I’ve had an inbox full of suggestions for inexpensive streamlining of MAX, our 100-mpg, DIY car. Some of them are good, some are not so good, and a fair number of them are (to quote the Magic 8 Ball of my youth) “Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later.” I won’t call automotive aerodynamics a black art, but when you get to a specific car, you won’t find all the answers in the textbooks. 

The problem is every part of the body influences every other part of the body. Like the parable of a butterfly flapping in Barcelona causing a hurricane in Costa Rica, a small difference here can make a large difference there. A small change in the radiator intake might generate a mild change in how air flows over the hood, which could make a moderate change in airflow over the windshield, leading to a significant change of airflow over the roof, causing complete flow separation at the rear window and a huge turbulent wake behind the car. The textbooks can guide you, but the only way you’ll really know what you’re getting is to test. 

As you regular MAX Update readers know, we got an involuntary do-over on body design about a month ago and we don’t have much time to fool around. We’re doing rapid prototyping and rapid testing and going back to the basics, back to how aerodynamic testing was done in ye goode olde days.

Now I hate to oversimplify, but as a general rule of aerodynamic drag, turbulence = bad; smooth flow = good. One way to observe the flow of air close to the body is to tape tufts of yarn on the car and watch which way they blow. It sounds a bit like the old “weather string” joke (if it’s wet it’s raining, if it’s moving around it’s windy, if you can’t see it it’s dark) but tuft testing has a long and legitimate history. In the nautical world, a tuft of yarn has been called a “telltale” since about the time yarn was invented. In our case, the problem is with tufts on a car body, how do you watch them? 

In a wind tunnel, you just stand there and look, but with a moving car it's not that easy. You can’t drive alongside in another car because the wake of your observation car voids the test. So I asked myself, what would Wonder Woman do? She had an clear airplane. Why not a clear car? 

I've taken out the passenger’s seat and paneled MAX’s right side in $10 worth of one-eighth-inch Vivak, which is transparent, thermoplastic sheeting and is clear, tough, and easy to work with. You can saw it, drill it, rivet it, bend it … and tape tufts of orange yarn to it. I’ll watch the tufts from the driver’s seat and see how changes in the front of the car (different fenders in particular) influence airflow in the middle of the car, and maybe I'll learn something.

Photo by Jack McCornack

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This is more of a “downdate” than an update, but I thought you’d like to know what happened. We suffered a thrilling daylight burglary on Friday morning, October 9. OK, it wasn’t all that thrilling — we left Kinetic for breakfast at 9, came back at 10, and the door was open with the lock broken off. “Golly,” I said to my secretary, although not in those words, “I wonder if anything’s missing.”

Not much, actually: two laptop computers, two briefcases, and one external hard drive. It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Well it was bad, because Friday is Backup Day, in which we back up our laptops with each other, and back them both up with a hard drive we keep at a secret location 10 miles from the shop ... except during work hours on Fridays when I watch that backup drive like a hawk and add the week’s work to its archives ... except during mealtimes, when we leave our work at the office.

So we were backed up solid, ready to restore from any computer crash, even ready to recover from any burglary, any fire less than 10 miles long (hey, we’re in the Oregon woods, we’ve seen worse) and most natural catastrophes, provided any of this didn’t happen on Friday between 9 and 10 a.m. (breakfast) or 1 and 2 p.m. (lunch). As you would guess, a whole lot of MAX data is (was) in electronic form, such as all MAX’s test results to date, and all the new body part drawings.

I’ve spent the last week looking for a silver lining to this cloud, and indeed I’ve found one: Now we get to work with a clean slate. For example, the “new” body (other than the roof) was designed over two years ago, and all the parts painstakingly rendered, ready for manufacturing. I’ve learned a bit more about automobile aerodynamics since then, but it was too much work to change the drawings if I didn’t have to. Now I have to. I may have even learned a thing or two about testing since MAX hit the road. Now I have to run those tests over again. And since I absolutely hate doing the same work over again the same way, I’m dang near guaranteed to do it better the second time.

Mind you, I’m not yet ready to send the burglars a thank you note. But chances are MAX will be slightly improved by this ordeal. And me? I’ll probably be slightly improved too, since I won’t be squandering my evenings in pool halls and movie theaters any more. I’ll be slaving away in my garret, drafting new MAX drawings on my replacement computer — the one handcuffed to my wrist, of course.

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The new MAX body is getting a new nose. Cardboard and computers are working hand in hand on this aspect of the design. Don’t worry, the finished nose won't look like this, we’re just seeing how small an air inlet we can get away with.

For drag reduction, the less air that goes through the car, the better. Properly guided, air that goes around, over and even below the car can have relatively low air resistance, but air that goes through will always be a big drag, to coin a phrase. If you assume that all the air that goes through a radiator is converted to drag, you won't be far wrong. If you go back to Update No. 16, you can see that MAX’s radiator opening is substantial — a full square foot of MAX’s frontal area. Is that enough area to be worth messing with?

Dynamic pressure (shown by the letter ‘q’ in the aerodynamics biz, for reasons shrouded in mystery) is the pressure of air in motion. For horseback calculation of car performance you can use q = 1 pound at 20 mph. Dynamic pressure (q) increases at the square of airspeed (if you double your speed, you hit twice as many air molecules and you hit them each twice as hard, etc.) so q at 40 mph (20 mph x 2) is 4 pounds per square foot (2 squared). At 60 mph (20 mph x 3) q is 9 pounds per square foot (3 squared). I’ll spare you the math, but it takes 1.5 horsepower to exert 9 pounds of force at 60 mph. If we could reduce the size of the radiator opening to one-third of a square foot (as shown in the photo), MAX’s “cooling drag” would only be 3 pounds, would only take one-half horsepower to overcome, and would save us one full horsepower at 60 miles an hour.

Testing will show how little air MAX needs for cooling, but my guess is not very much. While Kinetic Vehicles encourages even our high performance customers to build their cars with four cylinder engines, we have a few who have put Chevy V-8s in cars that look just like MAX — same nose and everything — and they cool just fine. Still, one test is worth a thousand guesses, all it takes is some cardboard zip-tied to the grill and a keen eye on the temperature gauge, and when we’re done we can recycle the cardboard!

Photo by Jack McCornack

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Escape from Berkeley II has a schedule, at last! Hopefully we can say it’s a last schedule. To quote the Escape from Berkeley website, “...while not final, our fairly firm dates are April 24 to 27, 2010.”

This time, we'll be racing to the Mexican border. Whoops, I mean rallying to Mexico — it's not a race, it's a rally. Hopefully for this rally, we'll be even closer to our goal of 100 mpg, if not already there.

There have been a number of date changes since the event was announced a year ago. I don't know how impulsive the organizers were being when they announced there would be a second Escape from Berkeley event, but the success of the first event probably was a determining factor.

Success? I'll say. For those of you just tuning in, the self-explanatory competition known as “Escape from Berkeley (by any non-petroleum means necessary)” involves getting from Berkeley, Calif., to somewhere far away, using only renewable fuels. To keep it from being too easy, you can't buy your fuel, no matter what it is. Instead of exercising your Visa card, you have to scrounge, forage and connive your way to the finish line. And this isn't some science fair contest with laps around a track under controlled conditions; it's for street-legal vehicles on real roads, in whatever conditions mother nature dishes out. Anyway, the premier event ran us from Berkeley to Las Vegas, and it couldn't have been more successful for us 'cause MAX won it! (See MAX Wins 800-mile Race, without Gas.)

We didn't stomp the competition, and the event wouldn't have been exciting if we had. The Green Machine, a truck powered by a wood gasifier, gave MAX quite a run for its money. The lead changed hands between us a couple times and it could’ve been a photo finish if they hadn't blown a tire on the last night of the three-day race. It proved there's more than one way to skin a non-petroleum cat.

But then again, MAX and the Green Machine, powered by two quite different alternative fuel technologies, did run away from the rest of the field. The pack wasn't biting at our heels because the pack wasn't quite ready. Man, there were some imaginative machines at the starting line. But as is tradition in the innovation biz, the finishing touches take longer than expected. Now, given the time to prepare for the sequel event, the organizers expect to see a lot of entrants not only ready to roll, but ready to win.

We won't know for sure until April, but Escape from Berkeley II could be quite the battle between the Smokers and the Greasers, as in gasifier technology versus waste cooking oil. Gosh, by the 10th Escape from Berkeley (we'll probably be escaping to Bangor, Maine, by then) it could be a rivalry like Ford vs. Chevy in the early days of NASCAR.

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Lots of the Auto X Prize design guidelines are worth continuing to follow as we develop our 100-mpg DIY car. If you scroll back to Update No. 19: A Roof Over our Heads, you'll see our first shot at compliance with the Auto X Prize’s no-roadsters rule. And if you scroll ahead a couple of posts from there, you'll find Update No. 21: New Motivation for an Enclosed Cabin, which pretty well speaks for itself.

I've driven a couple thousand miles with that “bikini top” and it's excellent for sun protection and decent for ordinary rain protection, but in serious rain, snow or slush storms, it's no great shakes. It didn't help streamlining either. The bikini top had five of the eight features we want in a top (it was cheap, it was light, it was simple, it was reliable, and it looked kinda cool), but it missed out on two biggies — weather protection and drag reduction, and it only gets a C- in the easy entry category.

I'm confident we can do better, and when I say “we”, I'm including you! If you'll go to the Kinetic Vehicles website and scroll down to the bottom of the page (look for “August 2009” subhead), you'll find some computer generated pix (side, front, top and rear) of the streamlined, aerodynamic body we're currently constructing, with front roll bar and split windshield added in. You have my enthusiastic permission to download those images and doodle up your own cabin ideas.

If you come up with something you think is worth sharing, follow the instructions on the Contact Us page to let me know. I'll write you back and we'll work out a way to transfer it. Use “MAX cabin kv” as your subject when you e-mail me. If you're a Rhino user (our software of choice for 3D imaging and CAM), let me know and I'll send you a Rhino file of MAX to work with. All I ask is you please don't send me any attachments — our system rejects anything with an unexpected attachment and I'll never see it. Actually, I'd rather not get any spam either, but I'm willing to risk it in the pursuit of a better roof.

