The Little Engine That Might

Jermakian would be hard put to distill everything into such stark terms, even if he wanted to. But Takamura gamely pecks away at his keyboard. Since the earliest undergraduate days of the solar car team, and since joining New Generation in 1996, Takamura has been the guy who volunteers for the grubbiest jobs. At the company, someone has to juggle everyone's schedules, coordinate purchasing, look for ways to raise money. It's usually him. As his responsibilities have increased, his pay has actually declined, thanks to the company's dwindling cash flow. He often uses his own credit cards to buy office supplies or plane tickets, then gets reimbursed when New Generation has the money. Until his son was born two years ago, Takamura regularly spent up to 80 hours a week at the office. Now, with his wife often out of town doing the software consulting work that supports them, he sticks to a schedule nearly as grueling as a cross-country solar car race.

Takamura leaves home in the District every morning at 7:30, if the nanny shows up on time, then works at the office until about 4:30 so he can be back to let the nanny leave by 6. He makes dinner for his son, and the two hang out for a few hours. Takamura then stays up into the night finishing projects for work. If he's writing proposals for supplying motors to other companies, or going back through motor design changes, he might toil away until 5 a.m.

His wife, Holly, who went to GW with him, says he doesn't complain much about the grind. "He's always really liked what he does. There are not a lot of people who can say that." When they married in 2000 after many years together, Holly insisted that he cut back on his hours at the office so they could have some time together. But she has accepted the company's central role in his life. He'll never give it up. "Eric's gonna be with it 'til they run out of money," she says, "And then maybe another six months."

Now, left hand on chin, right knee bouncing under the desk, Takamura sits stumped by the last entry on the company profile. A pack of Camel Lights and a green lighter wait next to the keyboard. "Use of Funds," 126 characters. If investors give them money, they'll hire more people, buy equipment, find new markets, develop new uses for the motors. He's gotten the explanation down to 128 characters, but how to get two more letters out?

There it is: "sales and marketing" becomes "sales & marketing." Done.

Takamura sees this as a good exercise. He has to be clear-eyed about the company to help it survive. Jermakian's vision for what they can do with the technology is important, but by itself won't get them anywhere.

Vision can be a dangerous thing in the auto industry. It tends to blind people to the cruel realities of the market. Vision leads to grand failures such as Preston Tucker's 1940s effort to build a stylish car with unheard-of safety features, which drew attacks from industry and government, and John Z. DeLorean's stainless-steel gull-winged cars, which live on primarily in those "Back to the Future" movies. The world is littered with martyrs to the car culture.

In Columbia, on the other side of Washington from New Generation Motors, Bob Beaumont knows the nameless frustration of being absolutely right and having the world turn away. In the 1960s, Beaumont was a chain-smoking, Elvis-haired car dealer in upstate New York when he had an epiphany: Gasoline engines were ruining American cities. What everyone needed, he decided, was a two-seat electric commuter car. In the early 1970s, he set up a company in Florida to manufacture a glorified golf cart called the CitiCar, which could go about 40 miles at 30 mph on a single charge. For a while, it looked like Beaumont was on to something. He got coverage in Popular Mechanics and the Wall Street Journal, and in three years, he sold more than 2,500 CitiCars.

In 1975, though, Consumer Reports printed a scathing article about the CitiCar's safety, and Beaumont says sales dried up almost overnight. He retired to Columbia and opened a used-car dealership.

In the early 1990s, Beaumont got his old team back together. Like Jermakian and Bedewi at New Generation, Beaumont was watching California's push for electric vehicles and decided that the world was finally catching up to him. He went back to Florida, this time to build a sexy little electric runabout called the Tropica, with a list price of $17,000. The car was so eye-catching that actor Don Johnson bought one and used it in his "Nash Bridges" television series. But the company had financing problems and disagreements about management, and it folded in 1996 after producing only 14 Tropicas. One of them sits in Beaumont's Columbia garage, its white body streaked with dust and its seats hidden under a pile of old lawn chair cushions.

