ONE
The Great Electric Car Race
What got Americans thinking again about electric cars started with the brownish blanket of smog that took shape over the varicose network of freeways growing out of Los Angeles in the 1950s. In the sixties the smog congealed into a semipermanent blanket of atmospheric filth that hung between the Pacific and the San Gabriel Mountains. Sunlight cooked its automobile exhaust and other ingredients into a more toxic stew as Los Angeles continued to sprawl.
Smog obscured the horizons. It sent a growing number of people to hospital emergency rooms. And it outraged students in the sophomore history class that Wally Rippel, a physics major, was taking at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1965.
The class discussion was about how the United States solves problems and it soon drifted into smog. Rippel, then a twenty-year-old day student, still remembers the rapid-fire questions: Why doesn't the government pass regulations? Why should automakers continue to sell vehicles that fouled the air? Why would people blithely ignore such pollution when America had the tools and the money to clean the air? Hadn't American scientists and engineers pivoted from the promise of the atomic age into the mind-numbing potential of the space age in a mere two decades? So why can't they fix this?
But the really galvanizing moment for Rippel came when one of the class's brighter and quieter members shouted three words: "We are they!" The room suddenly grew quiet.
Rippel lived in Hollywood. He was frequently prodded by his father to think of unconventional solutions and to believe that the American "can-do spirit" could solve almost anything. His father had not finished high school, yet he had become an NBC radio sound engineer and something of an electronics expert by reading a lot of books.
By 1965 most of the people who had worked on electric cars in the United States were dead, so the "we are they" moment in the Caltech classroom sent Wally to the books. Books often romanticized the earlier phase of electric cars as their "golden age." But romance meant little to Rippel, a physics major. He began with the basics: how much energy did it take to make a car go one mile? Soon he was scribbling multiple calculations: If every car in Los Angeles were electrically powered, electricity use would rise by 20 percent, but smog might drop by as much as 90 percent. That led to the next question: How would you go about making a modern electric car?
He initially thought of using fuel cells. They were much discussed in the sixties because they were being designed to power U.S. spacecraft. Rippel found them to be far too complicated and expensive. Batteries would be much cheaper and simpler, Rippel decided, so he read about those. They could power electric motors, giving them enormous spinning power or torque to propel cars. He discovered that transmissions were a problem in the earlier electric cars, making the cars jerky as drivers accelerated. But this was the space age and Rippel was sure that solid-state electronics could give these cars "glass-smooth acceleration."
So he set about to design an electronic control system, following a manual he'd gotten from General Electric. He invested eighty dollars in what seemed to him to be an elegant solution, a solid-state device called a thyristor that controlled the electric flow by cutting it into segments, hence its nickname: the chopper. Rippel managed to fry his chopper by feeding it too much electrical current. After many mind-numbing hours of trial and error and more spectacular destructions, he gave up. It seemed too hard. "Looking back, I didn't know what I didn't know-the worst kind of ignorance," he recalled.
But the other elements were there. Batteries had been used for over a century and chargers were readily available. Electric motors that were used in forklifts and other small industrial applications produced no emissions and were far more energy efficient. Stacked up against the gasoline engine, Rippel calculated, they had the ability to reduce emissions regardless of how the electricity they used was produced. After quizzing a number of his Caltech professors, Wally Rippel decided that he was going to be "they." So that summer he earned $1,000 working as a lab technician and invested $700 of it in a used 1959 Volkswagen Microbus that he set out to electrify.
One thing Rippel began to have doubts about during his junior year, when he began to assemble his electric VW, was equations that showed that it took almost a ton of lead-acid automobile storage batteries to get the car up to a mere thirty-five miles per hour. In theory batteries should be able to deliver fifty times more energy per pound than his did. Why didn't they? Rippel upgraded to a set of golf cart batteries.
When he asked his professors about batteries, they were evasive. Rippel had stumbled into a data gap. "Batteries were something we didn't talk about on campus. It was still a topic like sex used to be during the Victorian age," he recalled. After more research, Rippel concluded that his professors didn't know exactly what went on in electric batteries. The electrochemical reactions in batteries tended, as he put it, "to be very messy. There's a lot of stuff going on, so it's hard to write an equation for things like that." What was known about batteries came from trial and error, not from well-understood physical laws.