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“When I gave up cigarettes, my dad called me a quitter.” — an old McCornack joke

We have officially withdrawn MAX from the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize competition. It was a no-hard-feelings decision by both parties.

Have no fear, this doesn't mean the end of MAX. It doesn't even mean an end to our involvement with the Auto X Prize competition. I intend to be there for their race events and cover them as a journalist. And I expect MAX will be the most fuel-efficient vehicle in the press corps.

But from a competition standpoint, it is clear that we and the X Prize Foundation are marching to the sounds of different drummers, so it’s time we take our hat out of the ring.

For the first year or so, the X Prize Foundation thought MAX was pretty neat. They didn't have many applicants yet, and we were one of the few with an actual car on the road. The MAX Project and the Auto X Prize were good for each other in the early days.

But lately, this competition has been interfering with our goal for MAX: a high-mileage car you can build on a budget. The final rules have no place for a DIY car, and preparing MAX (even on paper) for factory production — as in 10,000 cars a year — has been sucking up our resources like you wouldn't believe. In the last year I have literally spent more hours filling out X Prize Foundation paperwork than I've spent developing MAX, and MAX has suffered for it. Instead of working on streamlining to improve the car’s gas mileage, I've been writing business plans and tech documents and getting price quotes, for every single part in the car. Imagine trying to figure out the cost of 20,000 windshield wiper blades to be delivered in five years, etc., etc., etc.

So go ahead and ask: Why didn't we figure this out two years ago? Why didn't we realize we'd get drowned in paperwork before we ever sent in our entry fee? Why didn't we predict that 10,000 how-to e-books to 10,000 potential DIYers wasn't going to count as “manufacturing capability”? It's simple — we entered the competition before the X Prize Foundation wrote the rules.

Mind you, I have no bone to pick with the Auto X Prize folks about the rules. It's their $10 million dollars and they can write the rules any way they like. They've always been perfectly up front that anybody who didn't like the final rules could get their entry fee back. Rule development is a tough job —I can see why it took years to complete them.

But now that the rules are done, they left us with a simple choice: Is MAX going to be a $10,000 DIY car you can build this decade? Or a $40,000 factory-built car you can buy in 2014?

Well, we chose to stick to our DIY roots. The Auto X Prize is a fascinating competition, and I'll enjoy covering it for you ... from behind the wheel of MAX, a high-mileage car that I built with my own two hands.

Photo by Katherine Loeck

Browse previous MAX Updates.

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When I showed up on the doorstep of Kinetic Vehicles earlier this year to check out the high-mileage DIY car known as MAX (see Update No. 22), my aura somehow communicated “car enthusiast.” 

Although I took my first road trip in the back of a Corvette at 2 weeks old, my father’s passion for automobiles has not rubbed off on me. I have never waxed my rig, checked the tire pressure or paid any attention to the confusing maze of gray intestines under the hood of my car. As far as transportation goes, I prefer to focus my energy on the power and strength of the human body. 

I had read about MAX in my days as a MOTHER EARTH NEWS intern. But now, given that I live in Oregon (like Jack McCornack and the Kinetic Vehicles team), I had the chance to actually see this unique creation in action. What I didn’t expect was that this encounter would bring about a long overdue engagement of mind, body and machine: learning to drive a manual transmission. 

At first, MAX made me think of a big kid version of a bumper car that had escaped from the state fair. But this image vanished when my Pontiac Sunfire convertible couldn’t keep up with MAX on the drive back to the shop. I can attest that MAX is definitely a real car … except with more personality than any car I’ve ever known. 

When I jumped into the driver’s seat, it wasn’t the five-point safety harness that made me nervous, it was the stick shift. MAX is dear to Jack, the Kinetic Vehicles team and the editors at MOTHER EARTH NEWS, so the last thing I wanted to do was ruin the transmission or clutch.

In the passenger seat, Jack began the lesson. MAX is probably the best manual transmission to learn on because it won’t die if the driver messes up while coaxing it into first gear. Regardless, as soon as the clutch would start to engage, my feet would freeze until MAX putted along. 

After multiple stop and go circles around the parking lot, and multiple commands from Jack to stop, I finally learned to give MAX some gas when I felt the clutch turning over. What a pivotal step in the learning process! I was ready for second gear. After a couple up and down shifts, I felt fairly confident in my stick shift driving abilities. Not that I’m road ready, but if I needed to drive someone to the emergency room and the only available car had a manual transmission, I could pull it off.

Learning to drive MAX was more than learning to drive a fun car. Seeing firsthand the time, skill, science and enthusiasm behind MAX made the experience unique and meaningful. This machine was built from scratch to prove a point about the possibilities of green transportation. The necessary technology is already available. The innovation is what we need. Thank you, MAX.

You can see lots of photos from my trip in the MAX, the High-mileage DIY Car gallery.

Photo by Jack McCornack

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

This is Tom and his Geo Metro. Tom is holding the Metro’s crumpled left fender. The front bumper got so bent up that Tom had to take it off to drive the car here to the shop.

Tom works summers at Kinetic Vehicles. I've known him since he was an auto shop student at the local high school, where he graduated this June. He spent last week getting a beater of a Geo Metro running and legal, got his driver's license on Friday, and Monday he ...

I'll let you guess what happened. Here's a clue: He lives on Deer Creek Road.

As you can see, Tom is fine, but the deer he hit is currently scampering around in deer paradise, telling the other deer spirits, “Honestly, they should have named it Car Creek Road, they're just everywhere out there.”

All I can say is, I'm glad Tom wasn't driving MAX.

MAX is on the inactive list for a few days while — by amazing coincidence — we work out mounting an auxiliary roll bar behind its windshield (see Update No. 30). I wasn't expecting to be able to say, “See, I told you so!” so soon, but there you have it.

Combine this lesson with the one I learned a year ago (see Update No. 4: Crash Test Dummy), when shiny new MAX got rear-ended before its paint was even dry, and I'm now convinced there's no “grace period” or “honeymoon” where driving is concerned. The risk is there every time you turn the key, starting with the first time.

Tom plans to build himself a MAX-like sports car next summer, but you know, the car he has now is a perfect first car, particularly for a young man in college. His Metro gets good gas mileage and his school is a 50-mile round trip from home — it should take him little more than a gallon to get there and back.

His car isn’t a hot rod, so he's not going to get lured into what the police of my youth referred to as an “exhibition of speed.”

And best of all, his car is totally bereft of any class, style or status. If he can make it a year being green instead of green with envy, maybe he'll miss out on the urge to define himself by the car he drives, the urge that got our culture into this gas guzzling mess to begin with.

Photo by Jack McCornack

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Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

Man, I sure hope I don't get kicked out of PETA for this.

I'm replacing MAX's aluminum windshield frame with something more substantial — a steel tube the same size as the roll bar. It will support the roof (coming soon) and provide a smidgen of side impact protection (more of that coming soon, too).

The trouble is that I live in deer country, on Eight Dollar Mountain in rural southern Oregon. It's bear country, too. I've seen bear in the Kinetic Vehicles driveway and our secretary, Jacky, shooed one away from her trash cans last winter, “Bad bear! Scat!” I suspect the bear ran away out of fear that Jacky was rabid.

It's even cougar country — my friend Dave, who has appeared in this blog a couple times, dang near tripped over one in his mud room this April.

But mostly it's deer country. Seeing a deer here is no more surprising than seeing a cow in Wisconsin.

I find deer charming. Every time I drive to my cabin and find them frisking about, converting my garden to venison, I can't resist calling to them, “I'm home, deer!”

Besides, they help the economy. I have a friend who is saving for his daughter's college tuition thanks to public interaction with deer: He drives a tow truck.

I hit a deer with a motorcycle once. We were both trying to dodge and we outsmarted each other. Although neither of us was killed, neither of us particularly enjoyed the experience. If I'd been driving MAX, the deer would’ve come over the hood and right into the cockpit with me, which wouldn't have improved either of our moods.

So MAX is getting what I call an auxiliary roll bar. But if local accident statistics are any guide, deer strikes are a lot more common than rollovers. I'm not sure how to discuss this in the brochure …

How's this? “The Kinetic Vehicles auxiliary roll bar helps keep wildlife in its natural environment.”

Photo by Jack McCornack

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

Don't pay the ransom, I escaped! Wow, it's been a busy month for me, and I apologize for the lack of updates recently.

The last weekend in May was MAX's farewell public showing in its Escape from Berkeley trim, at a fun, wonderful event called the Maker Faire.

We were there to show the flag and drum up business for Escape from Berkeley II. I figured if the Escape folks were willing to give us five grand for winning the event last year, the least we could do is encourage others to join in the fun this year. So we pulled off the streamlined body bits and put back the stylish-but-slow fenders and lights and all, and drove down to San Mateo, Calif., for one last hurrah.

Now we're back, and we have to knuckle down on the streamlining. In order to reach 100 mpg, we’ll have to get MAX down to the drag coefficient of a typical modern sports car.

The drag coefficient (aka “coefficient of drag”, abbreviated Cd) is a comparison of the drag of an object versus a flat plate of the same frontal area. A Mazda Miata, for example, has a Cd of 0.38.

MAX gets better mileage than a Miata because (among other things) MAX is so small it doesn't have a lot of frontal area. But MAX’s Cd is about 0.7, which is pretty terrible. That’s about the same drag coefficient as a shoe box.

Obviously, we have to make a lot of improvements, and one feature we can improve is a curved windshield. Hey, if you were making a windshield for a shoe box, it would look a lot like MAX's windshield does now — a flat panel right across the front of the cockpit.

But unfortunately a curved windshield will blow our $10,000 budget, because there's nothing off the shelf that will fit MAX (the windshield is only 33 inches wide — more than a foot narrower than the Miata windshield, for example) and custom-curved windshields cost a bundle.

