Report from Boston's Altwheels Festival 2006

By Jory Squibb

Being at the Altwheels Festival in Boston was both exhilarating and taxing. For this ‘country mouse’ to be in such crowds, yakking for 12 hours at a stretch, geeking it up far beyond my span of attention, brought me back to Maine after three days with a renewed love of my adopted state.

But for someone who had spent 12 months obsessing about a project, spending long hours isolated in a dim garage, simply to receive such applause, to force myself to hear and accept it, was a sort of completion, a kind of healing of an imbalance. There were so many fellow travelers, kindred head-scratchers who had puzzled and persevered. You could only be inspired--after a suitable resting on your oars--to go on. I wanted to very briefly summarize my impression of the present alternatives in powered personal transportation, as they were presented at the festival.

Treated and Untreated Bio-diesel--Here is an alternative you don’t have to wait for. Two choices were represented. One is the greasecar.com and the vegacrossamerica.com representatives which involve a stock diesel car which has an auxiliary tank for filtered but untreated restaurant frying oil. The car is started on its usual diesel fuel, but switched via solenoid valves to the oil, until it is to be shut down, when again it is allowed to run on diesel. I asked if this were a viable solution in terms of numbers. How many people in your town would be interested, my informant asked? About a dozen, I said. how many restaurants? also a dozen. Problem solved, he said.

You can also use treated oil, either buying it in the growing number of suppliers, or putting a treating plant in your basement ( $3000 or build it yourself). Once treated, the stuff is completely usable as diesel. The diesel engine likes it better than fossil diesel.

You can also have a regular car converted to natural gas or to propane. This involves heat-treated engine valves and other significant tweaks. cleaner, slightly cheaper fuel. some municipal fleets are converting. growing number of supply sources, in many areas. natural gas is especially nice.

You can run ethanol, especially E85, an 85% blend. This is grain alcohol, made from corn, approximately on a par with gas in terms of cost. The car has to be modified either to run on both, or simply on ethanol. ethanol is tough to transport and is best when it is slightly chemically modified.

Natural Gas, propane, and ethanol all require a significant commitment in terms of hassle at this point in time.

Hybrid cars were there at the festival in great numbers and it was a treat to chat with the owners. Honda’s impulse is going out of production, but three other Honda models are now for sale. Many USA cars have bought Toyoto’s patents and are doing fairly well copying some of the Prius’s details. The Prius is quite a runaway success. The drive train is a masterpiece of good thinking. I tried to make the point that the lifetime fuel saving was eaten up by high manufacturing/maintenance/raw materials costs, but didn’t seem to convince anyone.

There were various electric scooters, motorcycles, a 70’s electric car, but I was sorry not to see any plug-in hybrids represented, nor any new-thinking pure electrics. Seeing “Who Killed the Electric Car” had convinced me again, that electrics with nickel-hydride batteries have an immediate nitch in our transportation needs, once we give up the idea that one car must do all. There is a beautiful simplicity of how we supply this sort of fuel: every home is already supplied, and urban charging stations are so simple to create.

Finally, I surveyed the numerous fuel cell/hydrogen exhibits. I began with the grudge, left over from the “who killed...” movie that fuel cells/ hydrogen was a smoke and mirrors game foisted by the fossil fuel suppliers and car makers to buy themselves another decade or two of our complacency. “just wait for the ultimate type of clean fuel!”

It helps me to understand the whole hydrogen/fuel cell thing to think of these cars as basically electric cars which use hydrogen as a battery. electricity is used to produce hydrogen, either in basement mini-plants or local commercial filling stations. This is carried compressed in a tank in the car and turned back into electricity, which drives the car.

The rub is how to generate, store, transport, and bottle hydrogen, a tricky low density form of energy. It soon becomes clear that using fossil fuel derived electricity to hydrolyze hydrogen, and then add more energy to compress it enough to get an impressive vehicle range is pretty much a dead end: too much dirty energy to make the original package of fuel.

The breakthrough might come by a direct solar conversion of water to hydrogen using titanium as a catalyst, and then storing hydrogen at less than 5000 PSI. One hydrogen car was driven on its own power. The others seem to be showcases.

I came away a little less prejudiced against hydrogen/ fuel cell cars. Maybe they aren’t “pie in the sky”. All developments, in the beginning are a leap into the unknown. But I’m a do-it-now independent cuss. When I don’t see my fellow crackpots doing hydrogen, but only big companies doing PR showcases, my democratic dander is up.

Moonbeam took many people on rides. People of all ages crammed themselves into the seat, opened the canopy, asked a zillion questions, took copies of my handout, hit the web site. Click and Clack, the famous tappet brothers of “Car Talk” packed in together somehow and joked their way driving around the circle. “This is a great car to give to your ex-wife”, Tom quipped.

I was happy to present a low-tech but immediately viable and somehow exciting alternative: become humble enough to use 400 pounds of simple and ultra-economical technology to move our carcasses around.