The New Urban Car

an imaginatively utile alternative to today's space-gobbling, pollution-belching personal vehicles

During the next 12 months, Americans will drive automobiles 900 billion miles. They will suck up a sea of gasoline--well, 75 billion gallons (250,000 filling-station pumps squirting into Main Street!)--they will burn, use up for good, an unimaginable number of tons of oxygen and spread over the land, say, 200,000 tons of pollutants, gases, chemicals and solids (870 tons of solids alone in each 1000-foot-high square mile); and they will do all this, for the most part, in the accomplishment of trivialities, one person (statistically, 1.2) in a 350-horsepower, 4000-pound vehicle, blasting down to the supermart for a carton of cigarettes and a six-pack.

There's a case for outlawing the automobile. The thing is a mad monster that eats our air at one end and spews out unassimilable effluents at the other, whimsically kills or injures 2,105,200 of us a year and, since it lives and functions only on smooth flat surfaces, has taken us well on the way to paving the whole country (1,000,000 acres a year, and already in existence over one linear mile of road for every square mile--3,600,000--in the country), with consequent destruction of beauty, waterways and essential oxygen-producing flora. Long ago, wise men saw the danger. Winston Churchill, for one: "I have always considered that the substitution of the internal-combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind." But the Americans love the automobile as they love life; he who helps them have it can grow great, or rich, at least; and he who tried to take it away from them would be ground fine and fed to the dogs.

Right. But how about a different kind of automobile? At least for the cities, reeling under smog, confrontation, riot, rape, rapine and an 8.5-mph average speed in traffic. The one we've got isn't really right for the job: It makes smog and it's too big. It's so much too big that giving it room to run and places to park uses up half the total downtown area in some jurisdictions, besides blanketing them with exhaust smoke.

For years, everyone who can read without moving his lips has known that smog induces lung cancer and emphysema, bronchitis and asthma, and that automobile exhaust is responsible for 50 to 60 percent of smog; but until really notable inversions over Los Angeles, London, Tokyo and New York triggered deaths both numerous and plainly attributable, there was no action. Then, suddenly, as it is likely to do, the roof fell in. John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the Johnson Administration, said that he could see "collision in the future of the internal-combustion engine and the interests of the American people." Frank M. Stead, head of Environmental Sanitation for California, proposed a total ban on the internal-combustion engine in that state by 1980. And, for the first time in perhaps 40 years, the notion that only gasoline could move people--a notion that had accumulated the majesty and weight of the law--was shaken out for a hard look.

From the beginning of automobilism until 1920 or so, there did exist what seemed to be viable alternatives to the i.c.e. (internal-combustion engine): the steam engine and the electric motor, both smog-free. So why not bring them, or one of them, back? On the other hand, if they were so great, what happened to them?

In the beginning, the steamers and the electrics looked like the only entrants in the race. They were the beginning: The first road vehicle to move under its own power was a steam-powered tricycle run in France by Nicolas Cugnot in 1769. Richard Trevithick ran a steam carriage in London in 1803 and, 30 years later, a fleet of steam buses ran to posted schedules between points as distant as London and Oxford. An electric car set up the first land-speed record--39 miles an hour--in 1898; and another was the first vehicle to do a mile in a minute: 65 mph in 1899.

When the making and running of automobiles grew away from its often dilettante beginnings and got down to business on a standard cutthroat level, the smart money went to the steamers and the electrics. Steam drove the railroads, the ocean liners and the factories and was moving in on the farmer's horse. It seemed logical that it would run the automobiles, if they were to amount to anything. Steam-automobile companies popped up all over the East and the Midwest. Half of them lasted only two years or less. The Twombly, the Binney & Burnham and the Grout were ephemera; but Stanley, Locomobile, White and Doble were cliché words in the public prints.

An antique-car mechanic once said to me, "If you read somewhere that the steam automobile ran on steam, that's true. Anything else you read about it is even money to be a lie." It's an exaggeration, but not by much.