So how about a split windshield, with a steep rake and a deep V to emulate a curved windshield? It'll be pretty cheap, and it would add to MAX's old-timey personality. I think I like it ... though I wasn't willing to commit the glass cutter before I saw how it looked.

Cardboard is a nice medium for conceptualizing design features, but it has its limitations. It should come with a sticker that reads, Warning: Remove Cardboard Before Operating This Vehicle. Nowhere would that be more important than the windshield …

Photo by Jack McCornack

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

I've been on the road for a couple weeks, laptop by my side, weighing the suggestions about pumping up MAX's performance (see Update No. 26 and the numerous comments attached to it).

One that especially sparked my interest was the idea of relocating the turbocharger to the back of the car — the commenter explained the idea in detail and it makes sense. The comment, from Glen2Gs, ended with this:

“… The "Still Born" Top Gear USA television program took a VW Rabbit Diesel (AKA The Sipster) and were able to "tweek" it to 84mpg with a 0-60 time of 7 SECONDS!

http://www.topgear.com/us/features/more/project-sipster-sipster-indeed/  

May be time to send the Kubota ... packing.”

For those unfamiliar with the Sipster project, they took an '81 Volkswagen Rabbit and put in a power plant from an '03 Volkswagen Jetta TDI (diesel). The word “put” is a bit of an oversimplification and waaay out of my skill set, but that's the basic idea. They backed up the engine swap with aerodynamic modifications and got the results quoted above. It's a good story and worth the read, and it got new folks interested in the subject. All in all, I think it's pretty cool.

But before I toss the Kubota and trade MAX in for a Rabbit, we're not really talking apples and apples here. For example, they used different cardboard-and-duct-tape aerodynamic modifications for the performance runs and the economy runs. But the X Prize Foundation isn't going to let us change MAX’s body depending on which task we're facing, so that's apples and oranges at best.

Maybe not even apples and oranges, since they were “hypermiling” — drafting, coasting, and generally making life rough for the surrounding traffic— for their economy run. So we're comparing driving techniques as much as we're comparing cars, so maybe it's apples and donuts.

But still, 84 mpg is pretty spectacular. But then I read how they measured the mileage and said, “Whoa, that's how the hucksters did it back when they were selling high mileage refrigerator magnets to tie on your fuel line.”

In brief, one morning they filled the tank all the way up to the gas cap (diesel cap?), drove 70 miles, and filled it to the gas cap again. The pump stopped at 0.833 gallons, less than a gallon by a pint and a third. Pretty simple, so what could be wrong with that?

What's wrong is that as the day heats up, the fuel heats up expands, filling the tank from the inside. A factor in this case is the TDI system re-circulates fuel through the fuel pump (which heats the fuel), into the engine compartment (which heats it further), and back to the tank. Diesel expands at roughly 0.05 percent per degree Farenheit and...

Well, I haven't a clue what the difference was between starting and ending fuel temperatures in Top Gear's mileage test. But neither do they, so I'll guess a number that makes the math easy: 25 degrees. That would give an expansion factor of 1.25 percent; times 10 gallons (the capacity of the Rabbit tank) is 12.5 percent of a gallon, or one pint. That’s not a factor to ignore when the line between success and failure is a pint and a third (as was in their case, where they were shooting for 70 mpg). Now we're comparing apples and honey bears.

By the way, this fuel expansion thing is not just theoretical. When Sharon Wescott and I won Escape from Berkeley (see Update No. 14), supporters had brought us extra fuel at the finish line. So we filled our under-the-hood tank to the top before we headed out of town. The fuel was veggie oil — I don't know its expansion rate, but it was greater than our fuel consumption rate. In Vegas traffic, we couldn't burn it as fast as it expanded — 15 minutes down the road we stopped to see if we'd sprung a leak, but no, oil was overflowing from the top of the tank. Imagine what fabulous gas mileage we could claim if we used the fill-drive-refill mileage measurement technique.

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

Thanks to y'all for the great response to my horsepower question in Update No. 26. We'll be trying several of your suggestions and reporting back here with the results. But first, MAX is getting a major examination.

In these modern times when some cars get their first service at 100,000 miles, it may seem odd that we're tearing MAX down for a look-see with a modest 5,160 miles on the clock. But I've got my reasons.

For one, I cut my teeth on aircraft, and a 100 hour/annual (whichever comes first) inspection is par for the course in the aviation biz. Mind you, if your car starts making a funny noise you can pull over and call for a tow truck — but that’s not an option for pilots. So they want to know if something has funny noise potential before the actual noises announce themselves.

Photo by Jack McCornack

It's a habit I've carried over to the road: My cars tend to be what the used car salespeople describe as fully depreciated, or beaters, or experimental ... Well, if I knew exactly what they were going to do, there'd be no point in building them, would there? Anyway, giving my cars an “annual” keeps me from wearing out my AAA card.

For another reason, 5,000 miles is long enough that gross design errors are likely to have left their mark. My biggest concern was that the transmission adapter might have a design flaw. Otherwise, believe me, I wouldn't have bothered pulling MAX's engine out of the chassis at a mileage mark where other people are thinking about changing their oil.

What defects was I expecting? Well, if I knew that, I wouldn't have to look, but one possibility was fatigue cracks. Every engine revolution vibrates the connection between the engine and transmission by one cycle. I could do the math and calculate how many vibration cycles there are in a mile, but it's easier to do a horseback guess based on hours. Let's see ... 5,000 miles is about 100 hours, figuring an average speed of 50 mph. Figuring an average RPM of about 2,000, 2,400 or so, times 60 miles per hour, that's 120,000 to 144,000. We'll be conservative and go with 120,000 cycles. That times 100 hours is 12 million vibration cycles — enough time for cracks to develop and grow if they're going to happen. They didn't.

It's also long enough for misalignment to show itself by unusual clutch or bearing wear. But it all looked good in there and appears ready to go another 50,000 miles before it gets another peek, and another 100,000 miles before the clutch disk wears out.

The only thing I didn't like is it's a bit dirtier inside than I'd prefer. But that’s all my fault; I left a big gap when I notched the bottom of the transmission bell housing so I could fit this powerplant in the Corrode Warrior (see MAX Update No. 7). I'm very happy with how this adapter is holding up, happy enough to make one for you if you want to make your own MAX, or for whatever Kubota/Toyota project strikes your fancy.

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

The rules for the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize have been under development for some years now, and all us entrants are on pins and needles — waiting for their release. We've had looks at rule proposals all along the way, given to us in confidence. That's really been the only challenge I've faced as a combination entrant/journalist: there have been times I've had burn-after-reading documents and had to resist my urge to blab.

But now that the latest draft of the Auto X Prize Competition Guidelines have been made available to the public, I'm going to ask for your advice.

The final rules are pretty certain to require we meet a performance standard of zero to 60 mph in under 18 seconds. Not much under, 17.999 will do, but for MAX, that's going to be tough.

What? 18 seconds to 60 mph isn't very fast, but you'd be surprised how many vehicles on the road can't do it. Fully loaded, my four-cylinder Dodge Caravan can't do it, and while it's hardly a performance car, it's adequate. Anyway, this 18 second thing is a fairly recent requirement. It wasn't in the projections when we signed up, so we had designed MAX from the get-go to hit 60 mph in 20 seconds.

Why 20 seconds? Because that's in keeping with the low budget sports cars you could buy new when I was young (and quicker than some, such as the Bugeye Sprites and the Karman Ghias) and I thought it could be done today with a 100-mpg, low-budget sports car. I'll confess we haven't hit 60 mph in 20 seconds yet. On paper it looks like streamlining will get us down to that, so I'm not worried. Or I wasn't before … but I am now.

To increase acceleration to a given speed by 10 percent (in this case, from 20 seconds to 18 seconds) requires more than 20 percent more horsepower. To skim over the math, it would take 10 percent more thrust applied for the same length of time, but by definition it has to be accomplished in 10 percent less time.

1.1 squared = 1.21 so that's 21 percent there. Plus there's no acceleration happening when I'm shifting gears and I doubt I can shift gears 10 percent faster (if it takes me a quarter second per shift then we're really comparing 17 seconds of acceleration with 19 seconds of acceleration). And we don't have much besides horsepower we can mess with.

Make MAX lighter? That'd be nice, but it's not likely to happen given the weight of the additional crash protection structure we're installing.

So to put it simply, this upcoming performance rule is going to call for about 25 percent more horsepower than we have now. How are we going to go from the 32 horses we have to the 40 horses we need?

Beats me! But we're sure not giving up; we're going to find out. The first step of our research is to ask you. Got any ideas on how we can boost our power by 25 percent without hurting fuel economy? If so, please post a comment below!

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

When people ask me if I really think I can get 100 miles per gallon, I say “Of course I can. I built my first 100 mpg commuter over 30 years ago.”

What I don't mention right away is it was a motorcycle. When I do, they roll their eyes and go, “Oh right, some put-put going 12 miles an hour.”

Then I say, “Heck no, it was a freeway flier, I spent more in tickets than I did in gas.”

I'm not exaggerating by much. My prize ticket was a combination, charging me with both a Speed Contest and Insufficient Horsepower for Freeway Operation. Ah yes, my misspent youth …

An interesting DVD showed up in the mail yesterday. It's a videotaped lecture by Craig Vetter about the Craig Vetter Fuel Economy Contests, held in the early '80s during the era I refer to as Energy Crisis Lite. These were not silly, low-speed science project pulse-and-coast competitions — these were street legal bikes going highway speeds on public roads. I thought I was hot stuff at 100 mpg. But man, the front-runners in these contests (yeah, folks got hooked on them and came back year after year) were getting 100 mpg improvements from one contest to the next, like 152 in '82 and 256 in '83. The last contest was in '85, and won at 470 mpg.

Well, you probably know the history: gas got cheap again, and the masses stopped caring about fuel economy for 30 years. But Craig called up the top finishers to ask them how they'd done it back in the day. The DVD is fascinating if you're into this stuff, and the advice from the guys getting 250 mpg and up is probably the best part.

