The soul of green machines: triumphant gearheads, standing ovations for a hydrogen bus, and a yuppie BMW that's actually good for the planet. I've seen the future, and I like it - Beyond Fossil Fuels - green vehicles race in Challenge Bibendum - Brief Article

Sierra, July-August, 2002 by Marilyn Berlin Snell

Alan Welch and his team of engineers and mechanics are building the car of the future. But on the day we meet last fall, the future isn't cooperating. Just a few miles from the finish of a three-day automotive competition and rally, their car poops out.

"We need another optical sensor," Welch pronounces from the backseat, where he's been hunched over his laptop running an engine diagnostic in the Mojave's desert heat. Wires are everywhere--some spilling from the glove box, snaking over the passenger side, then connecting to Welch's computer. "It's burned. We've lost RPM. Off, please." Welch is talking to driver Campbell McConnell, who receives the news, follows orders, and slumps down in his seat. The sensor that overheated is the size of a fingernail and available at most electrical-supply stores. But it's late afternoon along a desolate strip of Interstate 15 near Sheep Mountain, above which a pale half-moon is on the rise. The car will need a lift the last 28 miles into Las Vegas on a flatbed tow truck.

The team from Westport Innovations, a small, independent research and development firm in Canada, has been working for two and a half years to retrofit light-duty diesel engines to run on cleaner-burning natural gas. Now, not only has their prototype Ford Focus come to an unscheduled stop, it looks like McConnell is going to spend the bulk of his 25th birthday in a parking lot.

Westport's prototype is one of 49 entries at the Challenge Bibendum, a kind of moving showcase for cleaner, greener vehicles sponsored by the Michelin Group. The event, named for the company's doughboy mascot, is the third for the French tire-maker. The first two took place in France, in 1998 and 2000. "Bibendum" derives from the Michelin family's original ad campaign, now more than 100 years old. In the ads, a marshmallowy creature holds aloft a champagne glass full of nails. (They're French, remember.) The Latin phrase nunc est bibendum or "time to drink" was used as inspiration for copy that read "Michelin tires drink obstacles." The fat guy became "Bibendum" and one of the most popular and recognizable corporate logos in the world, and so he stays. But his name is awkwardly out of step with modern attitudes about drinking and driving--as out of step, in fact, as the Challenge Bibendum itself is with oilman George W. Bush's vision of an unapologetically consumptive drill-and-drive America.

It is a stroke of genius to begin the U.S. Bibendum beneath the particulate haze of Los Angeles, a city whose car culture has contributed to some of the nation's most notorious air. L.A. artist Stephanie Sanchez has spent many years painting the atmospherics above her hometown. "When I. paint a realistic Los Angeles sky," Sanchez says during my visit prior to the event, "I use earth colors--usually raw umber and raw sienna." High concentrations of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxides, and lead apparently often cancel the need for traditional blue.

As an ice sculpture of Bibendum melts in the parking lot of the Automobile Club of Southern California, I get a glimpse of the less-polluting vehicles on the horizon. It is estimated that by 2020 the number of cars on the world's roads will have tripled, to nearly 1.5 billion. If technological innovations such as the ones being shown off here aren't a significant part of that mix, the palette used to paint skylines will surely get darker.

Some of the Bibendum entries are bizarre, like the one-seater Solar Eagle III. The bright yellow vehicle is designed by students at California State University, Los Angeles, and propelled by photovoltaic panels that make it look like a computer punch card on wheels.

Others look out of place at a competition, like the stodgy 1994 Buick Regal station wagon retrofitted to run on a mix of hydrogen and corn alcohol, or ethanol.

Still other entries will suit more conventional tastes, and--their builders and backers hope--mean big business down the road. Eight of the world's top automakers are participating, including Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, which all have relatively clean vehicles in prototype or production. In addition to natural gas and ethanol, there are autos run by electricity (think plug-in), and hybrids, which have a gas-powered engine that works in tandem with an electric motor to boost fuel economy. Electric vehicles have zero emissions, though the juice to move them comes from utilities, which now pump 25 percent of all C[O.sub.2] green house-gas emissions into the atmosphere. (Cars, sport-utility vehicles, minivans, and pickups are responsible for 17 percent.) Hybrids don't need to plug in to power plants, since they generate electricity on board via the gas engine.

There are also fuel cells (which can be powered by a variety of fuels--see "Are You Ready to Drive Green Today?" page 44), and hydrogen-powered internal combustion engines. The latter combine hydrogen with oxygen from the air to run the motor. Though the only thing coming out of a hydrogen car's tailpipe is water vapor--a very good thing--there is a bit of a fuel-storage problem that still must be overcome: It currently takes 11.6 gallons of hydrogen to create the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline. Engineers on Ford's H2 ICE team (cool mechanic-speak for "hydrogen internal combustion engine") say they are working to improve hydrogen storage technologies.