The Stanley Steamer--life span in its various reincarnations 1897-1927 (the early Locomobile was a Stanley design)--was an outwardly conventional-looking automobile. A tubed boiler under the hood made steam that ran a two-cylinder engine geared directly to the back axle. To that extent, it was basically simple, and Stanley advertising (of which there was little, since the twin Stanley brothers, F. E. and F. O., did not believe in it) stated, "We use no clutches, nor gearshifts, nor flywheels, nor carburetors, nor magnetos, nor sparkplugs, nor timers, nor distributors; nor self-starters, nor any of the marvelously ingenious complications that inventors have added in order to overcome the difficulties inherent in the internal-explosive engine and adapt it to a use for which it is not normally fitted." All true enough, but the Stanley had complications of its own. To start from dead cold could take up to 30 minutes and involve the use of a blowtorch. Fuel for the fire was kerosene or gasoline or a combination of the two, but the burners of the day were crude and dirt in the jets often shut down the fire, which would stay down until they had been poked out with a bit of wire. The boiler tubes were subject to leakage. The necessity of mixing oil and steam in order to lubricate the cylinders spawned troublesome boiler deposits.

A big teakettle with a roaring fire under it is the image that leaps to mind, but a vehicle steam system isn't that simple. It must make and send to the engine steam as it is needed, a lot of it for going fast, less for going slowly, a lot for uphill, none for going down, and so on. If you drove an early Stanley faster than 40 miles an hour, the boiler pressure dropped quickly, because as boiling water was converted rapidly into steam, cold feed water poured in. Early Stanleys didn't carry a condenser in the system; steam was exhausted to the open air, which meant stopping to refill the water tank every 20 miles or so. Later models did have condensers, which meant they could reuse some of the water.

The great virtue of the steamer, the characteristic that made it worth the trouble, was that it could start itself. The internal-combustion engine couldn't and still can't. Hand-cranking a big engine gummed up with the oils of the day, which went semisolid in cold weather, was beyond the capacity of any but a strong man and was tricky even for him. Doctors, fire chiefs and others subject to emergency liked the steamer.

The steamer's silence and vibration-free running racked up other plus points. Around 1900, all but the very best i.c.-engined automobiles shook, buzzed and rattled and could be heard a block away. The steamer's exhaust made a whuff-whuff sound, passengers were aware of minor roarings and whistlings as the fire came up and down and the pumps worked, but that was all.

The steamer's endearing ability to start against a load, to exert maximum power at its lowest speed, made the gasoline car's clutch-gearbox assembly irrelevant. Aside from the standard steer-stop devices, the Stanley used only a hand throttle and a foot pedal working the cutoff, the device that regulated the amount of steam sent into the cylinders on each stroke, and it didn't require the skill and synchronization needed to handle the gas car's clutch and gear lever expertly. Driving the Stanley was simple, but maintaining it was not, because it was really a miniaturized steam locomotive, a fairly primitive machine. Payment for its silence, smoothness and power ran high. Lighting the fire in a Stanley unnerved some owners: Excess fuel would ignite, producing the dreaded "flashback," a puff of flame that would remove eyebrows and shorten mustaches.

The blow that staggered the Stanley, and probably killed it, fell when Charles Kettering of General Motors popularized the electric self-starter, beginning in 1912. Kettering is usually nominated as inventor of the starter, but, like most basic automotive inventions, it had appeared in Europe some years before it came to America--in this case, in 1896. Kettering's contribution, a massive one, was to make it widely available. In one stroke, the electric starter cut from under the Stanley its main reason for being. It wasn't clinically dead until 1927, but irreversible decline began in 1912. A far better steamer, the best, the Doble, lasted until 1932. Abner Doble, a Californian, laid down his first car in 1914 and was concerned with the steam automobile into the Fifties. He made far fewer cars than the Stanley twins. His final productions were superb carriages, good-looking, luxurious, mechanically sophisticated. Steam production was completely automatic; and at --32 degrees Fahrenheit, a Doble would move from dead cold in 40 seconds. It would do 95 mph, would maintain 750 pounds per square inch of pressure in the boiler under any demand and, like all steamers, would climb anything on which the back wheels could find traction. A tankful of water (30 gallons) lasted 750 miles. Fuel consumption was 8-11 miles to the gallon. An English tester wrote, in 1920, "Care is necessary, because of the exceptional acceleration." But the Doble came too late and it ran into simple bad luck: financial two-timing, war and depression. By mid-Twenties, the gas car was reasonably quiet, less complicated than the steamer, easier and cheaper to make.