Beaumont, 71, insists he isn't bitter. Suffering from emphysema and other ailments, he says he's made his last run at the auto industry and is content to spend his days reading books. But he still can't believe it didn't work. "I was so positive, and still am -- you could move millions of people this way with no pollution. Cheaply." He laughs. "Here I am, one guy, trying to convince the world to do this. What a schmuck . . . There's an opportunity to make millions of these things. Why they don't do it, I don't understand."

One person who can tell him why is Larry Burns, who as head of research and development for General Motors is the technology gatekeeper for the biggest automaker on the planet. "I've seen examples where there's an idea and a promise and a potential and an entrepreneurial spirit, and it's really just tough for the companies to find the market," Burns says.

He has 600 automotive scientists at labs around the world, plus an "intelligence" squad of about 30 people who spend all their time scouting fresh ideas from small companies or backyard geniuses. One outsider that managed to break into GM with a new idea is right here in Washington: XM Radio, the satellite radio service that's now on more than 1 million GM cars and trucks.

Sometimes GM will take an ownership stake in little-guy ventures, if the research is aimed at a specific area the corporation wants to pursue. For instance, it owns 20 percent of Quantum Technologies, a small California company that makes compressed gas storage systems that could be used for hydrogen-powered vehicles.

But for GM to be interested in something, the product has to appeal to the corporation's quest for that basic quality that makes the auto industry so alluring in the first place: volume. GM isn't looking for technologies that might sell a few thousand cars or trucks. Even the success of the Prius, which is selling about 50,000 units a year, doesn't do much for GM, which has delayed rolling out its own hybrids in a bid to develop a bigger market. GM only cares about selling millions of vehicles per year. Toyota, the most profitable automaker, spent years losing money developing the Prius and selling it at a loss; GM and the other American manufacturers don't have that kind of money.

Burns says most small entrepreneurs don't survive long enough to get their ideas to the point of mass production. First, you have to have money to sustain you while you're developing the technology, because you're not yet producing anything that can pay the bills. Then you have to figure out how to turn a hand-crafted laboratory device into something that can be mass-produced safely and cheaply, and invest in the equipment to make it. Finally, you have to figure out how to market the product, which takes yet more money.

New Generation has raised just over $4 million in its nine years, all cobbled together from family members, friends and associates still patiently waiting for a return on their investments. The company has won a little more than twice that amount in grants and research contracts over the years from other corporations or the government. That's pocket change in terms of the 1990s Internet boom; a fashion Web site called Boo.com, for instance, burned through something like $23 million a month during its brief existence several years ago.

But New Generation never bothered with the frippery of the Internet age, the flashy Web sites or publicity stunts. Instead it tried to pour everything into its technology, in the belief that the motors were so good and the market was so clear that success was just a matter of staying on track. Early on, the company had promising avenues into Ford and with a company called Global Electric Motorcars, or GEM, which makes "neighborhood electric vehicles" -- snazzy golf carts for gated communities or large estates.

But the dream of big success shattered almost as quickly as that first solar car in Australia.

First, New Generation's contact at Ford, Lou Ross, died unexpectedly in 1998, depriving the company of its primary patron in the auto industry. Then California, under relentless pressure from automakers that did not want to bother with building a few thousand electric vehicles, backed off its zero-emissions mandate. Government and industry research switched almost completely away from electric-powered cars and into the pursuit of hydrogen fuel cells -- a technology that could be decades away from practical use.

GEM was bought by DaimlerChrysler and quit working with New Generation. Then the Internet bubble burst, and terrorists attacked on September 11, 2001, and the economy went sour, and all the money and confidence flowing into new technologies of all sorts simply dried up.

Bedewi, 40, gave up on his teaching sabbatical in 2001 and went back to GW full time. He's still chairman of New Generation, and through direct investment and debt has about a $500,000 stake in the company. But he now spends most of his time in the classroom and running the crash analysis center. He and the others haven't given up on the dream, though, just scaled it back. New Generation has found an unusual alternate route that, if it works, might let the company achieve something almost as rare as big success: survival.