The Little Engine That Might

All that work, splintered in an instant.

As angry as Takamura felt, it's the nature of an engineer to regard life as a series of problems that can be solved through calculation and action. He got on his cell phone and called Jermakian. With four weeks remaining before the race, every team member who could make it flew to Australia and began rebuilding the car.

The GW team managed to make it to the starting line, but the disaster cost it any real chance at the title. It finished ninth out of 51 competitors. Still, the crash turned out to be a fortunate event. It was the key to everything that came later.

When GW had to rebuild so quickly, it had gotten help from the local Northern Territory University and its solar car team leader, Dean Patterson. Takamura and his crew got a good look at an experimental type of electric motor Patterson had designed for the NTU solar car. It fit into the wheel hub, eliminating the need for a complicated transmission system between motor and wheel. It was like the difference between pedaling a bicycle, which uses a chain to make the rear wheel turn as you work the pedals, and pedaling a unicycle, which puts the force directly into turning the wheel. Getting rid of the "chain" made the solar car simpler and more efficient. What's more, the motor seemed to use energy more efficiently than the off-the-shelf motor GW had bought for its car, which analysis showed was the least-efficient component of the vehicle.

The following year, when Patterson was visiting the United States, he stopped by GW. Patterson agreed to license his motor design to the university's solar team. The team spent months making refinements and, by the 1995 Sunrayce, had produced a better version of the Aussie motor -- winding the coils differently and making other improvements that increased efficiency. More problems with the solar array kept GW from winning that race, but the team won an innovation award for its propulsion system. A few months later, with the solar problems ironed out, GW traveled to Japan and won the top prize at the World Solar-Car Rallye.

Suddenly, the GW motor was the hottest thing in the solar car world. Other teams lined up for a look, and many wanted to know if they could buy one. The motor the team had created, based on the Australian model, used a rare design called "axial flux." Most motors are configured somewhat like a hot dog. The meat consists of magnets mounted on a rotor. The bun is called the stator and is lined with electrified coils. When electric current passes through the coils, it creates a magnetic field that repels the magnets on the rotor, making the rotor turn.

The axial flux motor is more like a pair of pancakes, with the rotor and stator shaped like disks and set next to one another. The gap between the two disks determines how powerfully the rotor turns, a force called torque. On a vehicle, you need a lot of torque to start rolling or to get up a hill, but you don't need much to coast along at a constant speed. That's why ordinary cars start in high-torque first gear and cruise in fifth.

Eventually, the engineers from GW figured out how to change the size of the gap while the motor was operating to respond to different demands. For high-torque acceleration, the coils are very close to the magnets on the rotor; for cruising speed, they back off. That helps the motor use energy efficiently, and allows a smaller motor to achieve a wider range of performance. Combined with a computerized controller, the motor has converted up to 95 percent of available energy into output, compared with about 85 percent efficiency for a typical electric motor and between 30 and 35 percent for a gasoline engine.

Bedewi, Jermakian and another adviser realized they had something with commercial potential. In 1995, they formed New Generation Motors Corp. to begin making the motors for other solar car competitors. Today, virtually all the top U.S. university teams use New Generation products, including last year's U.S. champion, the University of Missouri-Rolla.

But from the very beginning, Bedewi, in particular, was thinking beyond the solar car market. The motors could work with any electric power source, and could be made big enough to run a family car or even a city bus. Bedewi was thinking of Detroit.

In 1997, he took a sabbatical from the university to devote himself full time to the company. The path seemed to be opening up. Ford's Ross, one of the most powerful men in the auto industry, was advising Bedewi and encouraging him to aim high. California had caused a storm among carmakers by demanding that 10 percent of all vehicles sold there have zero emissions, forcing the production of electric cars. The U.S. government was funding electric car research in Detroit. It was a guaranteed market. And the Internet boom was taking off. Technology was in the news; companies were flush with cash and an optimism that everything was possible. Bedewi wrote a business plan that projected revenue of $500 million a year within a decade. He envisioned New Generation electric cars rolling off an assembly line in Northern Virginia.

It looked like a sure thing.

Posters from the solar car races line Jermakian's office at New Generation. Over his desk is a picture of Albert Einstein with the quotation, "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." Behind mounds of papers, with Diet Dr. Pepper and a Hewlett-Packard calculator at the ready, Jermakian calls up a program on his Dell workstation. Colorful three-dimensional drawings flash across his screen, swoops and pie shapes that simulate the inside of a working electric motor. Cascades of yellow and green represent the flow of electricity. The colors change as Jermakian changes small details of the motor's design, looking for ways to make it more efficient.

