The Road Ahead: The Outer Limits

Just how fuel-efficient can a car be? We discover 100-plus m.p.g. models are just around the corner.
By Alan Rider

What if we told you that there was an affordable new car on the market that can travel 100-plus miles on a single gallon of fuel without sacrificing any of the comfort, safety or practicality of the vehicle you’re driving right now? You’d be intrigued, right?

Well, despite how improbable that idea may sound, energy-efficiency guru Amory Lovins, cofounder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and coauthor of the book Winning the Oil Endgame, says that you’re likely to find one of these so-called “hypercars” parked in your driveway sooner than you think.

“At this point, the barriers to creating much more fuel-efficient automobiles are no longer technical; they have more to do with the culture of the car industry itself,” says Lovins. “Which is why the current tsunami of change washing over Detroit is a good thing because it’s opening minds to unthinkable new levels of innovation.”

Mega M.P.G.
If you’re still skeptical, you should know that these new hypercars are far from theoretical. The two-seat Volkswagen 1L prototype, for example, achieved an impressive 235 m.p.g. back in 2002.

The recent announcement that Chevrolet’s forthcoming Volt sedan would achieve 230 m.p.g. also sounds promising, though many critics have pointed out the car’s real-world fuel economy numbers will likely be considerably lower. This may leave you wondering why new models that return triple-digit fuel economy numbers aren’t already rolling off assembly lines. The reason is simple, according to Lovins.

“There’s no shortage of engineers who can do this,” he explains. “The problem is that they’ve never been asked to [apply all that know-how to a production model].”

The X-Factor
That’s precisely where next summer’s $10 million Automotive X Prize competition comes in.

More than 130 teams, ranging from well-funded startups like Aptera to scrappy upstarts like the teens from West Philadelphia High School, are currently working to develop both an affordable vehicle that gets 100 m.p.g. (or the equivalent, known as MPGe) and a viable business plan to begin mass-producing it within five years.

“Competition drives innovation, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing,” says X Prize Deputy of Technical Operations Steve Wesoloski. “People are coming out of the woodwork with designs that range from dropping an all-electric powertrain into an existing model to highly aerodynamic vehicles that look like something from an old Jetsons cartoon.”

Four-Wheeled Fitness
Lovins says that the key to achieving these remarkable new levels of fuel efficiency comes down to an idea he calls “platform fitness.”

“The majority of the energy a vehicle uses goes to overcoming weight and aerodynamic drag,” he explains. “So making a vehicle as light and as slippery as possible allows you to dramatically shrink the size of the engine without a loss of performance.”

The most important step in the modern automobile’s new fitness regimen will be replacing traditional steel body components with lightweight composites. Add other tweaks like low-rolling resistance tires, and the efficiency gains begin to rapidly snowball.

The Driving Force
While some experts believe it will take government mandates and incentives to bring this new generation of hypercars to market, Lovins disagrees. For proof, he points to a long line of revolutionary products—from iPods to flat-panel TVs—that have quickly made older designs obsolete.

“As consumers, our product expectations are defined by technological breakthroughs, and that’s exactly what’s starting to happen with automobiles,” he explains. “So ultimately we’ll end up driving these new more fuel-efficient models just because they’re all-around better cars.”

The information in this story was accurate when it was published in the November/December 2009 issue of AAA World.