In general (SPOILER ALERT) the secret is to use real streamlining (Craig goes into great detail on the difference between real streamlining and styling department streamlining) and no more motor than you need. Of course there's a lot more to it (and a lot more on the DVD) but it sounds like our four wheeled motorcycle, MAX, is on the right track.

If you'd like one of Craig's DVDs for your very own, check out the Craig Vetter online store. Also cruise the rest of his website for more insight into high-mileage bikes.

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

MAX is getting its first 21st century body part fitted — a snug, low frontal area fender. Goodbye, classic charmer, hello, sports racer. When this project is done, we'll hardly recognize the old girl.

Don't worry, we're not throwing away any of the pretty stuff. We'll be able to swap back and forth between antique and zooty in a 10-hour day ... that is, once the zooty part is finished. Besides, the slicked-up version of this body may have some charm of its own.

Photo by Jack McCornack

So here you see the first new part out of the first new mold. In keeping with the keep-it-simple-keep-it-cheap philosophy, we're using one mold for both front fenders. We've put MAX up on blocks and removed the suspension spring from the right front wheel, so we can move the wheel up and down and see if/when/where it hits the fender. So far so good; once we have the fender positioned correctly we'll add the fender fairing (see Update No. 23 to understand what I'm talking about — it's the part that tapers back from the fender and blends into the rest of the body), then start building the “pontoon” that runs along the side of the car.

I think the front fender assembly will be the last MAX body part we build the old-fashioned way, where we measure drawings and saw templates and bend sheets and shape foam with big files and ... heck, even this part wasn't done totally the old-fashioned way — at least I had my Rhino CAD (computer aided design, if you're new here) drawings I could print full size and trace on the wood I was carving. Still, it took a loooong time.

Maybe not long if you're a redwood tree, but plenty long for a human being. I figure I can build a computer-operated foam carving machine quicker than I can sculpt a whole car by hand, and we'll soon see if I'm right. But right now, it's nice to see the streamlining starting to take shape in real, live, go-out-and-touch-it form.

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

If you missed the Brink TV show last week, or it's not part of your standard cable package (grrrr), you can still see the program about MAX, captain Jack McCornack and the victory in the Escape from Berkeley race. Visit the Brink video page and click "Brink Package: Escape from Berkeley" if the page doesn't load with that video.

If you're not familiar with our MAX project, read the introductory article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car and browse through the MAX Updates. For more about the Escape from Berkeley Race, read MAX Wins 800-mile Race, without Gas.

It's too darn cold to go in the shop, and I have a lot of work to do. To hit our goal of 100 miles per gallon, we have to get MAX's drag down by about a third, and the only way to get there is streamlining. And to hit my personal budget goal (I want MAX to be a car you can reproduce at home for less than $10,000), MAX needs a simple body.

Jack McCornack

The practical problem with a slick sleek full fiberglass body is it's going to blow the budget — maybe not for me, 'cause I've built car bodies before and I'm willing to pay myself 35 cents an hour to build another one, but the Michelangelo technique (take a big rock and knock off everything that doesn't look like David) works better on paper than it does in practice. A full body from a commercial fiberglasser is going to cost at least few thousand, and if you don't live on the West Coast, how are you going to get it home? So we're going to try simple first ... or to quote Albert Einstein, “as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

The idea is fiberglass fenders — which have to be a bit complicated — with complex curves to direct the air over and around them, joined together by sheet metal body panels with simple curves. And thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I can work out the details in a warm house instead of a cold shop.

This particular miracle is Rhinoceros, a 3D modeling program with a funny name. When I build a real body to match the electronic/virtual body, I'll know the parts fit before I fit them.

Another advantage of working electronically ... you remember a couple months ago when I mentioned the crew from the Science Channel shooting a Brink segment about us? It'll be on tomorrow (Friday, Jan. 30), and they wanted some graphics right away of what MAX will look like when it's done. Well, maybe it'll look like this, kinda. Except with a roof.

P.S. I saw an ad for the Brink episode and it looks like it'll be fun. To look up when it will show in your neck of the woods, visit the Brink website.

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

The Saturday before The EG, Mother Earth News sent a photojournalist down to make sure MAX was for real (it's amazing the things I can do with Photoshop... ). Katherine Loeck is a couple of generations younger than me, so sports car nostalgia isn't part of her program (nostalgia isn't what it used to be, I'll tell you...) but she dug MAX anyway.

She was having so much fun in the passenger's seat that I said, “You should drive.” Then she said she'd love to, but she didn't know how to drive a stick shift.

“Really?”

Yes, really. She'd tried driving her dad's 'Vette once but that hadn't gone well.

I would imagine it hadn't. A Corvette does not seem like an ideal driver's ed car. It's heavy, the clutch is heavy, and there's only a small difference in throttle pedal position between too-little-and-stalled-the-engine and too-much-and-smoking-the-tires.

“Perfect!” said I. “MAX is a perfect way to learn to drive a stick. Every high school should have one.”

MAX is light, the engine puts out huge torque at low rpm, the clutch is easy to push, and with the governor limiting the engine to 3000 rpm and 32 horsepower, it's not going to get away from you if you give it too much throttle. So Katherine and I swapped seats.

Photo by Jack McCornack

“Don't bother with the throttle, just let the clutch out slowly.”

She did. Chug chug chugchugchug, MAX pulled forward smoothly, idling at walking speed.

“Good, push in the clutch and do it again,” I said. “Uh, push the brake to make it stop.”

She did. She did it again. And again and again, 20 times without stalling the engine. She was wowed by how easy MAX is to operate. I tried not to look surprised but I'll tell you, it was sure different from when I was first learning the clutch/throttle/brakedance some 44 years ago. We moved on to first-to-second shifts, second-to-first downshifts, not bad for Lesson 1.

She's not ready for the street yet, but she will be soon enough; I'm sure we'll do a follow-up to this update when the weather warms up again.

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

Did you guess why the trip home was no fun? If you live in the Pacific Northwest, I'll bet you figured it out.

In the year 2050, when children gather around my feet and ask, “Grampaw, where were you during the Great Storm of Oh Eight?” I’ll answer, “I was driving a high-mileage sports car from California to Oregon, and even in that weather I got about 60 miles to the gallon.” And I'll show them this picture, of what the world looked like from MAX's driver's seat.

Photo by Jack McCornack

Depending on how things go between now and 2050, they'll reply, “Sixty mpg? They called that high mileage back then? Ha ha ha ho ho tee hee,” or they’ll ask, “What's a car?”

Then I'll tell them that even though I was dressed for foul weather, it was a challenging trip. And even with a top, MAX was really only good for nine months of the year back then. And there were times during that trip I'd wished I'd been somewhere else and doing something more sensible, such as running with the bulls in Pamplona.

To maximize fuel economy, MAX needs a fully enclosed cabin. There's just too much drag from the wind coming in, noodling around the driver and passenger, and wandering off again. We aren't going to get 100 mpg without separating the moving air in the inside of the car from the non-moving air on the outside of the car (or vice-versa, depending on where you're standing). But now I have another motive: I’m not going to drive through another storm without a weather barrier between me and the elements.

I don't mind driving in light rain — in Oregon, that's what we call “humidity.” But I'll never plan another unprotected road trip when the weather station is predicting Industrial Strength Humidity — Now Available in Chunky Style. My second biggest problem was that the windshield wiper couldn't keep up with the snow. My biggest problem was that when the road got slushy and trucks zoomed by, their wheels would throw buckets of slush through MAX's doorless doorway, drenching me from face to floorboard. When I had to stop to buy chains — chains! I had to buy chains for MAX! — even guys with snowmobiles were saying, “Man, you're hard core!”

So I won't have to embellish much to entertain the kids, And in 2050, when they say...

“Grampaw, I did the math, that makes you 102. That's really old.” I’ll then say, “Yes, and if I hadn't met your grandmother in 2009, I might not have made it this long.” So keep those cards and letters coming.

Browse previous MAX Updates.

Read the introductory MAX article, Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

Visit the Kinetic Vehicles website for more technical details on MAX.

The EG was a hoot and I'm so glad I went. 

EG stands for Entertainment Gathering, as far as I can tell — I was in way over my head. It featured the most eclectic group of presenters I've ever seen in one bunch. My personal favorite speaker was Teller, of Penn & Teller, who spoke of how knowing how something is done does not lessen one's appreciation of the act, even if the act is magic on stage.

Many other presentations were inspiring: One laptop per child? Good idea. Digital motion control in the arts? I'll use those lessons to make MAX's next body. Peter Diamondis of the X Prize Foundation? Heck yeah, but he'd already inspired me. International goofy dancing? The world's not such a bad place, is it? But Teller renewed my dedication to open sourcing the MAX project. If there's anything about MAX I'm not telling you, it's not because it's a trade secret, it's because I haven't figured it out yet.

Photo by Jack McCornack

MAX was well-received, partly because (as a commenter predicted in MAX Update No. 19: A Roof Over Our Heads) it was the only Auto X Prizer that got there on its own steam. The Physics Lab of Lake Havasu folks brought their “Green Giant” SUV, but they brought it on a trailer. ZAP brought a scale model of their much-anticipated Alias trike, which they maybe brought in a hatbox. Both companies have loftier goals than Kinetic Vehicles, and if the cars were being judged by projected performance, MAX would have been the loser. Instead, I was giving rides during the breaks and MAX was getting bonus points for being real.

During my talk, I described my design philosophy as minimalist, and got a good laugh with my definition: A pessimist says the glass is half empty. An optimist says the glass is half full.  A minimalist says “We're using about twice as much glass as we need here.”

The trip down to California was good fun. I used about 8 gallons from MAX's 9 gallon diesel tank and a gallon from its veggie oil tank to go the 600 miles from Grants Pass, Ore., to Monterey, Calif., via Los Banos, Calif. The conference was fabulous fun. The trip home, not so fun. I'll bet you can guess why ...?

