Sleek and shiny, lightweight and aerodynamic, the three cars — one gold, one silver and one blue — made a distinct impression, at once vaguely familiar but also jarringly new.
One employed tiny video cameras in place of rearview mirrors. Another had vents on the front grill that popped up only when the engine needed air. The third used the braking energy to help power the radio and headlights.
Most important, all got great gas mileage: more than 70 miles per gallon.
A crowd of 300 dignitaries — congressmen and Cabinet members, scientists and lobbyists — gathered this March morning at a Washington conference center to celebrate the cars’ unveiling. When Vice President Al Gore arrived, Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business” blared on the sound system.
With cameras flashing, Gore peered into the windows of the first car, admired the styling of the second and kicked the tires of the third.
Then he turned to the audience. The concept cars before them, he said, represented a major milestone in America’s historic Supercar project, the multibillion-dollar effort by the U.S. government and the auto industry to build an 80-mile-per-gallon family-size car. The cars not only were great technical achievements, he said, but they also marked a giant step forward in the nation’s long battle to cut air pollution and to ease its reliance on foreign oil.
“This,” he told the crowd, “is truly a mountaintop moment for America.”
In the spring of 2000, by all outward appearances, Supercar was perfectly on track. The Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler — were touting their concept cars, politicians were jockeying for credit and the engineers in the trenches were congratulating one another on a job well done.
But behind the scenes, a far different story was unfolding.
The Big Three automakers were privately telling their government partners that they wanted to kill Supercar, even though four years remained in the 10-year project and the companies had not put a single highly fuel-efficient car in the showroom.
Government officials were willing to consider industry’s concerns, but not during this critical election year, when Gore, the most visible champion of Supercar, was running for president.
Even Charles Gray, the federal scientist who had tirelessly fought for the project at the outset, was increasingly angering his fellow Supercar colleagues. He was building his own vehicle — a fourth Supercar — and now was refusing to tell many officials what he was up to. More and more they wondered where his loyalties lay.
So as the curtain rose on the final act of the Supercar saga, and as officials publicly celebrated and privately schemed, Supercar was facing the most difficult and perilous part of its journey.
Cost becomes issue
More than a dozen engineers at each of the Big Three companies had worked feverishly to put the finishing touches on their concept Supercars.
Ford engineers conducted last-minute tests of their Supercar at their proving grounds in Dearborn, Mich., while engineers from DaimlerChrysler — the successor to Chrysler — frantically called suppliers for needed parts. “There were a lot of guys missing sleep,” recalls Gerald Cilibraise, engineer for DaimlerChrysler.
Speed was of the essence, particularly because the Japanese had already unveiled and started selling their own ultra-fuel-efficient car: the 52-mile-per-gallon Toyota Prius.
But while the engineers in the back shop were putting in long hours on the concept cars, executives at the companies were working on an entirely different goal.
The automakers told their government partners that they were willing to finish the concept cars, but they did not want to work toward the final milestone: produce by 2004 an 80-m.p.g. production prototype, or a car that could be mass-produced in a few more years, approximately 2007.
The problem, they said, wasn’t meeting Supercar’s 80-m.p.g. goal. GM’s concept car achieved 80 while Ford’s and DaimlerChrysler’s got 72. All were diesel-electric hybrids — an electric motor and a diesel-fueled engine working in tandem.
The problem was cost. According to government and industry officials, the automakers increasingly felt that they could not mass-produce Supercar at a price consumers would be willing to pay.
GM and Ford would not reveal how much their Supercar might cost if put in showrooms, but Chrysler publicly stated that its car would be $7,500 more than a conventional auto.
Some government officials thought that was not too high, especially with four years remaining in the project to whittle down costs.
“They were within striking range,” recalls Gary Bachula, a former top Supercar official in the Commerce Department.
But the automakers argued that to go forward would require each company to make a huge investment.
The concept Supercars had been relatively inexpensive — about $5 million to $30 million apiece — as the goal was simply to prove that it was technically possible to achieve 80 miles per gallon.
But production prototypes were a significantly different undertaking. Those cars needed to show that they could be mass-produced, requiring the companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to retool assembly lines.
The automakers did not want to make that investment for a product they weren’t sure was going to sell — particularly now that sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks were the most popular passenger vehicles in the nation, with sales in the hundreds of thousands per year.
“It wasn’t going to be the best use of resources,” recalls Mike Schwarz, a Ford research director.
Knowing that the agreement to build Supercar was not a binding contract, government officials responded by saying that they would consider addressing the industry’s concerns.
