Here Comes the 100-mpg Car

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Here in Oregon, MAX is keeping me and my Kinetic Vehicles team pretty busy. As of this writing, we don’t have the final rules for the competition, so we’re not building the final chassis yet, but we’ve driven two Kubota-powered test cars and we’re learning fast.

Of course, to keep our economic edge, we’re going to have to keep certain trade secrets to ourselves and ... BWAA-ha-ha-haa, just kidding. This will be an “open source” project: We’re going to share everything we do and learn with you and anybody else who wants to make a MAX of their own. Everything. Right down to the part numbers.

In the days when President Nixon set our speed limit to 55 mph and President Carter set our thermostats to 65 degrees, the homemade car of choice was a dune buggy. Folks tore the bodies off Volkswagen Beetles and installed fiberglass shells over the bare frames and engines. After a day of fun in the sun, making sand castles or whatever, you hosed it down like the beach toy that it was. This was the dawn of the “donor car,” a car you stripped for parts and then reassembled into the car you really wanted.

The Beetle was the ideal donor of the era — it was cheap and plentiful, and the kit car industry grew around it. Most kit cars were fancier than dune buggies — there was some differentiation between the interior and exterior, and many had “luxury” features such as roofs and doors — but they were all pretty Spartan. Then after the oil embargo and before the gas price drop, scads of cars from Datsun, Honda and Toyota arrived from the Far East, and suddenly, “Japanese car” wasn’t a punch line any more. They were light, reliable and economical. Now that they’re old and gray, they’re cheap.

I’d rather reuse than toss and replace, and it’s not just because I, too, am old, gray and cheap. A lot of energy goes into making automobiles, and energy conservation is the point of this exercise. Using old parts makes good sense, and getting as many parts as possible from one old car makes good sense. So we started scouting for an oil-crisis-era import to provide our axles, wheels and other running gear.

We found the perfect donor: a rusted-out Toyota station wagon, with a body so seasoned by a quarter-century of coastal living that one could reach into the car without opening doors or windows. Yet it was surprisingly sound in all other respects. It was immediately dubbed the “Corrode Warrior.” We cast and machined a Kubota-to-Toyota engine-to-transmission adapter, and my accomplices ... assistants, I mean, assistants and I … high-fived each other and said “that’ll work” and “can’t imagine why it wouldn’t.”

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