A Collision of Visions

Ladies and gentlemen! The battle over your future automobile is now raging!

In this corner we have the visionaries, made up of a partnership of the Big Three auto makers and 11 government agencies, plus the numerous scientists who advise them. They say that within just a few years, cars will go 80 miles on a gallon of gas, be constructed of ultra-lightweight materials and still cost about the same as current models.

In the other--rather lonely--corner, we have the spoilers. They are two soft-spoken scientists from MIT who wrote a recent article for a technical journal and sparked a nasty debate. The MIT scientists agree that technology exists to build ultralight, high-mileage automobiles to replace today’s steel-body heavyweights.

But that’s only two out of three of the visionaries’ goals. The problem is that the new technologies are too expensive to be very practical, wrote engineering professor Joel Clark and Materials Systems Laboratory head Frank Field.

“Whatever strategy the industry adopts,” Clark and Field wrote, “a vehicle made of lightweight materials is clearly going to cost more than today’s conventional car.”

Steel, they pointed out, costs only about 30 cents a pound, aluminum costs about $1.50 per pound and some super-strong plastics proposed for car bodies cost as much as $20 a pound--67 times the cost of steel.

The visionaries, who are working on a government-commercial project called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, were quick to counterattack.

“They should know better,” said the dean of lightweight car proponents, Amory Lovins.

Lovins is with the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit research group that recently published a highly technical book on futuristic car technologies. The book is a paperback, but don’t look for it at Crown. It has a price tag of $10,000-- which some industry insiders have actually paid to see what the institute came up with in the lucrative but intensely competitive auto industry.

“If they would have read our materials carefully, they would have seen that their assumptions were wrong,” Lovins said. “The article was inaccurate, bad analysis, in so many ways.”

Lovins was just one of several scientists and automobile industry officials who wrote to Technology Review, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology publication that ran the article authored by Clark and Fields. The May/June issue, published this week, contains the protest letters.

Clark, speaking from his home in the Boston area, said that being a spoilsport has not been fun. “What we said was not what people wanted to hear,” he said.

But he has no intention of backing down.

“I actually like Amory. He is a physicist and a good one,” Clark said of Lovins, “but he doesn’t know a damn thing about manufacturing.”

Manufacturing is where ultralight cars will have to prove themselves in the real world. Clark contends that many of the assumptions Lovins and other proponents have made are based on technologies that would not work--at least for the foreseeable future--on a large scale.

“They can sit around and dream about these things, but they would be laughed out of the big design groups,” Clark said.

One of the basic arguments is over the cost of raw materials. Lovins said carbon fiber--one of his prime candidates for use in car bodies--will be available for $5 a pound by 2000. And because it takes less processing than materials now in use, he said, the remaining advantage of steel will be erased.

Clark counters that he and Field ran the numbers based on the $5 figure, and steel came out considerably cheaper, even when fuel savings for a lighter car were factored in.

Lovins said that one of the traditional drawbacks of synthetic materials, lengthy processing times, will be remedied by a speedy process called electron beam curing. But Clark said that process has not been shown to be practical except for small batches.

Finally, Lovins said that Clark and Field are stuck in old ideas about manufacturing. He calls for techniques that would rework nearly every segment of automobile making. The protest letter he co-wrote to Technology Review reads, in part: “Success in the highly competitive global car market demands boldness, not incrementalism, no matter what body material is used.”

Clark counters that the numbers simply don’t add up. He and Field’s published answer to their critics includes these lines: “Aggressive goals can spur substantial improvements in automotive technology. But irresponsible cheerleading for preposterous targets can result in gross misapplication of R&D; resources and unrealistic expectations.”

To find out who was right, check your dealer’s showroom in about 10 years.