“Our constant message to industry was: We hear you. We understand what you’re saying,” recalls John Sargent, the government’s Supercar director during this period. “We don’t want you to waste a lot of money. There will be an opportunity to renegotiate the whole thing — after the election. Hold your fire.”
Gore was running for president, and administration officials thought killing Supercar might provide his opponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, with ammunition. For seven years, Supercar had been a centerpiece of the Clinton-Gore administration’s energy and environmental policies.
And Gore had been personally involved. He negotiated the Supercar agreement between the White House and the Big Three in 1993, and over the next several years hosted receptions for Supercar scientists at his vice presidential mansion and publicly hailed the project as a success.
During the 2000 campaign, he cited the project as an example of what he was doing to reduce oil imports and make businesses more competitive. He even vowed to “intensify” the effort.
When Gray, a top official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, heard through his industry and government contacts that Detroit wanted to renege on the Supercar deal, he was deeply troubled.
In his 30 years as an EPA researcher and administrator, he had heard these arguments from the automakers before: They frequently said they couldn’t achieve certain goals, only to prove under the threat of penalty that they could.
He pleaded with his government colleagues to not let the automakers off the hook.
“The country has invested all this time and money,” he told them. “We should follow through.”
But in some people’s eyes, Gray himself was becoming part of the problem.
Secrecy irks many
Gray once had been the driving force behind Supercar, having conducted the studies that produced the 80-m.p.g. idea.
But after the project was launched, Gray felt that some of his fellow Supercar leaders in government and industry were not fully committed to the goal.
So he struck out on his own. For the last few years he and his staff of 12 engineers at the EPA in Ann Arbor, Mich., had been building their own Supercar. Increasingly, he was doing so in secret, which angered many project leaders in the government and industry. They knew he was building a hydraulic car but little beyond that.
“We got in shouting matches over this,” recalls Rob Chapman, a Supercar official in the Commerce Department. “I said: `Just describe it in general. In general, what the hell are you doing?’ And he wouldn’t say.”
It wasn’t that Gray was naturally combative. Those who knew the Arkansas native described him as unfailingly polite and gentlemanly. An elder in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, he knew the EPA’s night cleaning staff by name and rarely went to work on weekends, reserving that time for meditation and his wife, Judy.
But when it came to his scientific ideas, Gray had a bravado that rankled many.
Supercar officials likened him to a bratty kid, gleefully boasting that he knew the answer to the Supercar challenge but that he couldn’t say what it was.
At one point, an independent panel of experts reviewing Supercar’s progress called Gray before the committee to get to the bottom of the issue.
For an hour and a half, they grilled him. And for an hour and a half, Gray dodged their questions.
“We didn’t know any more than when we did when we started,” recalls Craig Marks, a member of the National Research Council panel, which annually reviewed Supercar. Panel members, he said, were upset. “They felt they had been given a snow job.”
Initially, Gray’s motivation for secretly inventing his own car was to prove that his idea of an 80-m.p.g. vehicle was possible, in case anyone in the Supercar effort claimed that it was not.
But by 2000, Gray was being secretive for another reason. He had signed a confidentiality agreement with Ford to develop his hydraulic invention. Under the contract, Ford and the EPA would split some costs on future lab work.
Such contracts were common between industry and federal labs but rare in the Supercar project, which was supposed to encourage agencies to help all of the Big Three automakers, not just one.
Because Gray was still technically part of the Supercar effort, spending millions of Supercar dollars given to the EPA, some felt he shouldn’t aid one company and not another.
“I think most everyone found that sort of distasteful,” recalls Bernard Robertson, a senior vice president at DaimlerChrysler.
Moreover, Gray was collecting several patents on the work — patents that could lead to thousands of dollars in royalties for him personally and his EPA facility.
Robertson says industry officials wanted to complain but decided to let it go. Gray was an influential EPA administrator, and the EPA was a powerful regulator. “You certainly don’t want to go out of your way to make enemies,” Robertson says.
Gray felt he had done nothing wrong. He had shown his work to all of the automakers, giving each a chance to capitalize on his invention. If one firm was interested in using his work to save fuel for the nation, what was wrong with that?
His hydraulic car had come a long way since the days when four bulky torpedo-shaped nitrogen tanks made it look like a mobile missile launcher. Now it looked much more like a car, with the nitrogen tanks shrunk to the size of duffel bags and made of a lightweight carbon-composite material instead of steel.