That brought Rippel back to brood on the "we are they" problem. After more frustrating experiments, in his senior year Rippel concluded that the grand solution to smog would require getting a lot of bright minds to focus on the problem at once. It would take a competition, one that was novel enough to capture public attention and outrageous enough to get young scientific minds focused on defeating the enemy-smog-by resolving the battery's many issues.
While he was thinking of enemies, Rippel came up with the one that would definitely grab Caltech's attention. That would be Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Pasadena school's longtime East Coast rival. Rippel's school was the rising, younger West Coast upstart that had blossomed during the space age. When it came to innovative science, MIT graduates often seemed to feel they were the cerebral equivalent of the New York Yankees. They could be smug about their clout, which had been proven long before.
Other celebrated rivalries among the nation's universities might be tested on the baseball diamonds or the basketball courts, but where could engineering geeks go to have it out? Rippel started thinking up the rules for a cross-country electric car race. It would be Rippel's electric VW versus whatever MIT came up with. The idea was amusing enough to persuade the then-dean of Caltech to write his counterpart at MIT extending the challenge. The two schools had a long history of taking jabs at each other.
Partly because it was a Caltech idea, MIT's dean immediately rejected the idea. Who needed that? But then a newspaper clipping of his curt rejection tickled the imaginations of one of the university's unofficial fraternities, the Number Six Club. "Back in those days, we had a lot of time on our hands and we said well, why not?" explained Leon Loeb, a sophomore from Corpus Christi, Texas.
An engineering student with a dry wit and a flair for entrepreneurial ventures, Loeb became the leader and, as he put it, the "chief scrounger," of the MIT effort. The MIT faculty became interested because one of its members had designed a state-of-the-art, electronically timed induction electric motor. Here was an almost poetic opportunity to show how easily MIT could still leave its cross-country rival in the dust.
MIT had excellent corporate connections and Loeb approached companies for donations to the MIT effort. He accumulated more than a half-million dollars' worth of equipment, including Detroit's latest creation, a brand-new Chevrolet Corvair contributed by General Motors. It would be powered by nickel-cadmium batteries made by Gulton Industries, a New Jersey company. The batteries were big, normally used to kick over aircraft engines, and came with a special set of nylon tools that would hopefully prevent the MIT students from electrocuting themselves.
On paper, Loeb's team had the race already won. MIT's more powerful batteries cost $18,000 versus the $600 worth of car batteries powering Rippel's VW. The Corvair was far more aerodynamic, even with 1,800 pounds of batteries stacked where the rear seat was and jammed into the front compartment of the rear-engine car.
But in the garage the calculations began to work out differently. Loeb's team spent hours trying to coax meaningful life out of the futuristic induction motor that had been designed at MIT under a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation. "The damn thing never did work," explained Loeb. "Then it became 'Oh, fuck it, we need something that will get us there.'"
MIT's car wound up with the same electric motor that Caltech had, normally used to power industrial forklifts. The last-minute switch meant Loeb's team had to spend all night before the race wrenching the final version of their Corvair together. They managed to mate the forklift motor with a four-speed transmission by leaving out the clutch, which would require drivers to do a lot of carefully synchronized shifting. "Boy, was it jerky," recalls Loeb. "I still have on my desk some of the gears that had the teeth knocked out of them."
On race day, August 26, 1968, Rippel's moment had come. Over a cross-country hookup attached to a public address system, the two teams managed to greet each other with sarcasm. Rippel told the engineers from Cambridge that he was sure to meet them at the Massachusetts border. MIT's riposte was that if Rippel's team made it that far, they would be happy to provide free towing because Caltech would surely need it.
Then the heavily laden VW bus whooshed away from the Caltech campus in Pasadena at 9:00 A.M. Pacific daylight time followed by two chase cars and an assortment of vehicles carrying newspaper reporters and local television crews.
At the same time the Corvair left MIT headed west. Electric utilities-which have long nurtured a dream of selling gobs of power to electric car owners-had helped establish a chain of fifty-five charging stations extending across the United States that the teams could use. They consisted mainly of linemen waiting with connecting cables brought down from overhead power lines.
Under Rippel's rules of the race, the first car to reach the other's campus would win. Both teams calculated it would take them five days to navigate the designated 3,398-mile route across the country.
Despite their desperate all-nighter spent reengineering their car, Loeb's MIT team appeared dressed in suits and ties for the prestart exchange of remarks in an attempt to establish a psychological advantage. They knew they still had a considerable edge when it came to the technology. Their car could go faster, recharge faster, and had a simpler, more aerodynamic design. But after that the posturing ended swiftly. There were cruel realities waiting for both teams out on the nation's highways, most of them having to do with batteries.