A folk legend no less viable than the George Washington-cherry-tree story (continued on page 172)Urban Car(continued from page 144) holds that "the interests" (Detroit and the oil people) did the steamcar to death. Not true. Detroit didn't have to and the oil interests didn't want to: The steamers used petroleum. It wasn't true that hideous danger of boiler explosion was a steamcar characteristic. A boiler of the teakettle type can be destructive in explosion, but the steam automobiles used fire-tube or flash steam generators (because they made steam quickly) and these are relatively safe, since only a small amount of water is being heated at any one time. The Stanley brothers believed that their boilers would hold 1600 pounds per square inch, much more than was normally used. A Stanley could be made to go very fast; a racing model took the land-speed record at 127 miles an hour in 1906, on Ormond Beach, Florida, Fred Marriott up. The next year, trying to break his own record, Marriott was doing 150 when the car hit a rough spot in the sand, went airborne (it had a flat bottom and a curved top, like an airplane wing) and smashed itself into junk. Marriott lived, but the Stanleys never allowed him, nor anyone else, to run a factory car in competition again, a decision that cheered the gas-car people, who couldn't come remotely near 150 miles an hour at the time.

So much for the golden years of steam. What now? About two years ago, the prospects for a revival of the steam automobile were bright. They are less so now.

William Lear's announcement, in 1968, that he would build a steam race car and steam passenger vehicles to follow excited the country, because Lear is a multimillionaire industrialist with a background of accomplishment--the Lear Jet airplane, for one example out of many. His plans were ambitious: a team of cars for Indianapolis, a 130-mph police cruiser, a bus, a passenger automobile of standard configuration and a $35,000 limousine in limited edition. As of this writing, nothing has come out of his Reno plant.

Lear turned his attention from the steam reciprocating engine to the steam turbine this past summer and, in mid-November 1969, told a University of Michigan audience that he was abandoning the steam turbine as too complex, too expensive, too difficult to maintain for passenger-automobile use. He had spent, he said, $6,600,000 on the steam project and now would concentrate on the gas turbine. Longtime steam specialists, most of whom had been skeptical of Lear from the beginning, were angered at the news and not much mollified by his stated intention to press on with steam applications for trucks and buses.

Lear is not the only runner in the field. Even before the U. S. Senate hearings on steam propulsion in May 1968, steamcars were being built and planned in this country, England, Germany, Italy and Japan. The hearings didn't result in any earth-shaking dicta being issued by Washington, nor had the earlier ones on the electric car; they did startle some segments of the general public by showing them that steamcars were in being, some of very interesting performance, and that intelligent and selfless people had long been earnestly working to bring them forward. There were the Williams brothers, for example, C. J. and C. E., of Ambler, Pennsylvania. With their father, Calvin, the Williams brothers have 30 years in steam-automobile experimentation behind them, and they have a running steam automobile that is almost completely automatic and will do a nearly silent 100 miles an hour. The Williams steam generator and engine system can be dropped into various chassis, and they offered a 250-hp steam Chevrolet Chevelle at $10,500. It would move in 20 seconds from dead cold and show full steam pressure in one minute. It did 50 miles to the gallon of water, 25 to the gallon of kerosene. But the Williams brothers ran out of money last year and, rather than accept outside financing, they closed their doors.

Karl Petersen and Richard Smith of California are successful steam developers of years' standing. They have used Volkswagen chassis and their engines are considerably lighter than the originals: One, built on a four-cylinder Mercury outboard block, weighs 32 pounds, with a 200-hp capability. Steamcar builders have successfully used both methods: cast their own or used proprietary blocks, in some cases V8s or V8s cut in two.

The Williams and Smith-Petersen systems show negligible emissions--unburned hydrocarbons at 20 parts per million, for instance, as against the Federal level of 275. In practical analysis, a modern steamcar would wipe out automotive smog: Because its fuel can be burned externally under controlled conditions, it's nearly pollutant-free.

Why not, then? All the major companies have investigated steam and their public reactions have been pessimistic. Technological problems of awesome complexity loom, they have said. Industry-oriented apologists have hinted that difficulties of water-fuel feed alone might require five years of intensive research and development, with no guarantee of success; designing a condenser capable of handling exhaust steam from a high-powered engine would be a major undertaking. I find myself skeptical. The Stanley brothers worked out a fair feed system, using the Stone Age tools and techniques of 70 years ago, and the Stan-leys, compared with even the second-team talent available in battalion strength in Detroit today, were little more than whittlers and blacksmiths. A technology that can throw an unmanned rocket to the moon, make it take photographs and transmit them to earth, on a time schedule of plus or minus nothing, could, I feel, work out a way of squirting water into the boiler of a steam automobile at a rate compatible with a given speed. In comparison with the billions lavished on i.c.e. research, mills, not pennies, have been spent on steam down the years. Karl Ludvigsen, who has a significant reputation in automotive reportage, wrote, "The achievements of today's steam researchers on practically zero financial backing merely hint at what steam might be able to do with a full-scale industrial push behind it."