But he still felt his invention wasn’t fast enough, so he decided to add yet another small motor to the back of the car. The extra motor took up valuable luggage space and would drop the car’s fuel economy from 70 miles per gallon to 68, but Gray would worry about that later.
He tested his more powerful Supercar in the EPA parking lot, where, on a 70-yard straightway, he floored the gas and raced straight at a chain-link fence, slamming on the brakes at the last second and careering to the left.
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The car accomplished 0 to 60 in 8 seconds — faster than some sedans.
His car, he thought, would be the biggest breakthrough in automobiles since the days of Henry Ford.
Hanging in the balance
That fall, Gray sat in his living room with his wife and watched the presidential election returns on television.
He knew what was at stake: If Al Gore won, Supercar would likely remain a high-profile project and perhaps even grow. If George Bush won, the effort might be curtailed, as he generally favored big business.
When the networks predicted Gore the winner in Florida, Gray went to bed, thinking that the vice president had won. It wasn’t until five weeks later that Gray and the rest of the nation learned that Bush would actually become the 43rd president.
Gray didn’t wait for Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, both former oilmen, to start eliminating energy efficiency programs. He and his staff, he recalls, started changing the names of certain EPA programs to mask work being done under Supercar. He also speeded up work on his invention.
When Bush took office, one of the first items on his agenda was energy. California was experiencing its worst electricity shortage since World War II. Fears grew as residents experienced blackouts, and power was interrupted to schools, businesses and hospitals.
The new president tapped Cheney to head an energy task force and to quickly devise a long-term national energy policy. Over the next three months, in early 2001, numerous closed-door meetings were held in Washington among administration officials and industry executives, including auto representatives.
One Energy Department document shows that GM sent a position paper on April 2, 2001, to a senior Energy policy adviser, attacking car fuel economy rules and stating that a better approach would be for the government to conduct long-term research. GM’s paper didn’t mention Supercar, but it did state: “Rather than focusing on the failed policies of the past, a better approach takes a longer-term vision of moving to a hydrogen economy with fuel cells.”
A week later, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced to reporters that the agency wanted to cut its budget, including much of Supercar’s funding.
He said that after consulting with auto officials, the government decided that a “refocusing” of the Supercar project was needed because it was “inconsistent with where the market is headed.”
He told reporters that Supercar had been geared toward building a family-size sedan, but consumers were increasingly interested in buying SUVs.
At the time, it wasn’t precisely clear what Abraham meant by “refocusing” Supercar. But it soon became apparent that the defining features of the project — the 80-m.p.g. goal, the 2004 deadline and the participation by many government agencies — were being discarded.
While this meant Supercar was essentially dead, there was little public protest.
By now, an odd coalition of liberals and conservatives, including Ralph Nader and New Hampshire Congressman John Sununu, opposed Supercar. They saw it as corporate welfare — tax dollars subsidizing efforts that the industry should be doing on its own.
And some leading environmental groups thought Supercar’s engine of choice, the diesel, would produce too much smog. They also thought the automakers and politicians were using Supercar as an excuse for not tightening fuel economy rules.
Throughout the summer and fall of 2001, industry executives flew from Detroit to Washington about once a month to meet with Energy Department officials to discuss what should replace Supercar.
According to Big Three and government officials, some in the Bush administration wanted to eliminate any kind of fuel economy partnership. Industry officials objected, arguing that government-funded research should continue.
But industry did not want to run up against the same problem it had with Supercar: It did not want to be forced to build a production-ready car.
In the end, industry prevailed on both points.
This past Jan. 9, at an auto show in Detroit, Energy Secretary Abraham stood with Big Three executives and announced that a new program would be replacing Supercar. It would be called FreedomCAR, and it would focus on trying to build cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
Supercar, Secretary Abraham said, was too wedded to oil as a energy source. “We can do better than that,” he said. “We can look beyond current technology and current fuels to a truly new generation of vehicles.”
The idea was to use high-pressured hydrogen gas and oxygen from the air to create electricity to make the car go. The only emissions would be water vapor so clean that, in theory, one could drink it from the tailpipe.
But even ardent fuel cell backers and the Energy Department acknowledged it would likely be 20 to 35 years before hydrogen cars were on the road in significant numbers. Not only were there huge technical barriers, but the nation’s infrastructure would have to change dramatically. Thousands of the country’s gas stations, for example, would have to be converted to hydrogen fueling stations.
Plus, FreedomCAR would have less money than the Supercar project, fewer government participants, less oversight and no deadlines to produce any vehicles.
