Doing the Impossible: What Detroit Doesn’t Want You to Know

Increasing gas mileage and horsepower with fast food waste

“Think about it,” Goodwin laughs. “…a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!”

Thus does Johnathan Goodwin, a 37-year old “who looks like Kevin Costner with better hair,” describe the 2005 H3 Hummer he’s recently hacked into being a tricked-out electric hybrid that runs on waste frying oils from fast food joints.

Fast Company Magazine calls him the “Motorhead Messiah” for taking the hugest gas-guzzlers in America and modifying them to get up to four times their rated gas mileage while burning low-emission biofuels grown on US soil – all the while doubling their horsepower. That’s what is becoming known as “Green and Mean.”

Martin Tobias, CEO of Imperium Renewables – the nation’s largest producer of biodiesel fuels, says Goodwin is in a league of his own. “Nobody out there is doing experiments like he is.” Particularly no one in Detroit. The big American automakers have been whining for decades that what Goodwin does regularly just because he can is impossible.

Which, lobbyists for the Detroit contingent tell us, is why they’ve fought aggressively against raising fuel efficiency and emissions standards. It hasn’t worked, as labor unrest in the UAW has been brewing and Congress is threatening to raise the fuel efficiency standards for cars by 10 miles per gallon and a dozen states are enacting laws requiring steep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, Japan has flood the market with vehicles that get up to 40% better gas mileage than any American cars, and Mercedes’ new BlueTec diesel sedans not only deliver better mileage, they produce boosted horsepower as well. What’s wrong with American automakers?

Goodwin says they could do it as well as he can. 90% of the parts he uses in conversions are made by American auto parts manufacturers. He’s got an eighth grade education, didn’t even go to high school. Surely all those multi-degreed engineers and designers in Detroit could figure it out.

Yet to their continuing discredit, American automakers are very slow on the uptake. They pretend to know their market, what people want, and yet consistently ignore it year after year. As the competition beats them to the punch every time, and their bottom line triggers bottom-feeding frenzies.

It is clear that the US has to cure its addiction to the Middle East’s black gold. We cannot grow enough corn on all the farmland in the country to fuel our cars with ethanol. And if we tried that, we’d all starve long before we could save up enough cash to buy one of those cars. GM holds a joint patent with the EPA on a new passenger car diesel engine as efficient as the new Mercedes engine, but has refused for as long as the patent has been held to actually build it and put it in their production line.

While Canada has installed plug-in outlets in its parking lots and parking meters so Canadians can warm their engines enough to start in below-zero temperatures, Detroit complains that it can’t use hydrogen fuels because they have to be pre-heated. Like diesels have to be pre-heated. Heck, they won’t even give us the hybrids Japan could sell here just as fast as they can produce them, if Detroit’s automakers hadn’t lobbied for restrictions in the law that puts strict limits on how many hybrid cars can be produced and sold.

What’s wrong is more than just institutional inertia. If something doesn’t change soon, there will be no US automakers – they’ll all be out of business and smaller, more flexible companies will arise to fill the gaps. Companies more in tune with the customer’s desires for something actually worth the tens of thousands of dollars invested. Something that they can afford to drive from point A to point B, something they’re not ashamed to be seen driving.

Automobile and truck manufacturing is a huge chunk of America’s economic base. Transportation of people and goods dictates all peripheral industries and policies in our economy. It’s the reason we’re at war right now in the Middle East and Western Asia, thus the reason our children are dying on foreign battlefields. All so we can drive our Hummers around town with American flag stickers on the bumpers and yellow ribbons on the windows, without feeling guilty for being the greediest, meanest, most arrogant conspicuous consumers the world has ever seen.

It may be time to think up some new ideas. Goodwin’s way ahead on that.

Links:

Fast Company: Motorhead Messiah

Doing what Detroit says is impossible

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Filed under Automakers, Biofuels, Economics, Energy, Unions, War | Comments (4)