A switch to steam automotive power would, of course, cause a horrendous economic dislocation. It would wipe out uncounted numbers of component suppliers and it would turn into scrap metal millions of dollars' worth of i.c.e. tooling. It would affect the sensitive oil industry, to a degree, by destroying the gasoline market in favor of other crude-oil derivatives. This effect might not be wholly adverse, since a barrel of crude oil will give more kerosene than it will gasoline. Detroit argues that the only reason for considering the steam engine is its favorable emission characteristics and that comparable levels can be achieved by i.c. engines within a short time. Some authorities dispute this vigorously, on the grounds that currently favored emission-control systems are expensive, inefficient and short-lived. Spot checks in California have shown them breaking down at surprisingly low mileages, as little as 2000; and, like so many other environmental problems, smog will not wait: We are running 100,000,000 i.c.e. vehicles now, we will have 180,000,000 by 1980 and 360,000,000 by 2000. The heart of the matter, Senator Warren Magnuson has said, lies in the fact that "The increasing number of combustion vehicles will outdistance the effectiveness of pollution controls and air pollution will take a dramatic rise." Because of the number of old cars in use, ten years will pass before all automobiles have emission-control devices. One New York City research group predicts that automobiles as presently used will make Manhattan uninhabitable by 1977. If pollution continues at the present rate, by 1980 we may have irreversibly contaminated the atmosphere.

Nothing less than a Federal mandate could effect a crash steamcar production program. Only a pollutant crisis very close to the point of producing death on an epidemic or plague level could call out such a mandate. To the extent that the Federal Government has taken a position, it has been one of hands off. Alan S. Boyd, Secretary of Transportation in the Johnson Administration, said that the Government should not actively help in developing new automotive-propulsion systems; and, in general, Washington's attitude has been that the problem is Detroit's. Nevertheless, Federal financing has supported a number of projects, but many have seemed nominal, and Ralph Nader called the Federal moves "trivial and misdirected." The token-fund device is often used: $5,000,000 would have allowed the promising Republic Aviation-New York State safe-car project to build 15 prototype automobiles, but only $70,000 was granted. The idea that the automotive industry itself should produce new systems is probably wrong at the root: Radical breakthroughs are more likely outside the industries affected. Nylon, for example, originated in the chemical, not the textile, industry. On balance, it seems likely that air pollution by automobile will be a serious problem for years to come, but palliatives will prevent its reaching emergency level. Steam automobiles will be built during this decade but not in significant numbers.

And the electric?

The electric is no new thing; the first ran in Scotland in 1837, the creation of one Robert Davidson. In 1902, Charles Baker, who manufactured pleasant little two-seater electrics, built a racer with a design speed of 100 mph. It carried a two-man crew riding in hammocklike tandem seats reminiscent of those in today's Grand Prix cars: the driver in front, a mechanic behind him to work the switches. Baker was getting about 85 mph on a Staten Island circuit when spectators ran across the course. A rear wheel rim (made of steamed hickory, for lightness) broke under braking and wrecked him. Two years passed before a gasoline car, a Gobron-Brillié, did 100.

Many ordinarily farsighted people, in automobilism's beginning, found the electric a better prospect than the steamer and much better than the gasoline car. The electric was taken for granted, it was an important part of the scene: The first speeding ticket in New York City went to Jacob German (he was doing 12 mph on Lexington Avenue) and the city's first traffic fatality was a real-estate operator named Henry H. Bliss, done to death by an electric taxicab in 1899. Before the electrics gave up, in the Thirties, 70-odd firms had built them, and the square, glassy-looking town runabout was a fixture in American cities. Endearing was the word for those Detroit or Baker or Waverley coupes, nearly always black, slipping almost silently along the boulevards (they made a well-bred kind of hum). They were usually upholstered in rich gray cloth, the driver, most often a lady of means, holding across her lap the tiller, which in its main movement steered the vehicle, and regulated its speed with a twist-grip throttle thing at the end of it. There would be a brake pedal on the floor, a voltmeter and a speedometer, a bell to warn away the peasants and, nearly always, a cut-glass vase for flowers.

