Hypercar Makes its Move: Driving for a Prototype

By Jason Denner and Thammy Evans

For the last 16 months, under a veil of secrecy, RMI’s latest for-profit spinoff has quietly been building a revolution. On January 9, 2001 that veil was partly lifted by a front-page feature in The Wall Street Journal, covering the development of Hypercar, Inc.

Hypercar, Inc. successfully completed a $4.3-million startup phase in November 2000 and it completed a conceptual design that met stringent goals and industry standards. Using the computer simulation capabilities of a leading engineering, automaking, and Formula One firm, the company showed that the concept car met all performance expectations, including occupant safety in collisions with much heavier steel cars. This is an encouraging outcome for the young team, proving to themselves, potential clients, and the general public that the Hypercar SM concept can become a commercial reality.

The company successfully courted technology partners and suppliers at an automotive e-commerce trade show in Las Vegas in November. There, Hypercar, Inc. displayed a two-fifths scale model of a concept car, called the Revolution, developed in the start-up phase. The model proved to be a focal point of the show, just as the full-scale model has done with shareholders and potential investors.

Building Partnerships
During the startup phase the company built partnerships with investors, clients, and technology suppliers eager to help germinate an entirely new approach to automaking. Such capable industrial partners as Sun Microsystems and BP Amoco provide important support, both technical and otherwise. Collaboration with potential end-users also helps to ensure the vehicles being designed are tailored to their needs.

Why are customers excited about Hypercar, Inc.’ s vehicles? For starters, the first concept car is an Explorer-sized vehicle – a midsized SUV replacement. It will achieve fuel efficiency equivalent to 99 mpg of gasoline (five times the efficiency of a similar-sized Lexus RX300), accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 8.2 seconds, and haul over half a ton, even up a 44-percent grade. It will run silently with zero emissions for 330 miles on electricity made in a fuel-cell from 7.5 pounds of hydrogen compressed in ultra-safe tanks.

Its dent- and rust-free body will meet U.S. federal safety standards for occupant safety in a 30-mph fixed-barrier crash, even in a head-on collision with a vehicle twice its weight, each going 30 mph. A fixed-barrier crash at 35 mph won’ t even damage the passenger compartment. And the design is consistent with a 200,000-mile warranty. These and other key attributes don’ t appear to have been combined previously in a single vehicle by established automakers. The Revolution appears to be the world’ s first uncompromised super-efficient concept vehicle.

Future customers and investors are taking the market potential for Hypercar Inc.’ s eventual products seriously. Seriously enough to stir the interest of Jeff Ball, The Wall Street Journal’ s lead automotive industry reporter. Jeff spent two weeks with Amory Lovins and Hypercar staff researching an article that was published as a front-page, column-one profile of the ten-person startup.

Hybrid Hype
The auto industry also seems to be taking notice of the potential for Hypercar technology. News coverage of Detroit’s annual North American International Auto Show carried headlines of high-mileage hybrid-electric production vehicles and even a pre-production (expected in showrooms in 2004) fuel-cell vehicle from Ford called the FCV. GM executives, sporting matching green sweaters, announced a hybrid-electric sedan for 2001 and a fuel-cell vehicle slated for 2004. At the Los Angeles Auto Show in early January, both Ford and Dodge unveiled hybrid-electric SUVs: the Ford Escape, due in showrooms in 2003, and Dodge’s hybrid prototype, the Powerbox, which uses compressed natural gas. Auto industry pundits agree there is a revolution underway in automotive technology. Hypercar, Inc. is on its cusp.

The core of the Hypercar, Inc. technical team was originally assembled at RMI. Timothy Moore, Dr. Jonathan Fox-Rubin, Michael Brylawski, and David Cramer all came to work at the Institute between 1993 and 1997. (Fuel cell expert Brett Williams was also a key member of the original group at RMI but is now pursuing a doctorate at the University of California at Davis.) With $2 million worth of research, funded by grants, donations, and earnings over eight years, they developed Amory Lovins’s theories about efficient auto design. They published numerous professional papers including the 1996 landmark tome Hypercars: Materials, Manufacturing, and Policy Implications, which sold to automakers for $10,000 a copy. The buzz about hybrid-electric vehicles and fuel-cells at this year’s auto shows is in substantial part a result of much of this work. Many of the gratifying interim achievements made by the auto and related industries are chronicled at www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid414.asp.

Great Expectations
By 1998, it was clear to the team that while the race had begun with great promise, established automakers faced many cultural barriers in rapidly adopting uncompromised Hypercar designs. This opened an opportunity to stimulate and support the industry’s transition by creating a wholly new product true to the Hypercar strategy.

With the help of Amory’ s network of contacts, a seasoned governance and executive team was assembled and Hypercar, Inc. was spun off in August 1999. Product development was led by David Taggart, a composites innovator from the famed Lockheed Martin Skunk Works . He led the team that developed a 95%-carbon-fiber-composite fighter aircraft, one-third lighter and two-thirds cheaper than its 72%-metal predecessor. Hypercar, Inc. enabled him to mix his aerospace skills and organizational methods with the ex-RMI team’ s knowledge, industrial partners’ skills, race-cars, and software. The recipe proved successful.

With the startup phase successfully completed and the manufacturable concept car designed, the team is now raising additional private equity for a two-year, $50- million phase that will produce numerous working vehicle prototypes by the end of 2002. To help manage and fund this phase, Hypercar, Inc. recently hired Peggy Corcillo as CFO and Sandy Selman as Se
nior Vice President of Finance.

Hypercar, Inc. is a technology development company that intends to license its intellectual property and engineering services to other automotive suppliers and automakers. The team at Hypercar, Inc. is a leader in the revolution shaking the largest industry in the world. Ultimately, vehicles traceable to its lineage will save as much oil as OPEC now sells, decouple road transport from climate and air quality, and provide enough plug-in fuel-cell generating capacity when parked to displace the world’s coal and nuclear power plants many times over. The adventure continues.

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General information on the Hypercar concept and history are at [sorry this link is no longer available]

This article is from Rocky Mountain Institute’s newsletter RMISolutions, Spring 2001. You can read the entire newsletter online.

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