The setting made it easy to convince myself I was seeing into the future: a breezy, misty, and generally miserable late fall evening outside Faneuil Hall.
Truly, it was a night when you might expect a movie company to be filming yet another sequel to "Back to the Future," in which an exotically powered vehicle could travel anywhere. The weather made all the shadowy places in the Quincy Market area dark and forbidding.
But in the middle of the plaza there was a beacon - a small, well-lit tent. Inside was a concept car - the Chevrolet Volt, an (almost) all-electric vehicle. As shown that night, it seats four or five, can go 40 miles without a recharge, and up to 600 miles without having to stop when it's recharged using the onboard gas engine, which serves strictly as a generator.
The Volt has traveled a good half-million miles to be displayed all over the world as Chevrolet unveils its energy-conserving initiatives, however, none of those miles were under its own power. But the company says that will change - the Volt is on line to become a production vehicle between 2010 and 2012, depending on battery development.
Over the past decade, I've developed a skepticism about anyone claiming to make giant steps along the road to energy independence. We all want to see such quantum leaps, but reality tells us advances come at a slower pace. A year ago,
"You need a vision and determination. No one is saying it will happen today or tomorrow," said Natkin. "You have to envision a scenario where the world will turn from petroleum dependence to renewable energy sources. It's an evolutionary process."
The step Chevy is taking with its Volt is that the drive wheels are powered only by an electric motor, as opposed to other hybrid systems in which a combination of internal combustion engines and electric motors do the job.
Even for someone who never took high school chemistry, the first question about the Volt came easily: Is it cleaner and more efficient to "plug in" this vehicle than to power it by burning gasoline?
"In areas where electricity is produced by fossil-fuel plants, you can reduce overall emissions by up to 40 percent at fossil-fired plants that employ 'scrubbing' of combustion gases," said Keith Cole, director of legislative and regulatory affairs for
If you're one of the roughly half of all Americans who live within 20 miles of work, you could use a Volt to commute without using any gasoline.
"Of course, there's the question of using a radio, heat, and air conditioning," said Chevrolet's Bob Boniface, who designed both the Volt and the new Chevy Camaro, two disparate but intriguing vehicles. "We have to design the systems so they don't drain too much of the batteries' energy."
Ah, the "B" word.
Among the battery suppliers General Motors has been dealing with over the past five years of the Volt's development is A123 Systems of Watertown, a company with its roots in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's research labs.
As the car was being put on a carrier later that fall evening, Ric Fulop, A123 Systems' founder and vice president of marketing and business development, tried to explain the state of battery art to me by using a restaurant napkin. He started with the lithium-ion batteries that we still use in laptops and digital cameras. Fulop scribbled lines of formulas - hieroglyphics to me - each one a step toward finding the right combination of power, battery life, and safety.
At Step 4, he paused and said, "This is what
"We've reached Step 5," he continued. "That's what makes the Volt a viable vehicle to be all-electric."
So, is Chevrolet a giant step ahead of the world?
"You have to think Toyota, with the Japanese research behind it, is moving along the same step," said Chevrolet's Cole.
Rick Arnold, a museum educator and faculty member at the Tsongas Industrial History Center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, followed Fulop's battery explanation step-by-step, asking questions along the way. His summation of the evening: "This is the biggest step forward in automotive engineering in the past 100 years."