The standard electric was usually run at around 15-20 mph and had a full-power range of about 25 miles. It used lead-acid batteries and, as a rule, spent the night plugged into the house current. Battery cost dictated a price for an electric automobile almost twice that of a comparable gasoline car; this and its rigidly limited utility made it as much a class symbol as a contemporary country-club membership. It was marvelously suited to the pedestalized fragile-flower image of the well-to-do woman of the day; it needed no cranking, no firing, no tiresome warming up and, in relation to the two other types, it was about as complicated as a bent pin, reliable to the point of boredom. Its lady pilot needed to know nothing of its workings, because, except for running out of juice or blowing a tire, little could happen to it. There was no excuse for flatting the batteries, since the gauge on the dashboard registered the life they had left; and even if they did run down, a 15-minute standstill for recuperation would usually raise enough current to get home. And the electrics ran so slowly that tires lasted a long time.

Limited range and speed forbade them the highways and then, as now, some formidably qualified minds were intrigued by these problems: Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, for two. Spurred by the success of the great Model T, they projected a $600 electric, chassis and body by Ford, power by Edison's radical nickel-iron batteries. A couple of prototypes were built in 1914, but that was the end of it; the announcement that the work was in hand was the only tangible that came to the public, a story that was to tell itself again after the Congressional hearings of 1966 set off an electric-car boomlet.

"An electric car, priced at $840, is scheduled to be introduced this spring by Carter Engineering, Tamford, England. Top speed is said to be 40 mph, with a 50-mile driving range between rechargings."

Bulletins like that flooded automobile publications in 1967 and 1968. There were stirrings all around, in the United States, England, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, but busiest in the U. S., where at one time, 15 different Federal agencies were funding 86 research projects by universities and corporations. Most of the research was directed toward new batteries, because everything else the electric needed could be taken off 1920 shelves, dusted and put on the road. But the batteries were a real drag.

The emission crisis resurrected the electric, as it had the steamer. Air pollution hits hard, because we must breathe. Lake Erie may be covered with iron-hard scum from shore to shore, but we needn't walk on it, as we needn't swim in the Cuyahoga River where it's so oily it's a fire hazard; but air is something else.

An electric delivery truck trundling along the street--there are still a few in the U. S. and 100,000 in the United Kingdom--looks like the instant solution to auto pollution. It's 100 percent emission-free, isn't it? No. It does produce a small amount of ozone, a form of oxygen and a strong oxidizing agent. Ozone appears whenever a spark jumps in air, and it's a primary smog ingredient. Further, 85 percent of U. S. line electricity, needed for charging batteries, is generated by burning fossil fuels, smoke-making coal and oils. Some authorities think that substituting electrics for our present 100,000,000 i.c.e. vehicles wouldn't alter the level of pollution at all, the cars would be pushing out so much ozone and the power plants so much fossil-fuel smoke. On the other side of the fence, ozone production may be curbed, a properly managed fossil-fuel furnace burns its smoke, and that's academic, anyway, because all new electricity plants will be nuclear-fueled. The argument probably favors the electric car on balance; at least the vehicle itself doesn't turn out the horrifying brew of carcinogens and lethal gases (200 chemicals have been identified) that the i.c. engine emits.

Dr. George A. Hoffman of the UCLA Institute of Government and Public Affairs thinks an urban electric should weigh 3000 pounds (49 percent batteries, 4 percent motor) and be capable of a sprint speed of 100 mph, with a range of 150 miles at 30 mph. A car meeting those standards would have a lot going for it. Its expensive batteries would probably be leased, as fork-lift batteries are now. Its 30-mph base speed would be more than adequate: The rate on feeder roads into New York City during rush hours is 13 mph and in the city proper, 8.5. As for range, the national average per car per day is circa 50 miles. The car's silence would have a profound effect on urban noise, 85 percent of which originates in i.c.e. vehicles. It might also alter certain of our psychological patterns. It would be difficult for an electric car to meet the status-symbol and virility-indicator requirements of the most sought-after i.c.e. automobiles.

Yes, but those batteries.

A battery is not hard to make, because whenever two materials of different electrical potentials are connected, a flow of electrons will occur. It's just that some materials are better than others. Lead plates and diluted sulphuric acid enclosed in a suitable box make a splendid battery from most points of view, but it doesn't register very high on the power-capacity standard, measured in watt-hours: 8-20 per pound. You can drain the lead-acid battery's energy slowly--take it out through a small hole, so to speak, as the old electric coupes used to do in a day's puttering around town at 10-15 miles an hour--or all at once, as the Autolite company has done with the fastest electric automobile of all time, the Lead Wedge, a single-seater that has done 138.863 mph at Bonneville. The Lead Wedge, so called because its configuration is like that of the wedge-shaped STP turbine cars, carried 20 standard lead-acid 12-volt automobile batteries wired in series to a rear-mounted General Electric torpedo motor designed to put out 40 horsepower at 10,000 revolutions per minute. It will accept a momentary overload to 150 horsepower.

