Heroes For The Planet|Design

By Margot Hornblower

The gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine is a menace to the environment. Although cars are far cleaner than they once were, California and other states are now demanding that autos be emissions-free. And the industry is beginning to comply, offering a few models pristinely propelled by electric batteries. Car companies are not promoting the vehicles with nearly enough enthusiasm (for the moment, they'd rather sell profitable gas-gulping SUVs), but the industry can see a new era coming and is pouring big money into better technology. Here are profiles by Margot Hornblower of two independent thinkers who have helped point automakers in a different direction.

STANFORD OVSHINSKY Listen, Detroit: You'll Get a Charge Out of This

Troy, Mich., in the belly of the automobile industry, is an odd place to spark a revolution against the internal-combustion engine. But, then, Stanford Ovshinsky is no ordinary gearhead.

The son of a Lithuanian-born scrap-metal dealer, Ovshinsky opened a machine shop after high school, but that couldn't satisfy him for long. Although he never went to college, he founded a new field of physics based on the superconductivity of certain alloys. The company he formed in 1960, Energy Conversion Devices, makes the photovoltaic cells used on the Mir space station to generate electricity from sunlight. In the '80s the Japanese licensed his patents to produce digital video discs. But what really revs him up these days is a car battery. How dull is that? Not at all, if it can "change the world," as he claims with a subversive glint in his eye.

In his wood-paneled office, the 76-year-old inventor with an Einsteinian shock of silver hair paces before a white board covered with mysterious equations and diagrams. "All you hear," he says, "is that electric cars are not realistic. But we are providing the means." Ovshinsky's patented new battery powers the 1999 model of General Motors' EV-1, the first modern American electric car to be marketed to the general public--although only in Arizona and California so far. It can go 150 miles before it needs recharging, more than double the distance achieved by electric cars powered by traditional batteries.

The breakthrough came in 1982, when Ovshinsky, the self-made alchemist, invented small, powerful batteries made from alloys called nickel metal hydrides. American manufacturers were indifferent, but Japanese electronics giants embraced the technology. Last year 780 million NiMH batteries were made for computers, cell phones and other gadgets, most through licenses on Ovshinsky's patents. In 1988 the PBS science program Nova aired a documentary on Ovshinsky titled Japan's American Genius.

Back then, when Ovshinsky talked of scaling up his battery to run a car, he was ridiculed. "The auto companies said it wouldn't work," he recalls. "Then, after one car got 200 miles on a single charge, they said it couldn't be manufactured. Now that we are making them, they say it is too costly. But that is a red herring too." Ovshinsky's team of engineers and electrochemists has slashed the cost 40% in two years, they claim. If automakers would commit to buying tens of thousands, Ovshinsky says, the batteries would make electric cars as cheap as gasoline models.

Not everyone is convinced. "Ovshinsky is brilliant," says Daniel Sperling, director of the Transportation Institute at the University of California at Davis. "But his battery will be cost-competitive only for small electrics, such as Toyota's E-com or Ford's Th!nk--both still prototypes." The battery will also work in "hybrid" cars, with both gasoline engines and electric motors (see diagram), that Japanese firms will send to the U.S. by next year.

Ovshinsky has attracted financing--$36 million in grants from the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium and $20 million from GM. His new battery factory in Ohio, however, is running at less than half capacity. "Automakers built an industry on gasoline," says an undaunted Ovshinsky. "And large corporations don't change easily. But electric cars are here. The genie is out of the bottle."

GEOFFREY BALLARD In a Hurry to Prove the "Pistonheads" Wrong

A century hence, when historians try to pinpoint the birth of the hydrogen age, will they focus on two weary tennis players vegging out in a Vancouver hot tub? It is as good a peg as any. For on that summer day in 1989 at the Hollyburn Country Club, a peripatetic Canadian geophysicist persuaded a British Columbia official to help fund a farfetched idea: a municipal bus that would run not on gasoline or diesel fuel but on hydrogen, and spew from its tailpipe only a thin stream of pure water. "Can you get me a green photo op?" Geoffrey Ballard, the geophysicist, remembers his companion asking.

Four years and $4.2 million later, the magic bus was built. Scientists from Vancouver's Ballard Power Systems, a then fledgling company, joined Canadian officials in drinking from a fluted glass the clean emissions of the world's first fuel-cell vehicle, celebrating an event they hoped would herald a transportation revolution. Since then, auto companies and other investors have poured more than $1 billion into Ballard's outlandish notion, betting that the fuel cell--an electrochemical device that combines oxygen with hydrogen to generate electricity--can all but eliminate auto pollution. With bravado Ballard predicts that fuel-cell cars will become economical by 2010 and "the internal-combustion engine will go the way of the horse. It will be a curiosity to my grandchildren."

If Ballard, a trim 66-year-old with an unflinching gaze, sounds cocky, it may be because he has finally won respect at the end of a long and winding career. The son of an electrochemist from Niagara Falls, Ont., he crossed the border to earn a Ph.D. in geophysics from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and worked for the U.S. Army in specialties ranging from microwave communications to ice physics (he studied how to hide bomber refueling tanks in Greenland). After the 1974 energy crisis hit, he became head of the new Federal Energy Conservation Research office in Washington but was frustrated when Congress refused to get serious about weaning the U.S. from imported oil. "So I quit," he says. "I've never followed the herd." His first business venture, a seven-year quest to build a lithium-based "superbattery" that would replace the internal-combustion engine, never panned out, landing him at one point in bankruptcy.

In 1983 Ballard and two younger partners, engineer Paul Howard and electrochemist Keith Prater, changed course, winning a contract from the Canadian military to research a more exotic form of power. Fuel cells had been around for 150 years and were used in the Gemini space program but were thought to be too expensive for any practical use. As Ballard's team began to make the cells lighter, smaller and thus cheaper, it realized that the technology could eventually be used in vehicles.

Skeptics--"pistonheads," Ballard calls them--say the company is decades away from making fuel-cell cars affordable, if it ever can. But some of the largest automakers are betting on a hydrogen future. DaimlerChrysler and Ford have paid $750 million for 35% of Ballard Power Systems, vowing to market fuel-cell cars within five years. Since hydrogen is difficult to store, current research focuses on fueling the cars with methanol, from which hydrogen would be extracted on board. That process would produce pollution, but not nearly as much as conventional engines give off.

In late 1997 Ballard, now a multimillionaire, retired as chairman of his company, but he's confident that his successors can fulfill his vision. He has already turned many doubters into believers. Science colleagues who were once "embarrassed to be seen with me at professional symposia," he says, now call upon him to give speeches. "Be impatient," he counseled students at British Columbia's University of Victoria as he accepted an honorary degree last year. "Challenge the normal. Dare to be in a hurry to change things for the better."