But Energy Secretary Abraham promised those gathered at the Detroit auto show that with the new FreedomCAR program, “the gas-guzzler will be a thing of the past.”
He sounded a familiar refrain: The effort would reduce oil imports, improve the environment and make the auto industry more competitive.
Supercar’s swan song
This past June in Washington, on a muggy Wednesday night that gave way to thunderstorms, a wake was held for Supercar.
It took place near the Capitol at the Dubliner, a popular Irish pub with a long wooden bar. A handful of government staffers organized the event, including John Sargent, the Commerce official who had directed Supercar.
When the mourners arrived at the bar, they pushed together some wooden tables, ordered Guinness on tap and said goodbye to the project that many of them had worked on for nine years.
They passed out Supercar T-shirts, pins and hats; played Supercar trivia; and arranged for a violinist to come in and play “Danny Boy” so they could sing along with substitute lyrics to mourn their lost cause.
By 9 o’clock, two dozen people had showed up, and after a couple of rounds, one could barely hear above the din.
But Sargent was noticeably down.
He was wearing the same shirt he wore the day the concept cars were unveiled: a white buttoned-down dress shirt with the Supercar logo stitched above the pocket. And at one point, he got up on a small stage and read his version of Psalm 23, including the lines:
George Bush is my Shepherd; I shall not want – fuel efficiency.
He maketh me to lie down in oil laden pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters of the Persian Gulf.
During Supercar’s better days, Sargent occasionally talked to his boss about how maybe they should create a permanent monument to the Supercar effort — perhaps a historic marker at the Commerce Department or a time capsule.
“It would show, here’s what we were doing, here’s why we did it, here’s who the players were, here’s what we were thinking at the time.”
On the night of the wake, Sargent left the Dubliner fairly early and caught a cab home. In his hands he held a framed Supercar poster, signed by his old friends and colleagues.
More pledges from Big 3
Today, the Big Three automakers keep their concept Supercars either in storage or a small company museum.
Under the Supercar project, $1.5 billion of taxpayer money went to research to help the automakers produce these high-mileage vehicles. The companies report investing roughly an equal amount.
The companies not only stopped short of introducing these cars into the marketplace, they did not fulfill another promise of the 1993 Supercar agreement: They had vowed to use emerging technologies to improve the fuel economy of their existing fleets.
But mileage for Big Three passenger vehicles has remained flat since 1993, while the horsepower has shot up 27 percent.
The automakers are, in effect, holding the line — giving American drivers the increased power they crave while keeping fuel economy stable. “I think you got to look at what the customer wants,” says Bob Culver, head of USCAR, a Big Three umbrella group that helped coordinate Supercar research.
Many say that was not the point of the Supercar program.
“That was a bitter disappointment — that they would take these advancements and unabashedly reinvest them in increased power,” says John Gibbons, Clinton’s science adviser and a leader in the Supercar effort.
The Big Three have repeatedly promised to improve. In the last few years, the companies have announced plans to produce gasoline-electric hybrids, or vehicles that use both a gasoline engine and an electric motor for power.
But some of the plans either have been quietly scrapped or the goals set so low that the fuel savings will be negligible.
DaimlerChrysler, for example, announced in 1999 that it would produce a hybrid Dodge Durango. But those plans “have been postponed and postponed indefinitely,” company spokesman Max Gates says. The carmaker decided that the plan simply wouldn’t prove profitable.
GM says it will put in showrooms by mid-2004 hybrid versions of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra, full-size pickup trucks that get 16 miles per gallon in city traffic and 21 on the highway. But these hybrids will show little improvement over the conventional models: GM predicts the new trucks will get just 2 miles more per gallon in the city and no more on the highway.
Ford promises to produce late next year a hybrid version of its Escape, the company’s smallest SUV. The company estimates the mileage will be in the high 30s for city driving and about 25 on the highway. (Hybrids often get higher mileage in city traffic because that is when the electric motor is doing most of the work.)
While U.S. automakers are planning to produce hybrids in the coming years, Japanese carmakers Toyota and Honda are selling theirs right now.
The most celebrated is the four-door Toyota Prius, which gets 52 m.p.g. in the city and 45 on the highway. The company reports selling 15,500 in the United States last year and expects that number to rise to 20,000 this year.
The Prius has even become a cause celebre in Hollywood, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz among the owners.
Though Toyota initially lost money on the car, the company reports the Prius is now breaking even. Its $19,995 price tag is about $3,500 more than the comparably sized Toyota Corolla.