The lead-acid battery is a fairly primitive rig; researchers have long looked for something better. There are new wonder batteries on the market and more in the laboratory pipelines: nickel-cadmium, silver-zinc, sodium-sulphur, zinc-air, lithium-chlorine, lithium-nickel-halide, lithium-tellurium. They lend to be powerful but expensive or tricky to use or short-lived or all three.

Ford researchers surfaced with a sodium-sulphur battery rated at 150 watt-hours, with a much greater potential, but it has drawbacks for automotive use: The sodium and sulphur, separated by permeable ceramic walls, must be maintained in a molten state, at 572 degrees Fahrenheit. This might make for awkwardness in an accident, and there's a second factor: The two chemicals react violently when mixed together or with water. General Motors has a lithium-chlorine battery that is stronger--250 watt-hours, with a final-development potential four times that--but it has to be maintained at around 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, with chlorine gas being continuously pumped into the cells. Lithium-tellurium batteries may have the highest potential of all, but tellurium, an element that usually occurs in nature in combination with gold or silver, is rare, costly and poisonous.

The silver-zinc battery is expensive at first pricing--about $2000, of which $1200 is the cost of the silver--but it works and it's four to five times as powerful as a comparable lead-acid battery. The silver in a silver-zinc battery is not consumed, it's fully recoverable, reusable over and over.

Silver-zinc batteries were used in what was probably the most advanced electric automobile so far produced, General Motors' Electrovair II. Erected on a 1966 Corvair chassis, this vehicle used 286 silver-zinc cells connected in series to an oil-cooled Delco motor, weight 130 pounds, horsepower 150, speed 13,000 rpm. Engine compartment and trunk space in the Chevrolet chassis were fully taken up by the batteries, motor, gearbox, oil pump, radiator, fan and the various controls. The Electrovair was meant to put out performance comparable with the production Corvairs and did so: 80 mph top speed, as against 86; and 0-to-60-mph acceleration in 16.7 seconds, as against 15.8. But maximum range on a charge was only 40-80 miles, as against 250-300 miles on a tank of gas. The Electrovair did not have a regenerative braking system, in which the motor is used as a generator to recharge the batteries when the car is coasting with power off. The designers felt that ordinary city driving didn't provide enough power-off coasting to be worth while.

General Motors' reaction to the Electrovair was negative. The car's short range, slow recharge and short battery life (100 charging cycles) were cited as basic flaws. Then there was cost, cooling requirements (batteries get very hot under stress) and such difficulties as control-system noises, lack of power for heating and options and possible high-voltage dangers.

G.M.'s experimental technicians produced another electric vehicle, the Electrovan, using not batteries but fuel cells, which produce electricity in a different fashion. The battery can produce electricity only to the limit of the capacity of the materials sealed into it. The fuel cell is continuously fed and will make electricity indefinitely. Various combinations can be used; G.M. settled on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. An electrolyte fluid is also needed; potassium hydroxide was chosen. Although simply stated in outline, delivery of electric power to the wheels was complex and components needed for fuel and electrolyte storage and transfer (550 feet of plastic plumbing, for example) for cooling and control, together with 32 fuel-cell units, brought the weight of the van to 7100 pounds, as against the standard 3250. It was seven seconds slower to 60 mph, one mile an hour slower in top speed, at 70, and its range was 100-150 miles, as against 200-250. There was, of course, no room in the van for useful pay load; the works were everywhere. The General Motors technical paper on the Electrovan, delivered to the Society of Automotive Engineers in January 1967, emphatically stated the vehicle's impractical aspects: weight, cost, complication, safety problems including collision hazards.

The paper's conclusion noted, significantly, that its authors had been working with the fuel-cell system as they had found it: "The build-up of an operating fuel-cell power plant gave us a realistic state-of-the-art evaluation. The many problems indicate that much research-and-development work remains ahead." It would, indeed, seem reasonable to suppose that the fuel-cell system, good enough at the moment to be used in space vehicles, in which reliability and weight are absolutely critical, could, within an acceptable expenditure of time and money, be brought to a state of utility in automobiles. Ralph Nader, in his Playboy Interview (October 1968), stated a conviction, not a supposition, that General Electric could, in two to three years, produce a fully efficient fuel-cell automobile with an 80-mph top speed and a 200-mile range.

