Amory Lovins: composite crusader - includes related article on the hypercar - Interview

Automotive Industries, Sept, 1998

He aims to change the industry and build his ultra-lightweight, 200-mpg Hypercar -- whether the automakers are interested or not.

The man who wants to reinvent the auto industry farms bananas in his solar-powered home perched on a mountainside in Snowmass, Colo. The modem 4,000-square-foot ranch house he designed is so energy-efficient its monthly heating bill is just $5. The house's solar-panel-array produces five times more electricity than the house consumes, allowing the owner -- Amory B. Lovins -- to sell the excess kilowatts back to the local power utility.

Even on this cloudy day, ambient light fills the high-ceilinged atrium, warming the room and reflecting off the tropical plants. Colorful birds and exotic lizards move freely among the foliage, as a small, burbling waterfall creates a soothing background rhythm -- it was "tuned" by Lovins to do so. Across the atrium, young research staffers prepare lunch in the communal kitchen. The atmosphere is quiet and purposeful -- like a biosphere in the heart of the Rockies. It's an unlikely place to launch an automaking revolution.

Amory Lovins clearly loves this house, which also serves as headquarters of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the non-profit think-tank Lovins and his wife, Hunter, founded in 1982. Focused on spreading the gospel of energy efficiency and energy-saving technologies, and providing intellectual capital, to businesses, electric utilities and the transportation industry, RMI's 30 young engineers, researchers and public policy experts are far away from the noisy factories churning out new cars and trucks, factories that he deeply believes will be made obsolete by his Hypercar.

"The auto industry is maybe the most impressive and capable undertaking in the industrial history of the world," Lovins tells AI, "but it's an industry ripe for disruption by something completely different." Lovins, 50, is an applied physicist who attended Harvard and Oxford in the 1960s, dropped out of both without earning a formal degree, and has since received six honorary science doctorates. He's served on the U.S. Department of Energy's senior advisory board and has published 24 books on energy efficiency. In 1991, The Wall Street Journal included him as one of 28 people "most likely to change the course of business in the 1990s."

Lovins finds fault with most of today's cars and trucks, branding them "the highest expression of the Iron Age." (He does, however, admire the Lotus Elise, and himself drives a clapped-out 1989 Honda CRXHF, with a radar-detector on the dash and a yellow RMI bumpersticker that reads, "I'd Rather Be Driving A Hypercar.")

Today's vehicles are designed and built using what Lovins calls a "black-steel mentality," that has forced their mass, cost and complexity to spiral out of control. Clearly, the ferrous metals and stamping presses that make vehicles affordable today don't figure at all in Lovins' vision of the future.

"Hypercars will change all that," he asserts provocatively. "They'll be like the little mammals that scurried over the feet of the dinosaurs" (see "The Hypercar" sidebar above).

Lovins claims that by the early 2000s, the cost of structural composites will be competitive with metals, at production volumes up to 100,000 units. That means composite suppliers have a lot of work to do. Automotive steel currently costs $0.35/pound in unfinished sheet, and is worth about $1.00/pound as a finished part. Structural carbon-fiber raw material ranges from $10 to $30 per pound, though tooling is much cheaper. RMI estimates a cost/mass break-even, at 100,000 units, when composite prices reach $5/pound (see related Zoltek developments in Ford story, p.41).

Hypercar-making could emulate the microbrewery trend, Lovins envisions, decentralizing the auto industry and spreading small-to-moderately-sized auto plants throughout the world.

It's all still a concept, however, just data and a battle plan for any party that's interested. But that's not for lack of effort. Lovins has ceaselessly crusaded for Hypercars for more than a decade, trooping his ideas to the world's automakers, suppliers and politicians -- he's known to have the ear of U.S. Vice President, and 2000 presidential contender, Al Gore -- and acts as matchmaker between various suppliers, technologists, and investors. With gasoline at below-water prices, and America's lust for big, heavy SUVs booming, Lovins often may seem a lonely voice. Nonetheless, through speeches, high-profile media commentary, consulting, and a prodigious stream of publications, he and Hunter steadily grew RMI into a 40-person operation with a $3 million annual operating budget. (About 33% of RMI's income comes from roughly 30 foundation grants each year, the rest is mainly from consulting, publishing, and individual and corporate donations.) RMI's eight-person Hypercar Center cranks out more ultralight vehicle studies than perhaps any other research group. Its papers are regularly presented at major engineering forums, the biggest and best-known work being the 450-page Hypercars: Materials, Manufacturing and Policy Implications, an impressively detailed study that RMI sells for $10,000 a copy.