We interrupt this science project for something practical. We'll get back to the subject of drag soon enough.

I have a speaking engagement next week, at The EG, down in Monterey, Calif. They're paying my expenses to get there from my home here in Oregon, which, since I'm taking MAX, should be about $18 of fuel. That, and lots of cough syrup.

It is, after all, the middle of December, and I whimsically refer to MAX as “an all-weather car,” meaning when you go anywhere in MAX, all the weather gets right in the car with you. That's fine for Berkeley-to-Vegas in October, but not so great for Cave-Junction-to-Monterey next Wednesday.

Still, this is a great gig — they put out a call for Progressive Automotive X Prize registered competitors to show our cars and talk about our progress — and I sure wasn't going to turn it down over a mere question of comfort. “I'm tough,” I said to myself, going to my laptop for a long range weather forecast. “Good thing I'm tough,” I muttered when I saw the forecast.

Yes, roadster season is over. The trip down will be cold; the trip back will be damp, or at least, that's the way to bet. It's time for MAX to become a convertible. Besides, the final competition rules are predicted to require a top, and I don't think we can achieve 100 mpg with an open car. So I might as well get some experience.

So here's the plan. I've made some fiberglass braces to bridge between the windshield and the roll bar, and I'm covering the gap between them with awning material. The process involves (among other things) learning how to sew.

Here's my progress so far, I think it will keep the raindrops from getting a straight shot at me. And though it's going to look a bit crude close up, it should match the excellence of the paint job at 50 mph from 50 feet away.

If you have a bajillion dollars or a well-equipped university, you can determine a car's aerodynamic drag in a wind tunnel. But you don't, and neither do I, so we'll have to do it on the cheap. Champagne science on a beer budget, that's my motto.

Automotive wind tunnels work by blowing air at a measured speed over a stationary vehicle (or model) and measuring the forces (drag, lift and stability ... doubtless the source of those tailfins that started appearing on American sedans in the '50s) acting on the car via a number of scales under the tunnel floor.

It's a fine way to do things, and is quite comfortable for the technicians, who sit in a room outside the tunnel, who can wander off for coffee, and who don't have to worry about their notes blowing out of their pockets during the test.

For the MAX project, however, we're using a moving car traveling through stationary air, which presents two obvious problems: How do we measure the speed and how do we measure the force?

PHOTO BY KATHERINE LOECK

A car speedometer isn't sufficient for speed measuring — too vague and too inaccurate — but modern technology has brought extremely precise speed-measuring equipment to the masses: the handheld hiker's GPS. Not only do they measure speed, they measure position and date and time of day, and best of all, they record it for you. This is important because one disadvantage of doing aerodynamic testing in cars (and trust me, this is also critical when testing aircraft) is that the technician has to pay attention to not crashing, along with attending to the test.

I quit trying to multitask during test flights (and drives) nearly 30 years ago, when I started using an Apple II for data acquisition. I mounted it on a plank (a literal “on-board” computer) along with a motorcycle battery to run it, and a 5¼-inch floppy drive. It was big and cumbersome and costly and fragile and only accurate within 3 percent to 5 percent, depending on what I was measuring.

Who would have guessed that future sporting goods stores would have speed-time-and-distance recording devices for under a hundred bucks, accurate to 1/10 mph, and small and handy enough to take in the shower with you?

That yellow thing on the dash in the photo is a Garmin eTrex GPS, and I leave it running any time MAX is running. It records my last 600 miles or so of driving, and every now and then I download it to my laptop and examine the data at my leisure.

So that covers speed, but how do we measure the force? I’ll tell you the answer to that riddle next week. But in the meantime, I'll give you a hint: See that yellow light on the driver's side of the dashboard? That's the oil pressure light.

Wow, I'll tell you, the only people crazier than camera people are stunt performers ... and that's not by much.

Last week, we had a crew from the Science Channel at the shop (which is why you're not getting the promised wind-tunnel-without-a-wind-tunnel update 'till next week), shooting a piece for Brink.

PHOTO BY DAVE LEVISON

What's Brink? Beats me, I've never seen it. I don't get cable and besides, the series isn't on yet. From what they tell me, it's about people and things on the brink of scientific achievement. MAX is just the sort of thing they're looking for, so they ended up on our doorstep.

It appears the show is rather personality-driven, and the ideal personality for Brink is a low-budget mad scientist. I'm good for two out of three (I'm still a little weak on the 'scientist' part), so I fit right in.

Plus, I'm game and cooperative. So when they told me to stand by the car and look “seriously cool,” I gave it my best and didn't laugh. I was a fully poseable action figure, and in exchange, they let me talk about MAX and why we’re building it.

And then we went off to show how much fun MAX is to drive, with the camera woman in the passenger's seat. We hit some back roads and went zipping around in fine sports car style, until she decided she could shoot better from on top of the car. I agreed, but refused to zip, which is why those particular shots are going to look a tad reserved.

Next, she wanted highway shots from the front, which she took by sitting on the trunk of Dave's Miata while I tailgated in MAX. She took it all in stride, but I was sweating, hoping Dave hadn't waxed his car recently and wondering how quickly I could hit the brakes if she started sliding my way. Apparently this is the norm in show biz, but if a police officer had wandered by we would all have been written up for Acting Stupid in or About a Motor Vehicle. Need I add, kids, don't try this at home?

OK, fun's over, time to get back to work.

I am getting so spoiled. When MAX's gas mileage drops into the 50s, I get grumpy.

I wanted to put 5,000 miles on MAX before the weather got wet (next project — a convertible top), a somewhat arbitrary figure, but it's been my experience that 5,000 miles (or 100 hours) is enough to say, “Yeah, it looks like this is going to work.” So for me it's a benchmark. I made it, but it involved a lot of road trips, and those involved a lot of freeway flying.

The freeways are not my favorite environment — one reason is they tempt me to go too fast for fuel efficiency. At 70 mph, MAX is no more fuel efficient than a ... well, actually, there aren't any production cars that get better than 50 mpg at 70 mph.

MAX does (barely), so I guess I shouldn't kick myself too hard. But heck, MAX is supposed to be spectacular, not just good. With its upcoming streamlined body (currently in that gray area between the drawing board and the highway), it's going to be spectacular. But gosh, can't it be kinda spectacular and still have the look-and-feel of a classic sports car?

I sure hope so, because — I know, I know, I should be ashamed of myself — I'm greatly enjoying driving MAX around in its Vintage/Prisoner/Escape from Berkeley regalia. Everybody digs “Classic MAX”, and I love all the attention. Total strangers say, “Ooooh, that car is so cute, can I take a picture, can I get in it, can you take a picture with me in it?” and I know I'm going to lose some of that attention when MAX goes all streamlined and serious.

Sadly, the lovely, swoopy front fenders are part of MAX's visual charm, I say “sadly” because recent fuel consumption figures indicate that those fenders have increased MAX's drag at cruise by about 10 percent.

As you can see, those fenders make up a lot of MAX's frontal area, and that has to translate into lots of drag. I don't know how much drag, but there are ways of finding out. Tune in next week, and I'll show you how to do wind tunnel testing when you don't have a wind tunnel.

Photo by Jack McCornack

Woohoo! We won Escape from Berkeley! What a great competition debut for MAX. 

This was a challenging race, and I'm not going to beat around the bush, this event turned out to be a race, not a “competition event,” as I had earlier described it. I doubt anybody on the road could tell, but because all the competitors had problems along the way, nobody had to slow down so they wouldn't get to the checkpoint too early. It was solve the problem and hurry to the next checkpoint — or the next problem, whichever came first. You'll read all the thrilling details in an early 2009 issue of Mother Earth News. 

I think we've proven the MAX concept with this run. Disguising MAX to look like the Prisoner car sure paid off — to anybody who stopped and said, "Oooh, The Prisoner, that was a great show," we'd counter with "Yes it was, but do you have any vegetable oil?" 

The concept of having to scrounge fuel made for an exciting race (I mean competition event, Officer), but it would have been exciting if we'd been allowed to dash into grocery stores and buy it ourselves. 

I have praises to sing, and first on the list is Plant Drive. A couple months back, I got a message from the company. They had read the MAX article in Mother Earth News and wondered if we'd like to try converting to veggie oil. I said I'd think about it. Well, I thought about it until the last minute (yes, Dad, I do my best work under pressure), and while Plant Drive doesn't make a conversion kit for a MAX, we exchanged e-mails and figured out what would go in one if they did. In Berkeley the day before the race, I primed the lines with canola oil and started MAX. Then Sharon flipped the switch on the dash from D (diesel) to SVO (straight vegetable oil), and we stood around until we felt the urge to order French fries. 

Other than the improved exhaust scent, there was no difference. Then we went out driving, and no difference. It just worked. 

I am sure there are other good conversion kit manufacturers out there, but we've been raving about Plant Drive for three days now. I'm really glad I didn't follow my original plan and get bits and pieces from various sources and concoct my own system. It would have made a better story, maybe, but it would have been a long story. We were racing, after all, and it was nice to be able to answer "How did you get it to run on vegetable oil?" with "We got a Plant Drive conversion kit, we followed the instructions, and we flipped that switch there. Gotta go."

We had some problems, but they were all of our own making. (They mostly related to how we fit our fuel lines — we had an air leak at the fuel tank fitting, and when bubbles got in the line the motor conked out and we had to purge it and prime it.) But the short form of the story is we were victorious, because we had one fewer fuel problem than anybody else.

By the last day, it was just us and the Green Team (a biomass-driven Dodge Dakota) at the start line. Our only problem the last day was getting fuel. Good thing MAX gets such great mileage, because we were literally in sight of Vegas when we couldn't go any farther. We pulled into a convenience store on figurative fumes and mooched their last three pints of cooking oil off the rack. It’s kind of a long story — I'll tell you later — but those 3 pints got us down the Strip and into the Sahara Casino parking lot. That was enough to win.

Photo by Jack McCornack

MAX won the Escape from Berkeley (by any non-petroleum means possible) race! Huzzah!! 

