Neil Young's electric car   |  May 27, 2009  

Prepare for a day at the beach

By Mathieu Yuill

The rockstar has turned inventor, and he wants us all driving big comfortable electric cars

When word started to trickle across the Internet that Neil Young was building an electric car, the initial response was understandable confusion. Young is one of the founders of Farm Aid and is well known for his charitable efforts, yet building a car was a giant leap.

Yet, right in his own garage, Young and some partners are indeed transforming one of his favourite vehicles, a 1959 Lincoln Continental. Deemed a flop at the time and still one of the heaviest production cars ever made, it is now considered a collector’s item.

First of all, most electric car (or hybrid) projects come from large, established companies. Toyota come to mind? How about Honda? Even the Telsa Roadster is backed by the likes of guys who launched PayPal, eBay and Google.

And to date, successful electric cars have been small and good for city driving, but not so much for loading up a family of five for a day at the beach.

Yet that’s exactly what Young envisions: “A safe, powerful automobile that is comfortable and economic on both long trips and the commute to work,” Young posted on his Web site recently. His approach involves two key components, an electric engine from UQM Technologies, based in Denver, Colo., and a generator set being developed by a scientist in Australia.

The LincVolt team members are experimenting with fuel blending, Young said. Basically, they’re combining two types of fuel in the same tank. Recently, Air New Zealand conducted the first successful flight with blended fuel in one of its aircrafts. It mixed 50 per cent A1 jet fuel with 50 per cent jatropha plant oil.

One method Young and his team have experimented with is using natural gas in a rotary engine. Traditionally, piston-based natural gas engines result in horrible fuel efficiency. However, John Goodwin, owner of SAE energy in Wichita and part of the team building the LincVolt, explained to the New York Times they have modified the engine by “Enhancing the range and efficiency with another fuel source, which we call the slog.”

Basically, water is run through a process of hydrogen fracturing, captured in the exhaust and then used again. This allows them to replace the traditional large tank of natural gas that only goes 500 miles with a smaller one that will last 1,000 miles.

Young’s mission to create an electric hybrid car—defined here as one that can achieve 100 miles per gallon—was sharpened when he and his team decided to enter the Automotive X Prize, a competition designed to inspire a new generation of viable, super-efficient vehicles that may help break our addiction to oil and stem the effects of climate change.

Winners will share US$10 million
A 2010 race from California to Washington, D.C., will determine if any of the more than 100 teams entered in the X Prize will be awarded a share of the money. Young has taken the LincVolt on the road several times and is averaging 68 miles per gallon, as of January 2009. The team ran a test run from California to Washington in February 2009 and hoped to see an improvement of 20 per cent in fuel efficiency.

Powerhouse
What’s particularly fascinating about the LincVolt is its ability to actually produce energy, Goodwin said. The hydrogen process actually produces more energy than the car needs.

“You’ll probably want to plug this into your house,” he told a Wichita television station. “Not to power the car, but to actually take your house off the grid.”

That means the LincVolt could actually be a source of income as well, as owners can sell extra power to the utility company. Generating power from the motor in excess of the automobile’s needs is of big interest to not only Joe and Jane Homeowner but also to the largest consumer of energy in the world, the United States military. UQM motors have been used in military applications and, at 19.5 feet and two and a half tons, the LincVolt could almost be a military-grade vehicle.

The UQM motor is connected to a generator which, in turn, feeds a bank of batteries. One criticism of small hybrid vehicles has always been the amount of space the battery takes up, usually in the trunk. A generator and a bank of batteries may not fit easily into a Toyota Prius but space is easier to find in a Lincoln Continental. ‘‘We are trying to make an example,” Young told the Australian newspaper The Herald Sun. “If you can make a car like that relatively green, then it’s obvious smaller cars could do a lot better.

‘‘The government is bailing out the automobile companies. Essentially, the government is going to own the companies for several years while they stabilize. During that time the government can tell the companies what to do, so we have a window now to show what can be done with innovation.”

