Amory Lovins - Rocky Mountain Institute researcher - Interview

Progressive, The, May, 1995 by David Kupfer

The car would be superior in all respects. People would buy it because it's a better car, not because it saves fuel and prevents pollution: they'd buy it for the reason they now buy CDs instead of vinyl records.

Altogether, bringing automaking out of the Iron Age will be the biggest change in industrial structure since the microchip. It has profound ramifications for America's competitiveness, foreign policy, oil imports, military missions....

Q: What would it do to oil imports?

Lovins: Oil imports would become unnecessary, because worldwide, hypercars and their heavy-vehicle analogues would save more oil than OPEC now extracts. The Middle East would therefore become irrelevant and the price would crash. With so little demand, most of the oil in the ground would be no longer worth extracting. This has already happened to most of the coal and uranium in the ground: they're now mainly good for holding up the ground. Attractive new markets would also open up for biofuels. Just fuels sustainably derived from farm and forestry wastes could run the whole U.S. transportation sector.

Q: But why save oil when we're awash in the stuff?

Lovins: Although oil looks cheap today--we sell gasoline for less than bottled water--it isn't really cheap. It's costing our country close to $50 billion a year in trade deficit, and the same again in peacetime-military-readiness costs. We recently put a bunch of our young people in 0.56-mile-per-gallon tanks and seventeen-feet-per-gallon aircraft carriers because we hadn't put them in thirty-two-mile-per-gallon cars. That's all we would have needed to do to displace the need for any oil from the Persian Gulf. If we had just kept on saving oil as quickly after 1985 as we did for the previous nine years, we would not have needed a drop of oil from the Persian Gulf since then. Failure to do that cost our nation some $23 billion last year alone in unnecessary oil imports. And by wasting that money and weakening the economy, that wasted oil cost a lot of American jobs.

Q: What are the chances we'll soon see commercial availability of something like a "hypercar"?

Lovins: Excellent, because everything required is already commercially available; what's missing is only the system integration to put them together. And this is starting to happen not only on paper but on real wheels. A light hybrid two-seater the size of a Corvette, built by students at Western Washington University, was tested in Los Angeles traffic last year by the US. Department of Energy. It got the equivalent of 202 miles per gallon, and the next version, now in testing, should do even better.

Q: Are you getting the same kind of resistance to this radical idea that you did when you used to say how much electricity could be cost-effectively saved?

Lovins: A little, for understandable cultural reasons--hypercars would turn the auto industry completely upside down, and that naturally makes some of its inhabitants uncomfortable--but not as much as I'd expected. Some auto-company engineers are even more radical than I am about what can be done. Since this work got the Nissan Prize in autumn 1993 at ISATA, the big European car-technology conference, the big boys have been paying very careful attention.