In an ironic twist, the U.S. government is helping sell the Japanese hybrids. Consumers buying a hybrid receive a one-time $2,000 tax deduction from the IRS.
Some see a replay of the 1970s, when Japan’s fuel-efficient cars clobbered the American auto industry, throwing tens of thousands out of work and helping plunge the U.S. economy into a tailspin from which it took years to recover.
“It’s a huge concern,” says Craig Marks, a retired GM executive engineer who also served on the review panel for Supercar, “but what are you going to do?”
Americans, he says, like big, fast vehicles.
Still seeking progress
Charles Gray’s hydraulic Supercar remains at the EPA facility in Michigan, sitting in a concrete-floor laboratory with the well-ordered look of a modern car repair shop.
The tires still have dirt on them from the last time the staff took the car for a spin in the parking lot. Without the outer shell of a body, it still looks like a low-riding dune buggy, with plexiglass covering the engines in front and back.
Wearing dark blue pants and his favorite purple dress shirt, the 56-year-old Gray leans against the roll bar of his car and says he remains bitterly disappointed that the Supercar project was killed. No other effort could have made such an impact on so many of America’s problems– “except this,” he says, jabbing a finger at his car.
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Since Supercar was launched in 1993, oil imports are up 26 percent. Imports from the Mideast also are rising and a cause for concern, given the region’s volatility and U.S. plans for a possible war on Iraq.
The EPA calculates that if the fuel economy of U.S. passenger vehicles improved by 10 m.p.g., America would save a billion barrels of oil a year — enough to stop importing any from the Persian Gulf.
Scientists, meanwhile, increasingly blame greenhouse gas-emitting cars for global warming trends. Floods, fires and droughts — calamities once solely attributed to acts of God and nature — are now being debated in the context of cars, trucks and SUVs. About 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from passenger vehicles.
Gray says the death of Supercar means he will have less money to combat these problems. The EPA budget for fuel economy and global warming issues has been cut by a third, or $10 million, meaning less money for his hydraulic Supercar. Over the past nine years, he estimates he spent $20 million of taxpayer money on this work.
This past summer, an unlikely figure tried to help restore some funding: John Dingell, Gray’s old adversary from Congress.
It had been nine years since the summer of 1993, when Gray was trying to sell the Supercar idea to the automakers while Dingell was warning them to be careful.
But Dingell was facing his tightest congressional race in years and running in a redrawn district that included Gray’s lab. The veteran lawmaker requested a tour.
Leaning on a cane, the 76-year-old Dingell inspected Gray’s Supercar, sat in the driver’s seat, and posed for photographs.
In July, Dingell wrote to an influential congressman asking that money be restored for Gray’s work. So far, there has been no change
The cutbacks came just as Gray felt he was finally reaching his dream of building an 80-m.p.g. car. Recent tests showed his car achieving 75 to 85 m.p.g. — but that was when he removed a motor in back, making the car likely too slow for consumer tastes.
While he hasn’t abandoned the Supercar dream, he is now focused on his contract with Ford, which is hoping to use hydraulics in delivery trucks — vehicles large enough to accommodate the bulk of the pump motors and nitrogen tanks.
In the last few years, he has acquired 6 patents for his hydraulics work, collecting $50,000 in royalties for himself and $100,000 for his EPA facility.
Gray, whose annual salary is $124,900, says the royalties “are motivation. I won’t kid you about that. But I don’t do this for the money. I’m doing this for the future of the country.”
He plans to keep his Supercar around for interested parties to see. After a year, he’ll probably put it in storage. He shakes his head at the dichotomy: On one hand he knows he was part of a historic venture; on the other, he could tear apart Supercar today and few Americans would care.
But Gray still cares, and for him the idea of Supercar isn’t dead — even if 80 m.p.g. no longer is his goal.
“I expect it to be over 100,” he says. “I would never settle for 80.”
———-
The series
SUNDAY PART 1: STARTING UP
The concept for an 80-mile-per-gallon is born.
MONDAY PART 2: SHIFTING INTO GEAR
After a slow start, engineers make incredible headway.
TUESDAY PART 3: HITTING THE BRAKES
70 miles per gallon–and then a dead stop.
ON THE INTERNET
A special presentation featuring interactive graphics, video, photo galleries and additional features exclusive to the internet.
– Find out the fuel efficiency of your car with a searchable database.
– How the Supercar engine compares to a typical sedan.
– Learn about some of the project’s personalities and their roles behind Supercar.
– Share your thoughts about the Supercar project in a message board.
Chicagotribune.com/supercar