Ford's prototype electric, the Comuta, was turned out by the British Ford research-and-engineering people and was a down-to-earth machine, carefully thought out, practical in limited application and pretty well ready for the market, should there be a market. The Comuta is small and boxy, only 80 inches over-all length, but will stow two adults and two children in modest comfort and move them for 40 miles at 25 mph with two five-horsepower motors and four 12-volt 85-amp/hour lead-acid batteries. It includes a good heater, fan driven and using waste heat from the motors and controls. A Ford of Germany version, the Berlina, is designed to accept alternative i.c.e. power.

The Comuta is probably the best of the urban electrics and would be useful today in any major city, San Francisco possibly excepted because of its hills; but it represents no great technical advance over the Henney Kilowatt of 1961. This was a Renault Dauphine conversion using a 36-volt battery system to drive a seven-horsepower motor. It had a 35-mph top speed and 40 miles of range. I had one for a time. It was quiet, pleasant, surprisingly quick on acceleration, short-winded on hills and expensive: $3600. True, the Comuta was not an adaptation but a new design from the wheels up. There have been many such in the past two or three years, most of them one-offs. The British, characteristically, ran out a whole covey, an amperage of electrics, some of them conversions of things such as the Mini-Minor, and some, such as Scottish Aviation's Scamp, wholly fresh designs, but all running on lead-acid. Enfield Automotive of England some time ago announced firm production plans for a four-seater electric pointed toward the U. S. market and selling at around $1000; so far this vehicle has not appeared on the market. The Enfield has a top speed of 40 mph, a 35-mile range, an eight-hour recharge period and is meant for city use, local suburban tasks (station car, child ferry) and as a personnel carrier for airports, multi-acre industrial complexes and the like.

Westinghouse announced, in 1966, a small two-passenger lead-acid to be called the Markette. It would be rated, the company said, at 25 mph and 50 miles and would sell for $2000. Production of 50 a week was planned; but after market testing in Phoenix, Westinghouse abandoned ship in 1968, saying that the vehicle didn't meet safety standards, an exit line most people thought uninspired. One thousand of the Mars II, a lead-acid Renault conversion, were contemplated for 1968, at $4800. General Electric had a four-seater prototype built by its Santa Barbara Division with the collaboration of the Illinois Institute of Technology, but it remained under cover. The numbers were impressive: 81-mph top, 300-mile range, eight-minute recharge! The Amitron, an American Motors-Gulton project, ran on lithium batteries.

The Rowan electric was a big thing at the 1967 London automobile show. British Motor Holdings, the U. K. giant, is said to be working on a zinc-air car. The zinc-air battery has unique advantages: Zinc is cheap--15 cents a pound--and a mechanical recharge is possible by dropping in new zinc plates. Tokyo Shibaura of Japan announced a 62-mph, 50-mile lead-acid car, which perhaps should be taken more seriously than others, since only the Japanese have put an electric into series production since World War Two. Toyota made 3300 electrics immediately after the armistice, when gasoline was almost unobtainable in Japan.

As with the steam auto, a practical electric urban car won't soon be turned out without Federal insistence backed by, say, the cost of two weeks' fighting in Vietnam. Utility companies would push hard for it, seeing a potential electricity-sales increase of fully 50 percent, and at the right times, too: late night and early morning. But it's hard to imagine how the Government could force an electric car into being at catastrophic cost to Detroit and Dallas, although, as auto writer Brock Yates has pointed out, the oil industry has so vast a future in petrochemicals and synthetic food that it might drop the gasoline business and never miss it.

There's been talk of the Wankel engine as a good power source for the urban car, but although it's now proved and practical, running on the road, and has the advantages of light weight and small size, it's still an internal-combustion engine, rotary instead of reciprocating, and it throws an exhaust that is notably dirty, although Mercedes-Benz and Mazda have developed separately successful correctives. The gas turbine is practical--Chrysler consumer-tested 50 turbines some years ago and is now running sixth-generation models--and offensive turbine emission is less than the i.c. engine's. George Huebner of Chrysler believes it wouldn't economically depress the industry, even though it has only 20 percent as many moving parts as present i.c. engines. The turbine uses cheap fuel, is quiet, light, smooth-running but expensive, because it's made of costly materials to critically tight tolerances.