It's late afternoon, but there's a midnight hush at New Generation, with the hum of computer fans the only noticeable sound. An engineer sits in a cubicle outside Jermakian's office; a technician works quietly at a bench in the workshop. The company employs nine full-timers these days. At its peak, a few years ago, 35 people worked there. New Generation rents space in one of those countless strip-mall-style office parks near Dulles Airport in Ashburn -- servants' quarters compared with the deluxe plantations of AOL, MCI and the like nearby. Next door is a lawn care service.

The offices are small and cluttered, their walls plastered with engineering diagrams. Bookshelves bulge with reference manuals and notebooks of technical data. A small kitchen pantry contains a sink, a microwave, a coffee machine, a dorm-size refrigerator and the main server for the computer system. Down a short hallway from the offices, the workshop is a wide, high-ceilinged garage space with two roll-up bay doors leading outside. Colored power cables snake across the scuffed concrete floor, threading through a maze of equipment and workbenches. Many of the work areas have ancient wooden tabletops, hash-marked from years of use. Hulking machines for shaping metal sit silent, but small piles of silvery shavings show they've been running recently. Motor parts -- coils of wire, aluminum housings -- are scattered throughout, and tucked among the equipment are half-built scooters and golf-cart-size vehicles used for testing motor designs.

It's a place that seems indifferent to outsiders. Anyone who got sucked into a campus organization in college -- a student newspaper, a radio station, a theater troupe -- will recognize it for what it is: the lair of a bunch of engineering and science majors who never wanted to give up the lab from freshman year.

Only four of the original GW solar car team members remain at New Generation, but the bonds they formed during the races are what shape the company. Jermakian, at 41 one of the oldest people on staff, guards the idealism that pulled them all together in the first place. He's chief technology officer, the guy whose job is to think big thoughts and keep working at the motors to make them better. When he speaks, he tends to cross his arms, lean his head back and shut his eyes, as if plumbing deep for an answer. Unlike most of his colleagues, Jermakian is a physicist by training, not an engineer, and his more abstract style is a contrast to Takamura's clipped and direct manner. Takamura, 34, runs day-to-day operations and has to think about both the science they're trying to do and the budget that will, somehow, keep it going.

Takamura's effort to get outside investors to put money into the company bothers Jermakian a bit. He knows the stakes -- they need to get through the coming year until revenue from their biggest venture starts flowing. But every outsider who writes a check will chip away at the company's freedom to chart its own course. Jermakian would rather chase federal grants for support, and tonight he'll take home an application for a government research contract that could bring in $200,000. He's put too much into New Generation to hand it over to someone else now. Jermakian quit his career at NASA to help start the company. The years of 80-hour work weeks contributed to the breakup of his marriage, and Jermakian has gone without pay for months at a time, living off savings and credit cards. If he had known what it would be like, he might not have done it. But every time he doubts he can keep going, he remembers Takamura in the Australian Outback at the end of each grueling leg of the solar car race, patiently remounting tire after tire in the back of a pickup, his face and arms black with insects.

This is not just a job. Jermakian says the technology can improve the world by making nonpolluting cars that use less energy. Toyota's gas-electric hybrid, the Prius -- which Jermakian is on a waiting list to buy to replace his 1995 Saab -- would be a far better car with a New Generation motor, he believes. "We have the most efficient drive system in the world," he says. If more people had access to the technology, "it would be life-changing for everybody in the company and hopefully would change the way everybody thinks about these things."

Takamura has no less faith in the technology or in New Generation's ability to chart its own course. But he knows survival involves compromise.

It is a business, after all. It has to make money.

While Jermakian works on his motor simulation program, Takamura sits in his own office on the opposite side of the building, filling out forms for the same venture capital group whose chat session he grudgingly attended several days before. He has to write a description of the company to try to interest investors, and the catch is that it has to fit into a strict format. Every section is limited to a certain number of characters -- that's letters, spaces and punctuation marks. It's better than cocktail party chitchat, but still. For "Company Background" -- the nine years of work and worry, sunny days spent under fluorescent lights, nights away from family -- he gets 882 characters. For "Technologies/Special Know-How" -- the years of refining the motors, the experiences of the solar car races, the two patents issued and five patents pending -- 315 characters. It's like writing haiku, with the future at stake.