had been emblematic of the American SUV for a decade and of the passionate embrace of the light truck. But now the small, fuel-efficient hybrid, which some had dismissed as a mutant, had unexpectedly toppled the mighty SUV.29
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THE GREAT ELECTRIC CAR EXPERIMENT
Arie Haagen-Smit was an avid gardener with an abiding fascination with plants. In his professional work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, next to Los Angeles, Haagen-Smit focused on the physiology of plants, particularly the chemistry of their odors and flavors. The Dutch-born professor achieved worldwide recognition for his work on plant hormones and the flavor components of wine, onions, and garlic. He also identified the active agent in marijuana.1
In 1948 Haagen-Smit was investigating something that deeply intrigued him: the chemical basis of the flavor of pineapples. One afternoon he stepped out of his lab for a break and a breath of fresh air. But there wasn’t any fresh air. Instead he found himself immersed in what he later called “that stinking cloud that rolled across the landscape every afternoon.” His own lungs were under attack. The assailant was the smog that often settled over Southern California and had become a pervasive part of life in Los Angeles.
At the time a fierce argument was raging over the source of the smog. Was it caused by industrial pollution, or by the million and a half backyard incinerators that residents used to dispose of their trash? Or could it be something else, the rapidly swelling population of automobiles? Right there, on the spot, Haagen-Smit decided that, using his skills at microchemistry, “it would not be difficult to find out what smog really was.” He put aside his beloved pineapples and turned to creating smog in a test tube.
Haagen-Smit was right: it was not difficult. “We hit the jackpot with the first nickel,” he later said.2
Haagen-Smit established that the real culprit was what came out of the automobile tailpipes—emissions from incompletely burned gasoline—along with gases released from storage tanks and auto gas tanks. For this discovery, along with his subsequent focus on air pollution, Haagen-Smit became known as “the Father of Smog.” He was not thrilled with the title; if he was the father, he would ask, who was the mother?
Haagen-Smit may have identified the cause of smog, but solving it was a confused, complex, and often contentious process that went on for many years. When Haagen-Smit first reported his findings, critics dismissed him as a “scientific Don Quixote.” Some were stunned by Haagen-Smit’s discovery that the automobile that made possible the Southern California way of life was also the scourge of that lifestyle. One citizen wrote to the Los Angeles Times in shock: “We have created one of the finest networks of freeways in the country, and suddenly wake up to discover that we have also created a monster.”3
Haagen-Smit’s discovery in 1948 would eventually lead to what some believe could be the most important development in transportation since Henry Ford’s Model T—the massive effort in the twenty-first century to bring back something that had disappeared from the roads at the beginning of the twentieth century: An automobile with no tailpipe at all. The electric car.
THE RACE RESUMES
Oil had held its seemingly impregnable position as king of the realm of transportation for almost a century. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, people were beginning to question how long oil would—or should—hold on to its crown. Yet as late as 2007 in the debate over the future of automotive transportation, the electric car was only a peripheral topic. Biofuels were the focus.
Within a few years, however, the electric car would move onto center stage. It could, said its proponents, break the grip of oil on transportation, allowing motorists to unplug from turbulence in the oil-exporting world and high prices at the pump. It could help reduce pollution and offset the carbon emissions that precipitate climate change. And it could provide a powerful answer to the great puzzle of how the world can accommodate the move from one billion cars to two billion. The electric car is powered by electricity that can be generated from any number of different sources, none of which need be oil. Perhaps more than any other technology, the electric car represents a stark alternative road to the future for the global energy system.
The electric vision rapidly became so compelling that expectations for electric cars far exceed the actual impact such cars might have on the world’s auto fleet in terms of numbers, at least in