Solution to $4 gas? Plug in hybrid, professor says

Andrew Frank, proud father of the "car of the future," has a news flash for gas-guzzlers: The future is now.

For more than three decades, the engineering professor at the University of California, Davis, has been touting vehicles that power up by plugging into household electrical outlets. Most of that time he had a hard time getting the right people to take him seriously.

Now, at 74, Frank is getting plenty of attention.

"The stars are aligned," he says, showing off a plug-in Chevrolet Equinox in a garage just a few steps from his office on campus.

"Companies could build these cars tomorrow at a reasonable cost," he says, "and I am going to make sure it happens in my lifetime."

Thanks to a "perfect storm" of superior technology, soaring gas prices and concern about the environment, Frank has the attention of the nation's big automakers and the ears of industry leaders, including former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca. Public interest in his "plug-in hybrid electric vehicle," or PHEV, he says, has never been higher.

On Tuesday, Frank and his fuel-sipping PHEV will be featured in a NOVA public- television program starring the motorhead humorists Tom and Ray Magliozzi.

Frank believes his technology has the potential to curb global warming and free the nation and the world of dependence on fossil fuels.

"If the car companies would build these things, we could transform ourselves from oil to electricity immediately," he says.

As gas prices have skyrocketed during the past decade, so has interest in hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius. Frank's version of the hybrid can be recharged using a standard household outlet, and on trips of up to 60 miles, his PHEV burns not a drop of gasoline. Overall, it gets about 100 miles per gallon of fuel.

"I see guys spending $100 to fill up their SUVs, and I think, 'We've got to get PHEVs in production,'" Frank says.

It could happen soon. General Motors, which produced the doomed EV1 electric car in the 1990s, plans to release its plug-in Volt in 2010, the company has said. Executives from Toyota and Ford also have said they are interested in the vehicles.

Iacocca has called the PHEV "the wave of the future" in transportation, and praises Frank as an innovator.

Dating back to his days as a teenage "hot-rodder" in Pasadena, Frank has forever been tinkering with cars. One of his first projects was equipping his 1936 Ford with a powerful Cadillac engine.

His interest in mechanics led him to the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, where he earned engineering degrees and started thinking about electric cars. He built his first hybrid in 1972, "but the technology wasn't good enough," he says. "We had no computers or high-powered electronics that could be used for this purpose."

So Frank began developing those elements, one piece at a time. Over the years, with the help of his UC Davis students and donated parts from automobile companies, he converted a dozen vehicles to PHEVs, yanking big engines and replacing them with electric motors that work in tandem with smaller gasoline engines.

After they're plugged in overnight to a standard 110-volt outlet, Frank's hybrids have enough electricity to run for the first 60 miles, or "a typical daily work commute," he says. Then computers turn on the gasoline engine to help run the car and keep the batteries charged.

The cars are durable, quiet and efficient, Frank brags.

"They respond exactly the same way as a conventional vehicle," except they pollute far less. They could become even "greener," he says, if their owners ran them on energy generated by the sun or wind.

Only about 500 people drive PHEVs today, Frank says.

But is the American public ready for the PHEV?

Frank and his students think the time is right.

"Everyone I talk to about this concept is excited about it," says Terrence Williams, a mechanical engineering doctoral student involved in the PHEV project. "Hybrids are cool, and they've become trendy. Everyone wants one of these cars."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)