Combinations of i.c. and electric power have interesting aspects, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development financed a $300,000 research project by the University of Pennsylvania and General Motors pointing toward a $1600 car with VW acceleration and a 100-mile range on the batteries alone. This is an old idea. Ferdinand Porsche built combination passenger cars before World War One, and during the War, the Austrian army used his giant gasoline-electric artillery prime movers. The urban combination, or hybrid, would ideally run on electricity on city streets and use its small, emission-controlled i.c. engine on open roads. It would combine clean exhaust in town with acceptable range and speed on the highway. The University of Pennsylvania-General Motors project, now called Minicars Incorporated and based in Goleta, California, envisions an ultrasmall automobile, probably running on both electricity and gasoline and used in a Minicar Transit System on a rental basis. Customers would pick up a car at a terminal, register use of it through an on-board credit-card reader, drop it at another terminal, at one of many designated parking lots or perhaps on the street, to be picked up by a roving retrieval crew.

General Motors has carried the hybrid idea to a higher point than anyone else by using the Stirling engine for primary power. The Stirling is a creaking ancient in engine chronology: Its patents went to a Scots minister, Robert Stirling, in 1816. The Stirling engine is something like the steam engine, in that it's an external-combustion machine; but instead of burning fuel under a boiler and sending the resulting steam to do work in a piston cylinder, the Stirling burns fuel (kerosene) and passes the heat to a jacket around a sealed cylinder and piston containing hydrogen gas. The hydrogen expands, driving the piston down for a power stroke; expanded, the gas is cooled and fed back to the cylinder, ready to be heated again. Since there is no near-explosive fuel burning, as in an internal-combustion engine, the Stirling is silent, it's vibration-free and, since the fuel can be burned under precise control, the pollution level is radically reduced.

The Stirling-electric installation was made in a 1968 Opel Kadett and the engine used was rated at eight horsepower. Alone, it could propel the car at about 30 mph at a fuel consumption of 30-40 miles per gallon. With power from the 500 pounds of lead-acid batteries cut in, speed would rise to 55 mph, maintained for a maximum of 40 miles, when current consumption would overcome charging rate. With the vehicle stationary, the engine could be fully directed to battery charging.

Engine-compartment and trunk space in the Opel are stuffed with machinery, a situation to be expected, since practically all the components are off-the-shelf items designed for other use. Research and development presumably would speedily change the picture: Miniaturization is not an occult art. There are problems in the Stirling electric--batteries, heat rejection, the cost of a double drive system--but they are not so grave as to dull its intellectual appeal. It has the extra value of being presumably inoffensive to the oil and automotive industries and perhaps attractive to a third power, the utilities

Until the great city-suburb complexes sag and crack under the maddening load of 4000-pound-car/160-pound-passenger traffic, and sag and crack they surely will, the urban automobile will be what it is today. After that, something small and squarish will appear, three of it parkable in an Eldorado's shadow and running a steam engine, maybe, an electric motor, perhaps, an emission-free i.c. engine, probably not, or a hybrid. Whatever the power source, it's most likely to be in the rear or under the floor, not in front. It will be small, since a 50-mph top speed will be adequate. The "three-box" basis on which automobiles have been designed from the beginning--one box each for engine, people and luggage--will have no relevance to tomorrow's urban design: It will be strictly "one-box." Indeed, a British designer has on the road at the moment a wheeled platform carrying a glass cube as its body. The general effort will be far less radical, the end result a cube rounded off on the edges and narrowing in all dimensions toward the top. Capacity will be two people, with less comfortable accommodation behind them for two children or one adult. There will be no luggage area except for minimal parcel stowage.

Seating will be straight up and down, since lateral space will be at a premium. There will be no doors as such: Part of the body, probably in front, will be hinged. One projected design allows the whole right front three quarters of the body to open, the windshield being in two parts, sealed on the center vertical line. The steering wheel (or yoke, or tiller) will fold out of the way.

To minimize maintenance, body metal will probably be anodized or otherwise colored at the source. All-round bumpers, perhaps hydraulic, will be standard ware, and minor traffic collisions will have no significance. Radio and tape rigs about the size of a present package of cigarettes will take care of the sound, and a cheap but adequate two-way radiotelephone will be standard. Like everything else on the road, the urban car will be air conditioned.

This transition vehicle will be succeeded by slot-track cars such as the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory's Urbomobile, capable of hands-off automated travel on city-access trunk lines and driver-control street use. Beyond the Urbomobile, the crystal ball clouds into striated visions of 25-mph moving sidewalks, 250-mph gravity-vacuum subways, individual electron-rocket pods and the ultimate solution: material transference, or, I think--ZAP!--I'll go to Paris now.