Engines: The Race is On

Interesting event. Michelin acts as a neutral third-party agent and puts a couple of hundred international journalists in front of several dozen examples of near-future automotive engineering. We see cars and buses and trucks running on all manner of alternative fuels, and we even get to drive some of them. Many of the engineers responsible for all of this wonderment are there as well, so we get to chat and thus dive pretty deeply into the newest technologies.

Michelin’s Challenge Bibendum, Version Three (the first two were held in Europe). There’s nothing else like it anywhere. And even though Edouard Michelin himself is in attendance, beaming all the while, nobody tries to sell a tire.

I get to chat briefly with Monsieur Michelin, managing partner of the company and great, great grandson of its founder. He’s young, articulate, and clearly overjoyed to be hosting this unique gathering. He says its underlying purpose is to demonstrate that cars-and larger vehicles, too-can co-exist with the environment perfectly well. Looking at this array of innovation, it would be hard for even the most determined tree-hugger to argue. This is the automotive envelope pushed to the max. And it’s populated entirely by gearheads.

The parking lot at the monstrous California Speedway in Fontana, Calif., is jammed with vehicles of all sizes that move off the line quite smartly but without a sound aside from slight tire noise. Vehicles that emit nothing worse than water vapor. They stage hotly contested and carefully measured competitions to find the quietest car, the most fuel-efficient. But the organizers nix an impromptu drag race between two city buses, one hybrid-engined and the other powered by a fuel cell. Pity. The next day the whole crowd takes off to drive vehicles from this crazy collection to Las Vegas.

Some of today’s forward-looking technology is there, too, stuff you could buy now if your pockets were deep enough. Like the United Parcel Service display of everything from LNG heavy tractors down to electric minivans (see the story on p. 34), each of them working somewhere on the continent as we speak. Nobody anywhere in the commercial carrier world has a bigger sense of corporate adventure.

Freightliner and Volvo are there with a couple of demo trucks, but it’s nothing I hadn’t seen before. Not that it isn’t nifty stuff-fuel-cell APUs, for instance-but I know those two manufacturers in particular have some astonishing technology up their sleeves that they didn’t or couldn’t bring to Fontana. Straight trucks that literally drive sideways into parking spots at curbside, active-suspension systems so smooth you can leave a cup of coffee on the dash without fear of spillage, lane-guidance systems that almost let the driver sleep if he wants.

All of which leads me to another thought: there’s no way to quantify this in any meaningful way, but it seems to me that trucks are way ahead of cars in the technology game. And nowhere is this more evident than with motive power. Engines, my favorite topic.

Sure, the Fords and Nissans of this world are making zero-emission cars that run on batteries or fuel cells or hybrid combinations of various engine-like bits and pieces, but they’ve all required massive development money and still need serious investment on the infrastructure side. At Challenge Bibendum, I saw hydrogen generators you can stick in your garage to juice up a little fuel-cell-powered car that can haul two people 100 klicks before it needs to drink again.

The fuelling process takes eight hours. Nice. But I’m pulling 63,000 kilograms of freight, my trip is several hundred klicks over the mountains, and I’ve got to be there in eight hours. The economy depends on my truck being able to do that routinely, and-nowadays-with essentially no impact on the environment.

Guess what? I can! The engine I’ve been using for decades, for which the necessary fuelling infrastructure was built long ago, is pretty close to being ‘clean’ already. By 2007, my diesel will emit virtually nothing by way of noxious stuff. Now that’s impressive.

The fuel cell is probably the answer for urban trucking in the long term. Hybrid engines combining a small diesel with electric motors and batteries will be used much sooner. Straight electric power for the smallest commercial vehicles makes sense, and it’s just around the corner. Practical LNG and, to a lesser extent, CNG are closer still.

But the diesel is still king, and at a fraction of the cost of all the other options. Given what’s been accomplished on the emissions front already-both in terms of air pollutants and noise-I wish those 200 journalists in Fontana had looked a little closer at the trucks on display. They would have been surprised.