Hypercars: Uncompromised Vehicles, Disruptive Technologies, and the Rapid Transition to Hydrogen

This presentation by Amory Lovins summarizes the nature, status, and prospects of Hypercar development. It includes a description of how Hypercars accelerate the shift to a hydrogen economy. The presentation describes the Hypercar design concept and strategy for bringing a Hypercar to market. In the presentation, Lovins also argues that the transition to the Hypercar and hydrogen economy will accelerate an end to traditional oil use.

Uncommon Knowledge: Automotive Platform Sharing's Potential Impact on Advanced Technologies

Automakers are embracing with vigor the strategy of dedicated platform sharing, which portions common design, engineering, and production efforts over a number of outwardly distinct models. Platform sharing mixes lower-volume “differentiating” technologies to increase market attractiveness with higher-volume “standardized” technologies to lower overall costs. “Disruptive” advanced technologies like polymer composites and the Hypercar concept, ill-suited to conventional, mass-production automaking, may fit very well within the new rules of platforms. This paper was originally presented at the International Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering Automotive Conference.

Advanced Composites: The Car is at the Crossroads

This paper about advanced composite technology in automobiles was presented at the International Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering Symposium and Exhibition in 1998. The paper provides strategic recommendations for composite firms seeking to join the lightweight automotive material market. Potential opportunities for advanced composite technology in the automotive industry are described. Ten strategic actions that composites firms can take to get a place in the automotive industry are proposed.

Speeding the Transition: Designing a Fuel-Cell Hypercar

This paper discusses the transformation in automotive technology could accelerate the transition to transportation powered by fuel cells. The authors write that ultralight, advanced-composite, low-drag, hybrid-electric Hypercars could be three to fourfold more efficient and one or two orders of magnitude cleaner than today’s cars, yet equally safe, sporty, desirable, and affordable. Further, important manufacturing and vantages—including low tooling and equipment costs, greater mechanical simplicity, autobody parts consolidation, shorter product cycles, and reduced assembly effort and space—permit a free-market commercialization strategy. This paper discusses a conceptual Hypercar powered by a proton-exchange-membrane fuel cell. It outlines the implications of platform physics and component selection for the vehicle’s mass budget and performance. Because Hypercars would require significantly less tractive power, and even less fuel-cell power, they could adopt fuel cells earlier, before fuel cells’ specific cost, mass, and volume have fully matured. The promising performance of hydrogen-fueled PEMFC Hypercars suggests important opportunities in infrastructure development for direct-hydrogen vehicles.

Hypercars: A Market-Oriented Approach to Meeting Lifecycle Environmental Goals

This paper from 1997 discusses the growing social and regulatory pressures that are compelling automakers to make cars with higher quality and lower lifecycle environmental impacts. Examples include rules and incentives for clean manufacturing, low-emission vehicles, and recycling. Yet focusing on any single issue or stage of the car’s lifecycle in isolation can easily turn into a zero-sum game: any improvement in one area can worsen other issues or stages, or even render the car unmarketable or unprofitable. This paper describes a system-level approach to car design that could minimize lifecycle environmental impacts without sacrificing the features that make cars attractive to consumers, such as price, performance, safety, comfort, and styling. The paper describes how a car optimized to meet market and regulatory requirements can also have a minimal lifecycle environmental impact. Skillfully combining these features would create a desirable product that not only would perform well, but also would improve fuel efficiency and emissions while creating other important lifecycle benefits.

Hypercars: FAQ

In this document Amory Lovins responds to questions about the Hypercar, RMI's conceptual vehicle that combines ultralight and ultra-aerodynamic design, a hybrid-electric drivesystem, and other features to achieve very high fuel efficiency and very low emissions. The questions that he answers include: what is a Hypercar vehicle, how could Hypercar vehicles attain such dramatically improved fuel economy, would there be tradeoffs in performance or styling, why a hybrid-electric instead of a battery-electric vehicle, what fuels would Hypercar vehicles use, and are fuel cells being considered in Hypercar vehicles?

