It is a glorious Sunday in late March, and spring skiers and snowboarders have descended in droves upon the winter haven of Aspen, Colo. On their way to the gondola, people stop to peer at a futuristic suv perched on the sidewalk in front of the famous Little Nell hotel. It is sleek and aerodynamic, not boxy and imposing like the typical four-wheel-drives that rule Colorado’s roads. Constructed from lightweight carbon-fiber composites, the hybrid-electric vehicle runs on a motor powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. It emits only water.
The Revolution is just a shell, but company representatives tell the crowd that if it were a finished product, the controls would be like those of an airplane: entirely electronic, with one of two sidesticks in place of a steering wheel and pedals. A sophisticated communications network monitors fluids and performance, regulates vehicle dynamics and delivers information and entertainment to the driver. Computer simulations predict that the vehicle will have fuel efficiency equivalent to 100 miles per gallon and the power to accelerate from zero to 62 miles per hour in 8.3 seconds. (Ford’s Explorer takes 8.4 seconds.) The car has adjustable suspension to avoid rollovers and has passed simulated federal safety tests. “Where can I buy one of these?” wide-eyed tourists inquire.
They can’t, yet. The founders of HyperCar, the company based in nearby Basalt that developed this prototype, want nothing more than to see their invention at the dealership, but in all likelihood that won’t happen for at least another five years. Michael Brylawski, a co-founder and the company’s vice president of market development, is undaunted by the many hurdles that impede the auto industry’s adoption of the HyperCar model.
The 1995 graduate of Stanford’s earth systems program has been working on the HyperCar project for nearly seven years, and his commitment hasn’t flagged. “I personally don’t like seeing 15-mile-per-gallon SUVs dominating our highways,” says Brylawski, a Honda Civic owner who walks to work. “If anyone thinks there is a trade-off between high quality of life and protecting the environment, that is a false trade-off. [The two] can be completely complementary— it’s just the way you design and engineer and manufacture these products.” (For a quick primer on fuel cells and cars, see sidebar.)
Anyone who knew Brylawski as an undergraduate wouldn’t find his protracted career with a risky green-car experiment surprising. He was a coordinator of Stanford’s Students for Environmental Action and spent a semester in Washington, D.C., on an environmental policy internship in 1993. His honors thesis centered on the problem of reconciling market economics with ecological economics. “I was interested in looking at innovative ways to create organizations and engineer things so they perform well but minimize the impact on the environment,” he says.
After he met the renowned energy expert Amory Lovins, CEO of the nonprofit environmental think tank Rocky Mountain Institute, his future began to quickly solidify. Lovins, who worked out the HyperCar concept, invited him to the Aspen-based institute on an internship in 1994, and Brylawski turned the experience into a full-time research position there. In 1999, the institute spun out the HyperCar center into a private company, HyperCar Inc. Since then, the company has scored a $5 million infusion from angel and institutional investors. Sound like a dream come true? A pipe dream, skeptics would say.
The major automakers are all working on fuel-cell cars, with plans to unveil limited-production models within the next five years. How can a small start-up stand a chance—particularly when bringing a new car to market costs $1 billion or more? For one, HyperCar does not plan to compete with car manufacturers. Instead, the company wants to refine its concept to the point where automakers and/or suppliers will license its intellectual property and develop futuristic SUVs like the Revolution. Two, the company’s engineers are trying to integrate some borrowed components and technologies into a workable system, rather than develop all the parts from scratch. If they succeed, they will have patented a new engineering process and cut production costs. Three, the use of carbon composites for the car’s body should make it more efficient and cost-competitive to build. Even though composites—used today in aerospace and high-end sports equipment like bikes and skis—cost 10 times as much as steel, they are lighter, stronger and more flexible than steel and manufactured through a simpler, less energy-intensive process.
But this is all still theory, and HyperCar needs a lot more cash and time to work out the kinks. The company is going after corporate and venture capital partners at the moment, hoping to raise $10 million to $15 million this year. Its technology partners include Michelin and Sun Microsystems. The company also has received funding from high-tech guru, Sun executive and Aspen local Bill Joy.
Lining up well-heeled backers may be the least of HyperCar’s worries. There are major marketplace barriers standing in the way of fuel-cell powered cars. The biggest unresolved question is how to store and distribute the hydrogen needed to power the fuel cell (a problem energy companies like BP and Shell are addressing). “There is no hydrogen infrastructure in this country or anywhere,” remarks Keith Wipke, a senior engineer in vehicle systems analysis at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colo. Add to that the conundrum of how to service and maintain electronic cars, and the overall complexity of building cars around fuel cells and electronic batteries, and it’s unlikely that cars like Revolution will be commercially viable before 2010, Wipke, MS ’93, says. Even so, he is enamored with the idea: “It’s inevitable that our transportation industry needs to go to something cleaner and more sustainable on domestic fuels that we can generate hydrogen from.”
One of HyperCar’s investors, Sam Wyly, a Dallas-based entrepreneur and chairman of Michaels Stores, is bullish about the company’s long-term prospects and ability to raise money. He predicts that Revolution ultimately will help solve other energy problems. “This product is not just something to get you down to the grocery store,” Wyly says. “It’s also a potential generator of power for offices.”
Brylawski may or may not stick around long enough to see that dream realized, although he says he won’t leave until the company is on a steady path to success. The last seven years, he says, have opened his eyes to the realities of the business world—how revolutionary ideas don’t often translate easily into a market frenzy. “The promise of environmental technologies is real,” he says, with an energy that only a 28-year-old can exude. “The challenge is getting them in people’s hands.”
