Driven by a Burning Desire for Efficiency, He Dumped the Motor and Fired Up the Batteries

Dirty. Smelly. Primitive. And, perhaps most unforgivable of all, inefficient.

These are the words that would probably go through Michel Bonard's head if he were to pop open the hood of your car. For there, in all its greasy splendor, would sit a piece of engineering little changed in the past hundred years: an internal combustion engine.

Just think of it, Michel says: Because we power our vehicles with this chamber of volatile gases -- this rolling series of controlled explosions -- we must lard them with all sorts of extra stuff: tubes to sluice cooling liquids around, overbuilt suspensions to accommodate heavy power plants, emissions controls to ameliorate the poisonous gases they belch.

"Why do we need 2,000 pounds of steel to carry 150 pounds of person?" Michel asks. And so he decided to build his own car.

We're standing next to it now, a silver Dodge Neon that he rebuilt in his Potomac garage. Well, he didn't rebuild the entire thing, but the important part. Last spring, Michel, 65 and retired from the aerospace industry, finished converting the Neon to run on what he's certain is the fuel of the future: electricity.

We're going to run out of oil, Michel says. The price of "gas will keep climbing and climbing. It will be a slow climb, I know that, but it will be a relentless climb. People won't be able to afford to drive their cars. I'm very worried about that. . . . I know it's going to happen. I don't see any other way."

Michel is an engineer -- an electrical engineer, it should be noted. Born in Paris, and still possessed of an accent that makes talking about amps and capacitors sound like he's talking about fine Beaujolais, he came to this country in 1975 to work for Rockwell International designing helicopter avionics.

"I don't like mechanical stuff," he says. "It wears out. It's heavy. It's costly. It's very inefficient. My dream was to be efficient."

To be efficient -- the dream of an engineer: to live in a cool, frictionless world.

He bought the Neon for $1,000 from a guy he found on Craigslist. "It was still running, unfortunately," he says. "I'd rather have a non-running car, because I'd pay less for it."

He pulled out the motor and sold it, along with everything else he didn't need. Then he tackled the various problems that await the home electric car builder. There's an active hobbyist community, but converting a car isn't as easy as, say, building your own deck or stereo receiver. He had to add a vacuum pump for the brakes, because the original brakes ran off the vacuum from the engine. Same with the power steering. No heater, either, once the radiator was pulled out.

There are 12 batteries powering an 80-horsepower motor. ("Only two moving parts!" Michel says of the tiny engine.) Looking under the hood now is like looking at the electrical closet in an office or the back of a network server: flat gray metal boxes, wires, a tiny cooling fan.