I may be 1,300 miles away from the Sahara Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas, where the race ended, but my heart is beaming with pride. Jack and his trusty sidekick Sharon Westcott were the first to complete the 800+ mile race, arriving at the finish line last night. Jack tells me MAX performed admirably throughout the trip. He sounded exhausted, but ecstatic nonetheless. He's probably wind-whipped and quite hungry. That's Jack and Sharon in the photo below.

According to this morning's New York Times article on the subject, With Little Fuel, Eco-Racers Arrive in Las Vegas, MAX finished the race in 1,418 minutes. The Times article has a great photo of Jack and Sharon and MAX, shortly after they arrived at the Sahara. You can see it large here.

Jack had close competition up to the last day of the three-day race from Wayne Keith, who drove a Dodge Dakota that runs on oxygen, hydrogen and methane converted from wood and biomass burned in a large device in the truck's bed. Mother Earth News readers are familiar with that idea; it's good to see the idea live on.

In the end, Keith finished three hours behind MAX after problems from a flat tire and dead wood that didn't burn correctly.

MAX made the journey on veggie oil. Per the rules of the race, each contestant was allowed 1 gallon of non-petroleum fuel with which to start their engines. For the rest of the journey, your power source of choice had to be scavenged. Jack made a smart choice by using veggie oil in MAX's diesel engine, and was able to get oil all along the way from kind folks.

For more on MAX and the Escape from Berkeley race, read our MAX updates and Here Comes the 100-mpg Car.

And check back soon for an update directly from Jack — he promised me he'll send a new blog post as soon as he can find an Internet connection.

Congrats to Jack, Sharon and the whole Kinetic Vehicles team!

Photo courtesy of Jake Haskell

Friday early a.m.: for the first time ever, MAX got upstaged. Escape from Berkeley is going to be quite an event. I'm so used to being “that weirdo,” but at Shipyard Labs, I'm practically the white sheep of the family.

Here are Shannon O'Hare (foreground) and Kimric Smythe (hiding in the back), lighting up their vegetable oil fired steam carriage. They made their engine out of an old old (1920 or so) air compressor, and they've carried the antique theme all the way from the suspension (none to speak of) to the smokestack (topped with a 19th century spitoon).

That's MAX in the background, looking ordinary and forlorn. Tomorrow (later today, actually) we have lots of work to do, and lucky for me, Sharon slept Thursday night, so she can do it. And lucky for MAX she's not fickle — Kimeric gave her a ride in the steam carriage and she came back with a happy laugh and gleeful smile.

I'm hitting the hay, lulled by the soothing pockata pockata of an idling steam carriage.

Come to the party tonight (Friday), Shipyard Labs, 1010 Murray in Berkeley.

Photo by Jack McCornack

Sharon (that's her in the brown jacket) and I got to Shipyard Labs about sundown (Thursday) for the  Escape from Berkeley (by any non-petroleum means possible) event. It was just getting dark enough to need flash for this photo. MAX performed admirably — and on short notice, to boot.

I'd given MAX a 90.38 mile test drive (ain't GPS wonderful?), had a bunch of errands to do anyway, and nothing fell off so we hit the road. Got to Eureka that night, about 10:00, went to Curtis Unlimited (a name to remember if you drive a vintage Lotus race car) and got a pair of '60s-style fenders mounted. Got three hours of sleep (6 a.m. to 9 a.m.) and drove to Berkeley down back roads. It was a beautiful drive and great fun, but I'm getting too old for these hours.

Now we just have to paint the fenders and ... oh yeah, we got the Plant Drive system installed before we left Oregon, but in order to get to the Curtis' at a reasonable hour (hey, they're night owls) we're going to do our veggie oil testing and debugging today (Friday, October 10). Then there's the party Friday night, then the race — I mean competition event — Saturday.

When I was 15, I brought home an “A” on a term paper I'd written the night before, and I told my dad, “Hey, I do my best work under pressure.” He smiled and said, ”Jack, you do your only work under pressure.” Smart guy, that dad.

PS: Those errands I ran on Tuesday? It was 19 stops (auto parts shops, a dive shop, a costume shop) in two towns. The driving was a good city/highway mix, and MAX got 60 mpg. That’s better than a Prius, and we haven't done any streamlining yet.

PPS: If you're around, you gotta come to the party Friday night. Shipyard Labs is at 1010 Murray in Berkeley. Festivities begin at 8.

Photo by Jack McCornack

... but it's too late in the season to go to Montana and throw the hoolihan. Time flies when you're having fun.

In the photo below, you'll see Dave Levison driving the freshly painted MAX out of the loft. Note that Dave is a pretty big boy; he doesn't rattle around in the cockpit much. In preparation for Escape from Berkeley (by any non-petroleum means possible), we invested $39.90 in 10 rattlecans of Rustoleum and painted MAX to match No. Six's green and yellow Lotus Seven sports car in the opening credits of The Prisoner. It's a long story, but the short form is The Prisoner was a BBC action/adventure/paranoia/social commentary TV series of the '60s, in which a secret agent resigns and is whisked off to a surreal penal colony run by who knows who. For 17 episodes whoever they were tried to extract his secret (why did he quit the spy biz?) and “No. 6” tries to escape. Forty years later, the show still has cult status. Can you believe it?

Anyway, since MAX already looks a lot like a Lotus Seven, we named our team The Prisoners of Petroleum and painted MAX in homage. It looks pretty good in this photo, doesn't it? That's because I know the secret to making a $39 paint job look as good as a $2,000 paint job.

The trick is to take your photo from some distance away, and then compress the photo really small so it'll fit in a blog column. MAX has what is known in the car racing industry (I'm not making this up) as a 50/50 Paint Job. That's one that looks decent from 50 feet away at 50 mph.

Well hey, that's plenty good enough for the Escape from Berkeley. It's the only event where MAX will look like this. We're doing quite extensive bodywork development. Soon, all those green and yellow bits are going to be replaced with a slippery new body. We'll probably get the next body painted by somebody who knows what he's doing, but this one got painted in record time by Dave and me — a couple of guys who've never had a lesson and had a lot of other work to do.

We have less than a week to get our Plant Drive vegetable oil conversion kit installed, plus figure out some front fenders so we can keep driving if it starts raining. And if we're going to be competitive in this event, we're going to need to install some rally-style instrumentation. Then we have to drive from Oregon to Berkeley in time for the send-off party Friday night, October 10.

If you're in the neighborhood, we'd love to have you there to wish us well. MAX should be looking pretty good because it's gong to be dark. Just don't touch the front fenders because the paint will still be wet.

Photo by Jack McCornack

News from the X PRIZE Foundation this weekend: Submit your idea for the newest X PRIZE contest for a chance to win $25,000. 

Remember when Scaled Composites won $10 million for the invention of SpaceShipOne, which carried three people into space and ended NASA’s monopoly on space travel? That was the X PRIZE Foundation, and they didn’t stop there. More contests are currently underway, including the Archon Genomics X PRIZE, which seeks to revolutionize health care by awarding $10 million to the first team of scientists to successfully sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. There’s also the Google Lunar X PRIZE — $30 million will go to the team that manages to land a robot on the moon, move it 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send images and data back to us on Earth. And don’t forget the Progressive Auto X PRIZE, in which Mother Earth News is participating through contributor Jack McCornack. This prize is designed to speed along the development of a 100 mpg(e) automobile with a sound marketing plan, again for a prize of $10 million. You can watch the car develop here, and read an overview of the entry here and here. McCornack even blogs about the progress in our Energy Matters Blog. 

Now’s your chance to contribute. With the Foundation’s “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea” contest, you can submit a video containing your idea for the next X PRIZE in the energy and environment category (and hopefully cash in)! 

Best of luck to you all …

Photo by VLADIMIR VLADIMIROV/ISTOCKPHOTO

MAX is heading for its competition debut in (gulp) less than three weeks. It's not exactly a warmup for the Auto X-Prize ... in fact it's a whole 'nother genre. It's Escape from Berkeley (by any non-petroleum means possible). So sure enough, we're going to perform yet another fuel change and run MAX from Berkeley to Las Vegas on raw vegetable oil.

Fickle, aren't I? Why don't I pick one fuel and settle down? Because in my opinion, the specific fuel is less important right now than the efficient use of fuel in general. I'm as eager as anybody to use wind generated electricity to charge the cheap lightweight batteries in my Detroit-built electric car, but it's not going to happen today. Even in the long run, the energy war will be fought on many fronts, and us humans may be looking for alternative fuels for a long time to come. Mother Earth News provides coverage of the alternative fuel scene, and I'll be your reporter for this alternative fuel event. And there's no place better to observe automotive competition than from the driver's seat, MAX will enter the Escape event.

Notice I've said “event,” rather than “race.” I'd like you all to look very serious while I tell you this is not a race. We're going to be on public roads and racing would hardly be appropriate. This is a timed rally, the goal will not be to get there first, the goal will be to get to the checkpoints exactly on time. We won't know what those times will be — we won't even know where the checkpoints will be — until shortly before the event begins, but we do know we won't have to break the speed limit to get there because that would be wrong. And now that that's settled, we can put on our game faces again.

The rules are pretty simple. No petroleum fuel allowed, a tiny bit of your non-petroleum fuel to get you started, and you can't buy any fuel along the way. Every drop/kilowatt/wood chip of fuel must be begged, mooched or otherwise scrounged en route. It's a three-day event, taking us over high mountains and low deserts, entrants include everything from biomass burners to hybrid bicycles. You've got to ask yourself, is anybody going to have a problem staying under the speed limit as they climb to Yosemite? I think for us entrants, it's going to feel a lot like a race ... like an open road race of a hundred years ago, when a 55 mph speed limit was a futuristic fantasy.

Not only will this be MAX's first race — I mean competition event — it will be its first extended outing with two people on board. As a responsible adult, I'm adding a few safety features.