Ultralight Hybrid Vehicle Design: Implication for the Recycling Industry

This paper describes the engineering of the Hypercar, a car made of carbon fiber that is lightweight, efficient, and safe. The authors argue that the automobile industry is on the threshold of potentially dramatic change in its materials use and platform design. Ultralight-hybrid Hypercars, using advanced composites for the autobody, may be more attractive to the consumer, just as profitable to the producer, and much more friendly to the environment than conventional cars. With the change in materials brought on by the production of the Hypercar, similar changes will be required of the automobile recycling industry. With careful clean-sheet design and the industrialization of recycling technologies similar to those described here, Hypercars may even increase the recyclability of cars in the future. Hypercars’ reduced power requirements could make the drivesystem smaller and simpler, enabling components to be modular for easy removal and upgrading. Its use of a small set of recycling-compatible resins could allow components like the interior, now largely landfilled as fluff, to be recycled along with the advanced-composite autobody. And in the long term, recycling technologies optimized for continuous fiber removal could allow “closed loop” recycling. Therefore, the materials that are now an impediment could actually be the key to increasing automotive recyclability.

Ultralight Hybrid Vehicles: Principles and Design

The technical feasibility of superefficient family cars has been demonstrated. Yet it has typically compromised vehicle performance, safety, cost, manufacturability, or marketability. Industry experimentation has tended to focus on improving performance, or on implementing hybrid-electric drivesystems in essentially conventional vehicles, or on reducing mass and drag, or on improving safety—but has rarely attempted to optimize all of these as a system. Maximizing benefits through synergies between platform, chassis-component, and drivesystem design parameters seems poorly understood. Whole-system engineering-design is essential to move toward commercial viability. Second-by-second simulations and performance modeling provide evidence for automobiles 3–4x more fuel-efficient than today’s, with emissions approximating the California Air Resource Board’s proposed Equivalent Zero Emission Vehicle requirement for hybrids, and with safety, performance, and marketability surpassing that of many current automobiles. The commercial success of such designs depends on the concurrent optimization of numerous parameters, with emphasis on tractive- and accessory-load reduction and on component and control optimization. Platform optimization, subject to appropriate design criteria, must precede or accompany new drivesystem technologies, because only tractive-load reduction makes hybrid drivesystems commercially viable. Thus the artful combination of hybrid-electric drive with lightweight, low-drag platform design appears requisite to the cost-effective optimization of efficiency, emissions, performance, and safety for production worthy and marketable automobiles.

Hypercars: The Next Industrial Revolution

Strong synergies between ultralight mass, ultralow drag, and hybrid-electric drive can produce attractive designs for superefficient cars (and many other vehicles). A realistic near-term 4–5-passenger “hypercar” can achieve average fuel economy with much room for improvement. Depending on design details, mature ultralight-hybrid hypercars could achieve 60–120 km/l using virtually any fluid fuel, perhaps ultimately ~250 with fuel cells, while being safer, sportier, more comfortable and durable, cleaner, and probably cheaper than today’s cars. By using recursive design to maximize mass decompounding, optimizing for manufacturing cost can save far more fuel than traditional optimization for fuel savings. The dozens of technologies required are all demonstrated, but capturing their synergies with radical simplification requires highly integrated whole-system engineering with meticulous attention to detail. Despite the difficulty of this design challenge, market-driven commercialization is proceeding rapidly, with ~$1 billion committed and early entries possible in the late 1990s. The barriers are far more cultural than technical or economic. Implications for a wide range of industries—notably cars, oil, steel, and electricity—could be profound.

Costing the Ultralite in Volume Production: Can Advanced Composite Bodies-in-White Be Affordable?

Advances in materials engineering, powerplant technology, systems integration, and fabrication processes now enable the automotive industry to design and prototype vehicles with improved performance and far better efficiency than current production platforms. The hypercar advanced vehicle concept embodies this technological potential. However, for hypercars to benefit society significantly, they must be manufacturable in large production volumes at a cost broadly competitive with conventional automobiles. In addition to manufacturing costs, environmental concerns have forced lifecycle cost to the forefront. This paper examines both manufacturing and lifecycle costs for an important component of advanced vehicle design: an ultra-lightweight body-in-white (BIW). The BIW lifecycle includes: manufacturing, operation, and post-use. This paper gives an overview of the hypercar; discusses materials, manufacturing, operation, and post-use issues for composite BIWs; describes the lifecycle cost assessment methodology; and analyzes the costs for volume production of the case-study BIW. The manufacturing and lifecycle costs for various manufacturing scenarios lead to encouraging conclusions about the applicability and future of lightweight advanced-composite BIW designs.