As a backup, the MIT team brought along a Corvette capable of towing the Corvair in emergencies. Caltech's car was followed by another towing a portable generator. The rules said that each side would be penalized by adding more time to their crossing if they used the tow truck or the generator. Each team was followed by judges and cars carrying reporters from Machine Design, a trade magazine that had volunteered to enforce the rules.
There were no cheerleaders waving pom-poms as the MIT team rolled out of the campus, but banners were flying and students were cheering as the electric Corvair disappeared in the distance. Getting out of sight was good because there were few witnesses to what happened twenty minutes later when MIT's high-powered batteries pooped out. In a short shakedown test the weekend before the race, Loeb's team noticed their batteries had a tendency to lose charge and overheat at the same time. Now they found the Corvair's electric motor overheated, as well.
As part of their all-nighter before the race, the MIT team thought they had a fix for the simmering batteries with a jury-rigged cooling-and-ventilating system. It began with bags of ice dumped on the batteries and copper coils that carried the meltwater through the front seat and into a "bilge" in the Corvair's trunk. Aside from the possibility of causing electrical problems, the melting bags of ice also leaked down the driver's neck. They fogged the inside of the windshield so there were times when he couldn't see.
But those were small issues compared with the batteries. Despite frequent attempts to charge them, their output remained so low that the Corvair had to be towed for two hundred miles to Buffalo, New York, racking up huge time penalties.
When they pulled into a service plaza near Buffalo the MIT team had been up for almost forty-eight hours. They had tried every trick they could think of to get the batteries to work better. None of them helped much. They called in a representative from Gulton Industries, who recommended overcharging the batteries, which seemed to Loeb and his team to be a dubious proposition. Overcharged batteries could blow up.
The psychological advantage, if MIT ever had one, seemed to have weakened. "By that time we had lost our idealism about what a battery really was," Loeb recalled. "At that time battery electro-chemistry was witchcraft and to a great extent it still is. I still don't think that folks have got a very good handle on exactly what goes on in a battery."
Shortly after dawn the sleepy, scruffy MIT crew watched as utility technicians gave their ailing battery what amounted to a supercharge. For almost six hours the Corvair's batteries hissed, bubbled, and gurgled menacingly as the incoming juice from the power line split some of the batteries' liquid electrolyte into oxygen and hydrogen, which the budding engineers also knew might blow up. "It was at this point when spirits were as low as the battery charge," observed one accompanying judge from Machine Design. "It was a gamble and if it failed the MIT team would probably have called it quits. For them the race had become a go/no-go proposition."
At about the same time, 3:00 P.M. California time, Wally Rippel's VW was climbing mountains in eastern California. The uphill strain drained almost all of his battery charge, but the downhill replenished it because Rippel could coast and recharge them through one asset that most electric cars now have-regenerative braking. The system captured the energy from braking and turned it into electricity that fed back into the batteries.
On a downgrade just east of Seligman, Arizona, Rippel decided to drop the VW into second gear to make the batteries recharge even faster. There was a loud thud and the car rolled to a dead stop. One of the crew members got out and dashed around to the back, but Rippel knew that any frantic attempt to fix things now would be pointless. The extra RPMs from his downshift had blown the VW's electric motor apart. It was the middle of the night and all was silent on the deserted highway. "So we sat there, thinking," Rippel recalled.
Caltech's adventure with the electrified Microbus had been, up to that point, mostly a one-man show directed by Rippel. In his mind he ran through all the new problems; a blown engine would not only have to be replaced, but specially machined before it could be made to fit the unique transmission he had rigged up for the VW. What it all added up to, for Rippel, was failure. He broke the silence. "I said to the team, 'You know, I think this is over for us.'"
The first stirrings of a resurgence of the electric car now seemed stillborn. MIT was mystified and a little frightened by their batteries bubbling away in a gas station in Buffalo, New York, and Caltech was depressed and stranded along with pieces of their shattered engine on the road in the deserted mountains of Arizona.
The technology was too hard. There were too many voids in the knowledge that people had written in books. And the thousands of men and women who had done the trial and error that put an earlier generation of silent, clean electric vehicles on the road seventy years before this race were now silent themselves, or in no position to be of any help.
Copyright © 2015 by John J. Fialka