Here's our new MAX back from the DMV — where it was declared officially an automobile, hooray! Note the new roll bar and back brace combo. It'll sure pay for itself in the unlikely event that MAX turns over like an SUV, but it's also there for the more likely event of getting hit from behind. The rear legs also protect the fuel tank, which on most Locosts and Lotus Sevens, is hidden behind a thin layer of sheet metal ... but you know what? I think I'm going to leave the back open so tailgaters can see the fuel sloshing around in there, maybe they'll give us a little more room. They'll never guess that the fuel is vegetable oil, and no more explosive than tailgating a grocery cart.

We were a big hit at Art Walk. People had a million questions and we were swamped most of the evening. But we had a lull while the fire-eating exotic dancer was performing, so I snapped this shot.

Art Walk is a regular feature here in Cave Junction. We're just north of the Oregon/California border, so we have lovely warm evenings during the summer. With that in mind, every second Friday of every summer month, selected artists show their work on Main Street. It's an opportunity for the community to get together and talk about something aside from politics. Anyway, last month, one of the organizers said our cars were beautiful. Then I said we make them ourselves and the next thing I knew, I was a selected artist for Art Walk.

I'd worked out a patter, sprinkled with phrases such as “the art of economy,” but everybody seemed to accept MAX as a piece of kinetic sculpture; the gas mileage thing was frosting on the cake. And since Art Walk is about things to look at, we brought The Plague along too.

See that black car next to MAX, the one covered with SCCA Solo Championship stickers? The one with the 44 inch high stack of racing tires behind it? That's MAX's evil twin, The Plague. It has a Honda CBR1000F sport bike engine, whereas MAX has a Kubota tractor engine. The Plague has about five times the horsepower of MAX and is a serious, national-level autocrosser.

Autocross is the art of high-performance driving on extremely tight courses, zipping around cones in parking lots (temporarily closed off to the public, as you'd expect) and specialized race tracks. The cars run one at a time against the clock — it's low risk, yet high excitement. And because a run typically takes less than a minute and an event is typically three runs per driver, autocross doesn't squander a lot of gas.

We had the hoods off both cars, probably 30 times in three hours, with grownups looking at MAX and saying “Would this run on vegetable oil?,” and youngsters looking at The Plague and saying, “Man, this is totally wicked!” It was a good show.

Afterward, while we were packing up, someone told Dave (he's in the white shirt in the photo) we were the most popular presentation at Art Walk. “Even more than the fire eating exotic dancer?” Dave asked her.

“What fire eating exotic dancer?” she asked.

“You didn't see him?”

“Him? You're kidding!”

Sure enough, Dave was kidding. There are limits to what we can call “art” in Cave Junction, and even MAX was a close call.

Photo by Jack McCornack

We're almost back where we started. This is the last shot of MAX 2.0 before it goes on the road. This Wednesday, we're scheduled for show-and-tell at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Then on Friday, of all things, MAX is going to be in an art show (that's why it looks extra clean right now). We still have to hook up lights and put glass in the windshield frame ... and maybe a couple more wheels, but by golly, we're going to make it.

Once MAX is on the road again (hey Willie, I have an idea for a song for you) we'll run a tank of diesel through its system (as mentioned in Update No. 7, we have already introduced one variable — we changed the overall gear ratio — and we don't want to introduce a second one yet) for baseline data. But after that, I'm going to fill 'er up with biodiesel.

As discussed back in Update No. 2, biofuels aren't going to make the energy crisis go away. There are technical and social hurdles to overcome before biofuels qualify as an unqualified success, and even if/when the day comes that biofuels come from 100 percent inedible feedstock grown on 100 percent non-arable land, an ethanol guzzler will still be a fuel guzzler, and an efficient biofuels car will do less harm to the world than an inefficient biofuels car. Energy doesn't come for free.

Anyway, I fell off the biofuels bandwagon because I got sick of TV ads saying you can feel all green and fuzzy by buying twice as big a car as you need, and getting half the mileage that it should, as long as it has “E85” in big letters on the gas cap. I'm also annoyed by the corporate spokesfolks who say biofuels have no influence whatsoever on the price of food. I'll accept that it's only a small part of the food equation, but I won't accept that it's no part at all, and if biofuels are so great, why don't their growers run their tractors on it? Lately there's been a totally over-the-top backlash against biofuels in general, and biodiesel in particular, so I'm going to start frontlashing a bit, in hopes of encouraging development of sustainable, renewable, biofuels.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, the backlash is taking the form of protests, picketing and good old fashioned one-on-one customer harassment, in an effort to close down biodiesel stations. Seriously, there are people treating biodiesel outlets like they're meth labs, photographing people who buy biodiesel and getting their license numbers. (For more about the situation, see this article from Seattle Weekly.) There's already the problem that biodiesel is more expensive than petrodiesel, the biodiesel retailers and researchers are having a plenty tough enough time staying in business without big-name greenies trying to scuttle them. The only alternative to biofuels today is petroleum fuel, and hearing these “save the planet” guys with their “just say no to biodiesel” platform is like hearing a Greenpeace member demanding we run our cars on whale oil.

So first chance I get, I'm going to vote with my wallet and buy some biodiesel. Lucky for me that MAX gets great mileage, so I won't have to vote very often.

Photo by Jack McCornack

We hit one teeny snag in final assembly. As you recall, the original MAX got a significant swat from behind, which we feared might have affected the rear axle. Well, when we drained the lubricant from the axle, chunks of differential fell out. 

That’s not too big of a deal, since we had a replacement rear axle assembly waiting in the wings (I'll tell you why in a minute). But we hadn't wanted to use it just yet. In my opinion, the best way to do this "rebuild" would have been to make the new car exactly like the old car. Then we could have driven it, tested it and made sure our baseline hadn't changed — we'd know that any differences between the two cars were the result of a mistake. If there was any difference in performance or economy, we could sit down and figure out what we did wrong. If there were no differences, we could go back to our development plan of making changes one change at a time and testing the results. 

But the clock is ticking: summer is whizzing by and we have quite a long to-do list. The top job on that list is to install a taller rear end. That's hot rod slang for a final drive ratio that takes fewer turns of the engine per turn of the wheels, so at any given engine RPM, the car covers more ground. It turns out that the automatic transmission version of that Toyota Corolla wagon (aka the Corrode Warrior referenced in this article) has just what we need, a 3.30 (3.3 revolutions of the drive shaft = 1 revolution of the wheels) axle, so we went ahead and put it in MAX. 

I expect we'll see a higher top speed than with the original MAX — about 75 mph — and an improvement in fuel economy at cruising speeds. But maybe not. We may need to make streamlining changes before we see any benefits from the gearing changes. 

Meanwhile, we'll just have to trust ourselves that we haven't accidentally introduced any new variables, and the only difference between MAX version 1.0 and MAX 2.0 is the gearing. We should know soon. As you can see, the parts are falling into place.

Photo by Jack McCornack

MAX is coming back together, and we're now in final assembly mode. Time to plug the parts in the chassis. Here's the finished frame, painted a trendy and eye-catching gray. 

And we've used only the finest of materials and techniques — indoor/outdoor enamel from the local hardware store, the stuff with pictures of lawn furniture on the can. And we painted it with a combination of a spray gun for the big areas and a foam paintbrush for the nooks and crannies. It looks decent, in an industrial sort of way, but it doesn't look like something you'd see at a car show. It looks like something you'd drive. 

We gave it a coat of gray primer before we gave it the gray finish coat, but a lot of people couldn't tell the difference. 

"Are you primering it again?" 

Nope, this is the finish coat, it's glossier than the primer if you look close. 

"Gray, huh? This is how it's going to look when it's done? You're not going to paint it black? Man, you must have got a deal on gray." 

Nope, it's gray by choice, and the gray cost as much as any other color on the shelf. 

The reason car chassis are traditionally black is that black doesn't show grease and grime, thus pleasing the end user. But gray shows where oil is leaking, for example, and one man's grime is another man's diagnostic tool. 

Anyway, I wanted you to know it's gray on purpose, we didn't just spray on the primer and get bored.

Photo by Jack McCornack

As I've been putting MAX through its Lincoln's Axe phase, I've been thinking that there's more than one way to skin this fuel economy cat. 

Back in the '70s, we experienced what I've been snidely calling the Energy Crisis Lite. A small group of oil suppliers stopped selling us their stuff, and we went into such a panic that we even started buying fuel-efficient cars. Then those suppliers decided our money was as green as anybody else's, so they resumed selling us all the oil we wanted. 

Did we learn our lesson? 

Heck no — we've spent the last quarter century buying as much car with as much horsepower as we could afford, and we're in worse trouble now than we were back then. 

By "we" I mean our culture in general, though there have been exceptions — exceptional people who have kept the faith for automotive efficiency — and the No. 1 faith-keeper has been Robert Riley. 

Robert designed a build-it-yourself 100+ mpg car in 1980 called the Centurion. It was well-publicized in magazines and film (it appeared in Total Recall, one of the Governator's perils-in-space action movies) and he sold about 30,000 sets of plans for it. So why don't you see one on every street corner? Hey, what can you say, gas got cheap. I think it's fair to say the Centurion was ahead of its time. In my opinion, it's still ahead of its time. Maybe when fuel costs $20 a gallon, people will be willing to drive 17 horsepower half-ton cars, but from a performance standpoint, the Centurion was awfully .. .stately.

But he's right on time with what he's doing now. 

This is the XR3, a three-wheeled, high mileage diesel-electric plug-in hybrid. People ask me to compare the XR3 to MAX, and I say, "The biggest difference is ..." 

And they interrupt with, "Is it that the XR3 looks like it came from the future, and MAX looks like it came from the past? That the XR3 has three wheels? Front wheel drive? Electric drive in back?"

I wait for them to run out of steam, and then I answer, "No, the biggest difference is the XR3 is a finished product and you can buy plans for it right now, whereas MAX is still in development."  

I have a set of XR3 plans, and they're excellent. As you'd expect, since Riley has the experience of delivering half a million plans for his various creations.

