnamed GMers; Cocconi's role involved holding a stopwatch as the car roared by.
MacCready, taking the long view, reasoned that in making electric vehicles seem real, Impact had hastened the arrival of real alternative vehicles by five years. Who cared if GM took most of the credit? Fortuitously, too, AeroVironment would be granted a long-term contract from GM to conduct an ongoing skunkworks of future automobiles. In fact, MacCready was less interested now in electrics than in hybrids, which might offset the limited range of their battery packs with a small engine as a second source of power. Though the engine, presumably powered by some fossil fuel, would keep the hybrid from being entirely emission-free, its small size would make it nearly so, and the much increased range would make it, MacCready thought, a far more practical car of the future than the electric. With Impact, he'd really just wanted to show how fuel economy could be dramatically improved with very lightweight structures. But Smith was too dazzled by the flashbulbs to let Impact go at that.
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