Here Comes Hypercar!

Abstract

Despite the fact that the price of gasoline seems stuck around $2.00 per gallon, gas-guzzling SUVs and pickups remain as popular as ever among Americans. The United States produces 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions; cars and light trucks account for around 20% of the nation’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It would appear that a gas-saving, nonpolluting car for the U.S. masses will need to be something that even car enthusiast magazines could applaud. It will need to equal or beat conventional cars in handling, performance, size, safety, and amenities, and do so at a competitive cost. It’s a tall order, but Amory Lovins, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) in Snowmass, Colorado, thinks he may have just the car to meet it: the Hypercar®. The latest version of Lovins’s Hypercar concept is a detailed virtual design illustrating an SUV crossover vehicle that would fully compete with today’s midsize entry-level luxury SUVs. Powered by a hybridized hydrogen fuel cell, the concept, dubbed Revolution, would achieve Environmental Protection Agency mileage ratings equivalent to 108 miles per gallon (mpg) of gasoline; as a Prius-like gasoline hybrid, 62 mpg, and with a good nonhybrid gasoline engine, 45 mpg, according to extensive RMI simulations. The gasoline hybrid version could sell profitably for $40,000–45,000 (in year 2000 dollars), at standard markups based on what Lovins calls extensive supplier price quotations for 82% of the components, plus bottom-up cost modeling by RMI and independent consultants for technologies not yet in production. Further development could pare the price to about $35,000. But Lovins’s concept goes beyond transportation. A national fleet of fuel cell–powered Hypercar-class vehicles could contribute to the national electricity grid when they are parked—which averages about 96% of the time, according to the Population Reference Bureau. And according to RMI, if Hypercars captured half of the world’s market by 2020, global carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks would fall 25%, instead of rising by 12%. (This estimate assumes that the efficiency of conventional cars improves by 25%, and vehicle miles traveled increases by 50%.)