Treehugger

Earlier this week [www.sundancechannel.com], we began peeking under the hood of the Hypercar [www.hypercar.com], a concept car for the 21sts century originally conceived by the folks at the Rocky Mountain Institute [www.rmi.org] (RMI). Today, we’ll look at some of the synergies that the vehicle uses to its advantage to create a new way of driving.



Hypercar is all about improved technologically efficiency; creating a vehicle whose performance is greater than the sum of its parts. From the propulsion (hydrogen fuel cell) to the lightweight carbon-fiber body (that allows for less powerful, less fuel-intensive propulsion) to the regenerative braking (which also requires less hardware, because the vehicle is so much lighter and therefore requires less to stop), everything comes together to create a working, almost living system. After the initial tests in the early 1990s, the Hypercar team determined that the vehicle would be four to eight times more efficient than an electric vehicle using standard sheet metal automotive construction technology, meaning that if an electric vehicle could get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon, Hypercar could come in somewhere between 400 and 800. Armed with these numbers, along with innumerable other tests, and after formally introducing the concept at the 1993 International Symposium on Automotive Technology and Automation, Hypercar won the Nissan Prize and RMI founded the Hypercar Center, an additional nonprofit arm dedicated to supporting the rapid commercialisation of ultralight hybrid vehicles.



From 1994 to 1996, Hypercar Center's emphasis was on further validating the concept from design and market perspectives through computer modeling and by publishing technical papers. demonstrating that Hypercar vehicles could work, that all market requirements could be met, and that the myriad of technical challenges could be overcome. In 1999 Hypercar, Inc. was spun off as a for-profit start-up company to commercialize the Hypercar concept and to start getting them made. And by 2000, all key technologies had been demonstrated. So what’s the hold-up? Some of the difficulties lie in the hydrogen infrastructure [www.sundancechannel.com] we discussed yesterday; some lie in the sheer magnitude of time, money and energy needed to move a car from concept to production. More than that, it may be that the world is not ready for Hypercar or an equivalent just yet, but as soon as Hypercar is ready for the world, we’ll be waiting.