Large-scale action
Young hopes the LincVolt will inspire government and industry. “We will know we have succeeded when we have one or more major companies building automobiles that use our technology or something similar, creating zero emissions, while saving money for the owner,” he wrote on his Web site. “We will also know we have succeeded when the world’s power generating plants start using our clean technology or another clean technology that delivers comparable results.”

Young also posted a scathing opinion of American auto makers. “The Big Three now have until the end of March to make the case that shows how they will survive. Survival is not enough, though,” Young wrote. “If the Big Three cannot agree to make only cars that are fuel efficient enough to get at least 50 mpg by 2011, 75 mpg by 2013 and 100 mpg by 2015, then they should go into bankruptcy and fend for themselves like all the other businesses that are having trouble. The truth is this can be done and innovators know the way to do it.”

Young has identified three main goals: reducing the need to fight over oil, shaping up the Big Three’s efforts and creating a zero-emissions car. These are the subject of a documentary he’s producing and directing (under his pseudonym, Bernard Shakey) called Repowering the American Dream.

Young explained to the New York Times that he’s also a lifelong tinkerer. He holds numerous patents, mostly to do with model trains. “I’m a transportation freak,” he said. “I like transportation devices. I like mechanical devices.” Living in Silicon Valley, Young said all the tinkering he saw his neighbours doing on electric cars intrigued him. He’s currently driving a 1982 Mercedes diesel coupe powered by vegetable oil he buys from a restaurant, and said “it’s clean and doesn’t smell too bad” but added this solution is only a Band-Aid.

Electric stations coming here
Canada is readying itself for electric cars. Better Place, based in Palo Alto, Calif., has unveiled a pilot project to build a recharging station in Ontario.

Better Place will set up an electric car demonstration centre in Toronto and develop a timeline for building the Ontario network, the company said. The Ontario government has earmarked $1.2 billion in funding for ventures that will help the province weather the economic downturn by creating jobs, and many point to building an electric-car recharging network as an excellent place to start.

In addition to the documentary, Young is also set to release an entire album about green vehicles titled Fork in the Road, including tracks titled “Cough Up the Bucks,” “Fuel Line,” “Hit the Road” and “Get Around.”

So far, Young has pumped US$100,000 of his own cash into the LincVolt, with the total budget approaching US$500,000. That’s big numbers for most but an astonishingly low amount given the R&D that has gone into other electric vehicles.

“People are looking for something; we used to lead the world with our automotive designs,” Young said at a Salesforce.com conference earlier this year. “We have an electrical grid that can support 180,000,000 electric commuting vehicles.

“I have a lot of cars, I’ve always been a collector and a material guy and I looked at them and it just didn’t move me anymore… Why are we only hearing about new Cadillacs that are getting 27 miles per gallon; what is that all about? This is America, we have ingenuity here and we can do much better than this.”

LincVolt is an open-source project. From very early in the process, Young and his team have been posting progress videos explaining the technology and even offering a live feed from the garage.

He said people with specific expertise have written in with ideas on different ways to do things and how to use certain devices they already have. Young is on record as saying he’s willing to share the X Prize money with anyone who helps. The need for America, and to a greater extent its neighbouring countries, not to be a slave to oil is the biggest driving force behind his efforts. People want to take long drives, he said; family road trips are part of our heritage, but current electric efforts don’t address those needs.

In addition, cars like the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight don’t offer anywhere near the room a family of four needs for a two-week trip to the beach, let alone a camping weekend.

But is what Young doing reproducible? It’s one thing to build a one-off automobile that gets 100 miles per gallon and an entire other challenge to produce more than 10,000 vehicles a year. “We’re just showing that this is possible since the big companies have not shown that it’s possible,” he has said. “It’s guys in their garages around the world who have come together and this is the result, this is an example of what can be done.”


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