"General Motors doesn't want people wandering around on their own in there," says a student guard. He points to the fence beyond which innocent-looking woods and fields stretch away through southern Michigan. The only authorized way in proves to be a shuttle bus. Bearing two Chrysler engineers and an average American car owner, pitifully eager for any word of mileage efficiency to come, it cruises along winding roads with nothing except trees in view. Nothing, that is, until the road opens on a vast stretch of black tarmac, 67 acres of it, set in the hills near Milford, a GM proving ground. Right in the middle, three circus-like tents and a maze of yellow rubber cones point skyward like the towers of some futuristic Camelot. A long line of odd-looking vehicles is strung out in front of them. Some appear to have wings. Some look like your average tired little foreign sedan. One, with a bright red body but made mostly of glass, could be a fire chiefs dream of glory.
The Chrysler folk swiftly head for the spot in the line where the car brought by a team of student engineers from the University of Minnesota sits. A mumble of talk ensues about the interesting hydraulic "hybrid" gas engine the team has built.
The humble car owner does not really understand hybrids (engineer jargon for automobiles that use more than one source of power—like a diesel engine combined, with a battery-powered engine, for example). What he really wants is a decent replacement for his air-conditioned, 8-m.p.g. '71 Chevy Impala. He was pretty disappointed when the so-called Moodymobile raised hopes and made headlines by getting from Florida to Washington, D.C., at 84 m.p.g. only to flunk its EPA emissions test.
It is the second day of the S.C.O.R.E. (student competitions on relevant engineering), an "energy-efficient vehicle competition." Thirty-four cars from 28 different colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada are on hand. If they do not have a better idea, who does?
S.C.O.R.E. officials are mostly graduate engineering students serving managerial stints in a nonprofit, Boston-based organization founded to promote "handson" engineering technology in North American schools. The Detroit manufacturers usually contribute not merely the testing site but also special testing equipment and engineers who serve as judges. James Paisley of GM's product planning group and his partner, John A. Nattress of the University of Florida, are scheduled to review the experimental-car contestants on something called "costs to the consumer." The bemused car owner finds Paisley and Nattress hard at work on the line evaluating a front-wheel-drive, hydrogen-powered, hydraulic-assisted entry from the University of Wisconsin's Stout campus. Even with some donated parts, the exotic power plant modestly housed in a blue Dodge Omni body cost $25,000 in cash. Student Steve Mann insists that the car would be "as cheap as or cheaper" than any current production model to massproduce. Mann is young and tousle-headed. But with poise beyond his years he points out that if society were to switch from petroleum-based fuels to hydrogen, fuel would cost the consumer only about 180 a gal. in gasoline equivalent. "But it'll take ten years before people realize there are oceans of water out there full of hydrogen."