The Little Engine That Might

"Give me the efficiency level," Meyers interrupts again. "'Cuz I'm a software guy. I'm not an engineering guy."

Sethi wipes his forehead. He explains how much more efficient their motor is than others. Meyers nods. "Okay, so it's a significant improvement," he says. He chats a moment longer, mentions that he's traveling soon to India, then shakes hands and begins to move away. At the last moment, Sethi realizes he's about to commit a giant faux pas. He saves himself by tapping Meyers on the arm and offering a business card, which causes Meyers to produce one in return.

When Takamura and Bedewi materialize a moment later, Sethi has a sheen of sweat like he's been doing jumping jacks. Bedewi says someone has told him they should talk to a guy named Tim Meyers. "I just talked to him," Sethi says.

"He's the chairman of the committee," Bedewi says, "so we need to gang up on him."

They go stand near the group where Meyers is now holding court. Takamura, hovering behind Sethi and Bedewi, nurses a bottle of Heineken with a napkin wrapped around it. They don't chat. They wait.

They're used to biding their time. As hard as it is to get the New Generation message across to these software guys, it's been even harder to get the ear of the auto industry. So the company has had to take an unusual route, circling offshore to foreign customers in hopes of working its way back to the Promised Land of Detroit. Tempered by years of hard knocks, they still have the dream that made them devote their careers to the low pay and uncertain future of running a small start-up business. They've come this far. If they can make it one more year, they think, they'll be in good shape. Just one more year.

The auto industry is almost irresistible to certain people looking to make their mark in business. It's so pervasive, so big. Americans bought 16.7 million cars and trucks last year. According to government figures, we now have 230 million vehicles registered in a nation of 290 million people. Think of that. It's a parallel population of machines, each weighing a ton or more and consuming petroleum products by the barrel, waiting for the command to drive to the mall. Cars literally carry the consumer economy.

For most of the past century, cars have been where ordinary people get into the guts of technology. Americans work on their cars in the driveway, changing oil, hopping them up to make them go faster. Historian Stephen Ambrose credited the Yankee compulsion to tinker under the hood with helping defeat the Nazis in Europe -- GIs fiddled with their tanks and adapted to problems, while the Germans struggled with their beautifully engineered machines whenever they broke down.

For inventors, automobiles are a practical object of desire. Invent something for the space program, and you're a dreamer; invent something to use in cars, and pretty soon you start seeing dollar signs. If your gadget goes onto even one car in 10 and makes you a dollar of profit on each, boom, you're an instant millionaire. Except it almost never works out that way.

When cars first became commercial products a century ago, scores of companies sprang up to make them. One by one, those disappeared or got swallowed by the competition. Today the Big Three are so big -- General Motors does more business in three months than Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor, does in a year -- that they're slow to embrace change. Radical new technologies would upset the way the U.S. companies make money. Electric cars, for instance, have very few moving parts, which is bad news for the huge business in parts and maintenance.

Introducing technology to the auto market is different from making, say, a new type of stealth fighter plane, which is going to be bought only in small numbers by a government with bottomless resources and trained armies of technicians. Cars have to be available to every Joe Schmoe with a checkbook, and, at the same time, have to be immune to liability lawyers. You can't just go sticking gee-whiz gadgets on them.

The guys at New Generation didn't see those hurdles at first, because they didn't set out to invent something that would make them rich. They were just out to win races.

In the early 1990s, engineering students at GW wanted to enter the solar car races that had recently become an international phenomenon. There was a big one every three years in Australia, and the U.S. Department of Energy, along with GM, had begun sponsoring biennial solar races in the United States, as well. Universities saw them as a way to inject some pizzazz into engineering programs; the government used them to promote solar power; and GM was looking to both associate its name with cutting-edge technology and help groom future auto industry scientists.

Bedewi was in a unique position to help the GW students put together an entry. The engineering professor had founded the National Crash Analysis Center at the university's Ashburn campus, under a contract with the Department of Transportation. Bedewi ran the center, which used computer modeling to predict how cars and trucks would behave in crashes and then actually crashed them to validate the results.

Detroit, needless to say, was interested in the professor's work. Bedewi used his contacts in the auto industry to get Louis Ross, then vice chairman of Ford Motor Co., to take a look at GW's fledgling solar car effort. Ross pledged support, and the team was up and running.

Solar car teams are a massive undertaking, requiring students to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and spend countless hours working on the complex design, assembly and testing of their vehicles. One of the earliest to sign up for the GW effort was a long-haired engineering student named Eric Takamura.

Takamura was exactly the kind of student the solar projects were designed to reach. He had never been thrilled by class work, which seemed dry and pointless. As a kid growing up in Hawaii, Takamura idolized his uncle, a French engineer who roamed the globe building things in far-flung parts of Africa and Indonesia. The work -- stringing power lines, building dams -- was just an excuse for venturing to the edges of the known world. He was Indiana Jones with a protractor.

The solar car project gave Takamura a hint of that kind of adventure. It let him learn with his hands and created a little exotic world on the fringes of everyday university life. The school rented office space to the team in the basement of the student center, in a former parking garage. Takamura spent almost all his time there. He missed classes, or showed up late and slept through them. One time his mother came to visit and found him in the basement office, sleeping in a box full of styrofoam packing peanuts.

The team spent eight months building its three-wheeled car, a low-slung craft that looked like a long, flat raindrop. In the 1993 Sunrayce, a 1,000-mile trek from Dallas to Minneapolis, GW's team members did well for newcomers, finishing fourth out of 34 competitors. But the car was plagued by problems large and small -- tires that blew out, a solar array that didn't give it full power.

Bedewi enlisted the aid of Joel Jermakian, a scientist at NASA's Goddard space center in Greenbelt who had consulted for previous teams at the University of Maryland. After the Sunrayce, Jermakian -- who at NASA designed solar panels for space vehicles -- helped the GW team rework its solar array.

Now they were aiming for an even bigger race, the World Solar Challenge, run across 1,800 miles of the Australian Outback. This time, the team was determined to be prepared. Members analyzed every system on the car, and they tested it repeatedly on a practice course in southern Maryland. Their confidence began to soar. They could measure themselves against what the competition had done in the Sunrayce; GW was now better than that. Australia, the most prestigious race on the solar car circuit, was starting to look like a sure thing.

A few weeks before race time, they hired professional packers to load the car and a backup solar array into separate wooden crates for shipment. When the fragile load reached Australia, Takamura and two teammates were there to meet the plane. A forklift raised both crates from the plane, lost balance and tipped them forward. The crates came down on the tips of the forklift, which speared the car through its center like a bug on a pin. The backup solar array fell about 12 feet and smashed.