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

Automotive Industries, Sept, 1998

Lovins will only admit that after five years of research, and tons of white papers, RMI is "laying the groundwork for an ambitions multi-partner demonstration project."

The cost to build a refined ultra-light hybrid prototype is $5 million to $20 million, he says, adding that a major announcement is coming by year's end.

Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that periodically there's an urgent need to stop having old ideas, so you can start having new ones. The transportation world's great unconventional creators -- including Colin Chapman, Alex Issigonis, Paul MacCready, Burt Rutan, Soichiro Honda and John Britten, to name a few -- all reached the same conclusion. Amory Lovins' own path has yet to bear fruit, but for the moment he's simply gratified by the staid old auto industry's Ultralites, ESX2's and Priuses.

"Of course, these encouraging advances don't mean that those vehicles are yet optimal, nor that further innovations wouldn't be valuable," he says. "There's a danger that automakers might stop halfway, with metal-bodied hybrids that aren't ultralight or ultra-low-drag."

The job of Lovins, and RMI's Hypercar Center, is to make sure they don't.

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RELATED ARTICLE: THE HYPERCAR

What is a "Hypercar?" Though Lovins has trademarked the term, it refers to a fully composite-bodied, four-to-five-passenger vehicle, with hybrid-electric drive (traction motorboat each wheel), fully integrated control electronics, and ultra-slick 0.15 Cd to 0.20 Cd aerodynamics. (Lovins originally dubbed them "supercars," until he learned that the word was already applied to fuel-gobbling missiles like Ferrari's F40 and the Lamborghini Countach.)

The Hypercar power source could be anything from an advanced piston engine to a fuel cell- RMI closely monitors developments across the automotive world, and has not yet allied itself with one emerging power strategy. But its key feature is a carbon-fiber-reinforced composite body-in-white, itself a lightweight structure that allows a "mass-decompounding" (a favorite RMI term) of all other components and systems, That means a vehicle curb weight of 1,100 to 1,350 pounds (500 to 600 kg).

Such a featherweight, super-slippery device would be capable of up to 200 mpg using fuel cell power, Lovins reckons, although until recently RMI was claiming 400 mpg to be achievable(He's revised that figure to 200 mpg on fuel cells, with more conventional powertrains claimed to beat the current 80 mpg and 100 km/3.0L goals of U.S. and European automakers. (For more details, see RMI's websites: www.rmi.org and www.hypercar.com.)