CAN THIS TRANSMISSION REALLY DOUBLE YOUR CAR'S MILEAGE?

Enlarge Image Image Gallery LEFT: The IST Fiat and IST components (inset). RIGHT: Mr. Carman's IST Granada has a few extra hoses under the hood. PHOTOS BY MARTIN FOX

The Good News is that Vincent Carman's new transmission can double your car's gas mileage. The Bad News is that—thanks in part to bungling by the U.S. Government's Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA)?it may be decades before this fuel saver is on the market.

Portland, Oregon's Vincent Carman is an honest, straightforward guy ... and the revolutionary automobile transmission he's invented is the same kind of animal. It's a simple, straightforward combination of off-the-shelf components that don't do a blessed thing ... except simply and straightforwardly double the gasoline mileage of a passenger car or other internal combustion engine-powered vehicle.

Getting this new fuel saver developed and put on the market, however, is proving to be a somewhat more devious and complicated breed of cat.

THE INERTIAL STORAGE TRANSMISSION IS A REALITY

It would be easier to understand Mr. Carman's current development and marketing frustrations if his new piece of equipment was merely a vague daydream that he'd sketched out on a place mat in a greasy spoon restaurant somewhere. But it isn't.

Vincent's Inertial Storage Transmission (IST) is already in its third or fourth generation of development, it has been endorsed by the National Bureau of Standards and championed by Senator Mark Hatfield and Congressman Robert Duncan, several versions of the transmission have actually been road tested, and the U.S. Postal Service is interested in equipping a whole fleet of vehicles with the IST ... just as soon as ERDA conducts some "independent" tests on Mr. Carman's invention.

And there's the rub. Because—thanks to a set of circumstances that occasionally seems as implausible as the script for a 1927 slapstick comedy—there sometimes doesn't seem to be much chance that those tests will ever get underway.

THE IST: WHAT IT IS

Vincent Carman's Inertial Storage Transmission does just what its name indicates: It stores energy that would otherwise be wasted during the many times an ordinary automobile is stopped with its engine running (in heavy traffic, while waiting to pull onto a freeway, at red lights, etc.) ... and then draws on that stored energy when it's needed to propel an IST-equipped vehicle down the pike.

More specifically, the IST [1] allows a passenger car or other internal combustion engine-powered vehicle's powerplant to run—when it runs—at a fuelsaving optimum and constant speed ... no matter how much the vehicle itself is accelerated, cruised at varying speeds, brought to panic stops or otherwise operated, [2] accumulates and stores a great deal of the energy that is normally "thrown away" any time a vehicle is parked with its engine running, [3] captures and saves a great deal of the energy that is normally dissipated as brake shoe heat when a vehicle is decelerated and/or stopped, and [4] will even automatically turn a vehicle's engine completely off and leave the machine cruising silently down the highway on nothing but stored power under certain conditions!