How The EPA Killed The Hybrid

As oil heads for $200 a barrel, people want to know what our lawmakers are going to do about it.

There really isn't much they can do because most oil is owned by national oil companies abroad - in other words, by other governments.

But people still ask why government can't do something about the energy crisis. The truth is, it did. It created much of the problem.

Today when the most popular hybrid car on the road is the Toyota Prius, few Americans realize the technology is an American invention. It was born from the engineering genius of a man named Victor Wouk and killed by the bureaucratic obstinance of a government employee named Eric Stork.

The story of the hybrid is a cautionary tale about the perils of bureaucrats making "who wins" and "who loses" decisions on matters vital to our energy security.

Our story begins in 1962, when a founder of Motorola, Russel Feldmann, contacted Victor Wouk about a problem he was having with a pet project. Feldmann was a tinkerer who had fiddled with the idea of an electric car. He mounted batteries and electric engines in a fleet of 30 Renault Dauphines but could not get the speed controls to work properly.

Victor Wouk on the other hand was no backyard tinker. He earned his bachelor's degree at Colombia then went west to complete his Master's and PHD in the High Voltage Lab at CalTech. His first company, Beta Electric Corporation, grew to become the largest manufacturer of high-voltage power supplies. Victor was the go-to guy for anything electrical.

After analyzing Feldmann's design, Wouk concluded the batteries were simply not strong enough to power the car.

It was a small job done for a friend, but it was hard to walk away from the idea. Smog in Southern California had reached a level hazardous to human health and the electric car looked like the perfect solution.

He focused primarily on the batteries. Standard power storage at that time simply did not have the oomph to power the American automobile and the batteries that did lacked the range Americans expected from a car, so he turned to the idea of the hybrid.

American automobile engines are designed for acceleration and power, not for mileage or emissions. Most cars use what is known as the Otto cycle but there is a more efficient design (now used by the Prius) called the Atkinson cycle.

Wouk deduced that an engine using Atkinson technology greatly reduces emission but was insufficient to deliver enough power for acceleration. But a hybrid system, like that used in the modern diesel locomotive, can theoretically provide infinite power at zero rpm.

Wouk had stumbled upon the right concept at the precise moment when it was needed the most. By the late 1960's, Californians got serious about smog and mandated strict emission standards. By 1970, Congress ordered national standards with The Clean Air Act.

Victor Wouk felt he not only had the solution to the emissions problems but also to the skyrocketing cost of gasoline.

Through his partner Charlie Rosen, he learned of an EPA program call the Federal Clean Car Incentive Program (FCCIP), which offered a reward of up to $37,000 for a vehicle that could exceed the targets set for the 1976 emission standards. The deal was, Wouk and Rosen would design and build the car on their own nickel, if it passed inspection they would be reimbursed up to the maximum of the grant.

Once Victor and Charlie set to work, the first thing they needed was a car. They scoured showrooms searching for the ideal vehicle. Mostly what they needed was under-the-hood-volume to hold the batteries. They finally found what they were looking for in the most unlikely of places and --- as strange as it might sound today, the world's first true modern hybrid was born from a 1972 Buick Skylark.

Their design worked. It passed all the emission requirements mandated by the EPA and got great mileage to boot.

This tale would have been another great American success story had it not been for a bureaucrat named Eric Stork, who inexplicably developed an aversion to the concept of the hybrid.

He set out to destroy it.

Mr Stork was good at his job. He was a regulator who delighted in the pure joy of regulation. Referring to Detroit automakers, Stork was quoted as saying, "I was their regulator. It was marvelous. It was a pissing contest at least every day, maybe two or three. Really makes the adrenaline flow and the rheumatism go away. You may be up to your ass in alligators. You're never going to drain the swamp, but once in a while, you nick an alligator, you think you're doing something. It was wonderful."

For Stork, a man who loved to wrestle gators, the little hybrid project was no more than an annoyance to be swatted. He not only refused to go through with his contractual obligations to test Wouk's hybrid, but went after the very program that funded it.

Victor appealed to the National Science Foundation with the help of his famous brother, Pulitzer-prize winning author Herman and a committee was formed to intervene between Wouk and the EPA. The committee was impressed with the design and pleaded with Stork to at least give it a fair test.

Only then did Stork appear to relent - but behind the committees back he instructed the EPA staff to not accept the hybrid under any circumstances.

That killed the American hybrid, and would have killed the entire hybrid concept itself had not Toyota resurrected it in 1994.

In the end Victor Wouk was vindicated. He is now acknowledged as the father of the hybrid and until his death in 2005, continued to championed the technology. He was known in later years to proudly drive a Toyota Prius around Los Angeles.

As for Eric Stork, long retired from the EPA he uttered his final word on hybrid technology in 2006 "It's just not a very practical technology for automotive. That's why it's going nowhere. It certainly wasn't [going anywhere] then. Even today, it's marginal."

This is the point where we get to the moral of the story.

Whenever we feel the impulse to rely on the power of government to address vital problems like energy, we need to ask ourselves how many Eric Stork's are lurking in the bureaucratic shadows?

© Greg Schiller, 2008

Author: Greg Schiller