Photo courtesy Robert Riley

This one's going in my wallet. It's the last pretty picture of MAX, on its way to a date with destiny. An hour later, MAX was in Eureka, stopped behind a van that had stopped for pedestrians, and the car behind me didn't stop for anything.

According to the accident report, the driver was progressing at a legal 30 mph and failed to notice that us other drivers weren't progressing at all. MAX is much shorter now, and wrinkly from stern to prow, since the impact from the back pushed me into the van in front.

So, what can we learn from this experience? We can learn how quickly we can make a new car, that's for sure. MAX is totaled, and though officially it's being rebuilt, it's going to be a bit like the joke about Abe Lincoln's axe:

“Yep, it's an heirloom, that axe has been in our family for 150 years.”

“Gosh, it looks brand new.”

“We've given it the best of care, generation after generation. My great grandfather replaced the handle, and my grandfather replaced the head.”

Or this could become like the true story of the Vin Fiz, the first aircraft to fly transcontinental across America back in 1911. It crashed and was repaired 22 times along the way; the only original parts left on the plane were the engine oil drain plug and one wing strut.

One lesson from this is it's better to sacrifice a car than a life. The front and rear of the chassis absorbed the impact as they crumpled, but the passenger compartment stayed its original shape, as did I. All in all I'm pleased with how well MAX “took one for the team.”

Another lesson is defensive driving is a full time job. I was stopped, in neutral, and I'd pretty much checked out of the driving experience. I had half an eye and about twelve neurons devoted to noticing when the car in front of me started to move, but otherwise I was giving my brain a little time off. In retrospect, I think the middle of the road is a bad place to take a break, and I should have been scanning for traffic despite being parked. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. But then again, maybe if I'd been pumping my brakes (and thus flashing my brake lights on and off) and screaming like a little girl, maybe my assailant would have noticed me two seconds earlier and saved us both a bunch of paperwork.

Live and learn. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a car to rebuild.

Follow our progress at Kinetic Vehicles and through the MAX Updates on this blog.

Small cars get better mileage than big cars. 

I know that's a gross generalization. I know a Bugatti Veyron is smaller than a Toyota Prius, but ...

A what? Yes, the Bugatti marque, reminiscent of racers in leather helmets wrestling with steering wheels the size of the ship's wheel on the Pequod, has been revived by Volkswagen, which is positioning itself as a performance car company. Hence the Veyron, their flagship sports car, with a price tag about $1.25 million higher than their Karman Ghia of yesteryear. But the Veyron goes three times as fast: a blistering 250 mph.

The Veyron looks cool, too. The seats are real leather and it has attractive cup holders and everything, but it doesn't get particularly good mileage, despite its smallness. And there's no reason it should — its target market is people who may be deeply concerned about fuel economy in general, but are totally unconcerned about their own gas mileage.

I don't hang out with a lot of gajillionaires, but I do acknowledge their argument about how they personally use fossil fuel: there just aren't that many gajillionaires, and their personal energy consumption is a drop in the bucket compared to the energy consumption of the billions of less fortunate folks.

I think the greatest damage done by the gajillionaire lifestyle is they set a bad example for millionaires, who then set a bad example for the rest of us. Our culture has been telling us our whole lives that we should live rich, that the trappings of wealth bring happiness, and that the image of success equals success. And a powerful car makes some powerful image statements, such as, “I am wealthy enough to get what I want, and this is what I want. And those dollar signs at the gas pump don't matter to me, what matters is having a car that will skedaddle when I romp on it.”

Lucky for the MAX project, the ultimate street skedaddlers are sports cars. The sports car is so well-established in our culture as a symbol of success — an impractical frivolity, a flaunting of one's disposable income — that any two-seat car looks like a luxury, and anyone driving one seems to be living the good life. I think that will be people's first impression when they see MAX, even people who turn up their noses at economy cars.

So thank you, Veyron. Thank you, Ferrari and Lamborghini, for flying the small-means-money flag. Folks won't know I'm a bunnyhugger, pennypincher, eco-cheapo-creepo until they read the fine print.

I've been asked why I've ended my romance with biofuels. It's a fair question, particularly because I used to be a biofuels buff back in the ’70s — an era I expect we'll remember fondly as Energy Crisis Lite — and even wrote glowingly about biofuels in Mother Earth News.  

It's simple: I wasn't encouraging biofuels in general, I was encouraging home-brewed biofuels (or as the revenuers called it, moonshine).

So what's the difference?

The difference is, stuff that folks make for themselves gets valued, and stuff that folks buy is just stuff. 

Growing, fermenting and distilling your own fuel-grade ethanol is a lot of effort per gallon, enough effort to make anyone an instant convert to efficiency. Thirty-some years ago, people put their home-brewed ethanol in economy cars and work trucks, and they didn't take two trips to town when one trip would do. Nowadays, people put store-bought corn ethanol in their flex-fuel muscle cruisers and treat it just like gasoline — except it’s a little cheaper because it's subsidized by us taxpayers — and feel smug while they're doing it. Hey, not only are they saving the world, they're saving themselves a pretty penny by not paying a gas guzzler tax. So what if they're driving an ethanol guzzler ... ethanol doesn't count.

Well, in quantity, ethanol counts. The ethanol industry has become a lucrative market for corn growers, lucrative enough that many food farmers are becoming fuel farmers. A tank of E85 in a flex-fuel Chevy Suburban requires enough corn to keep a bicycle engine running for a full year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

What's a bicycle engine? You're one, and so am I.

Overconsumption of ethanol auto fuel could pit people who want to drive against people who want to eat. That's one reason the MAX project is focused on minimizing fuel consumption, rather than focusing on what fuel gets consumed. Future technologies will cut the link between biofuels and groceries. But for today, I'm favoring fuel conservation, no matter what we're burning. Cellulosic and algae ethanol may be just around the corner, but conservation works right now.

Look for much more on the infant days of MAX in Here Comes the 100-mpg Car, from the August/September 2008 issue. And follow our progress through this blog, the Green Energy & Great Homes e-newsletter and my Kinetic Vehicles Web site.

Naming our high-mileage project MAX was half in jest. The serious half is it's a condensed acronym for the Mother Earth News Automotive X Prize entry. The jest half is the implication that the car is big, a MAXimum car. The truth is it's really more of a MIN.

In my designs, I'm always thinking small. The pessimist says the glass is half empty, the optimist says the glass is half full. I say we're using twice as much glass as we need. It takes less energy to move small things than big things, and human transportation is one area where it pays to use the right amount of glass.

Need to move lots of people long distances? You can't beat railroads, though for person-miles per gallon, there are some busses that are pretty good. Need to move one person a short distance? You can't beat a bicycle, though there are some interesting electric vehicles that are close behind.

But our culture and our infrastructure — our millions of miles of roads, our cities and suburbs, our feed stores and tack shops that you can't get to by horse — are designed for cars, and that's not going to change overnight. We can, however, change our cars.

MAX is sized to perform the majority of automotive tasks, which is to move one or two people a moderate distance. For most driving in America, a four (or more) seat sedan is twice as much glass as we need.

A two-seater is not the solution to all automotive needs, we all know that. A 40-mpg minivan is more efficient than a 75-mpg two-seater, but only when the van actually carries four or more people. There are no points for potential efficiency because Car A could carry a bigger load than that of Car B. Actual usage is what determines efficiency.

If you have a crew cab truck that carries six passengers and a half ton of river rock while towing a 28-foot fifth wheel travel trailer and gets 11 miles to the gallon, that's pretty dang efficient when you're actually doing that stuff. But it's way too much vehicle for a trip to the grocery store. Unless you're picking up an awful lot of groceries.

Look for much more on the infant days of MAX in Here Comes the 100-mpg Car, from the August/September 2008 issue. And follow our progress through this blog, the Green Energy & Great Homes e-newsletter and my Kinetic Vehicles Web site.

Hello, I'm Jack McCornack, and this is the first blog entry in the chronicles of MAX, the Mother Earth News Automotive X Prize entry.

The Progressive Insurance Auto X Prize is a competition to develop high-mileage vehicles. You can read more about it here and here, but in brief, the target is 100 miles per gallon, and the cars have to be suitable for mass production. 

Oh, sure, the $10 million in prize money is attractive, but the big outfits say that's a drop in the bucket compared to what it takes to develop such a car. But then again, for an automaker, the publicity of winning would be worth much more than the prize money.

For Mother Earth News and me, the prize money doesn't matter because we aren't going to win any of it. We're in this to show what concerned do-it-yourselfers can do on a small budget, with readily available materials and present day technology. And if that's only 90 percent as good as the winners, well heck, I wouldn't mind driving a 90-mpg car that I built myself. Will it be suitable for mass production? You bet. In fact, it'll be so suitable for production that when we're done, we're going to tell you how to produce one of your own.

Last summer, I showed up at the Mother Earth News headquarters for the first time in a quarter century. While the faces had changed, the spirit felt the same. I met with Cheryl Long (the editor in chief) and John Rockhold (the green transportation editor) and we talked about old times. Even though this time I was the old-timer, the conversation followed a familiar path: what can we do to make things better?

Personally, I think Mother Earth News’ greatest contribution (cue the violin music) has been seeding our nation with (stirring trumpets enter here) folks who are happy with conservation (kettle drums, muffled snares), despite living in a culture where highest honors are given to (rim shot) waste and excess (whoopie cushion). Seriously now, how can people take pride in houses with 4,000 square feet of floor space per resident, and cars that get 11 mpg, and ...?

So after I stopped jumping up and down and foaming at the mouth, the editors said, “Yes! Let's do it, let's demonstrate that dramatic improvements in fuel economy are within reach. Jack, you’re the project manager — go for it! But please wipe that foam off your mouth, it looks creepy.”

And that's how MAX got started.

Look for much more on the infant days of MAX in Here Comes the 100-mpg Car. And follow our progress through this blog, the Green Energy & Great Homes e-newsletter and my Kinetic Vehicles Web site.

Stay tuned, this is going to be a heckuva fun ride.