Note: A previous version of this post was published here on PJMedia.
Victor Wouk with his hybrid car, EPA lab, Ann Arbor, Michigan circa 1973
It’s the kind of story Hollywood normally loves: An independent genius’ invention ends up being suppressed by powerful interests. In Tucker: A Man and His Dream, political agents of the Big 3 automakers maneuver to put Preston Tucker out of business; intermittent windshield wiper inventor Robert Kearns is ripped off by the Ford Motor Company in Flash of Genius; The documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? accused General Motors of suppressing the development of electric vehicles by crushing them.
The truth is that GM and other Detroit automakers have been doing research on EVs for decades and that perhaps a better question would be “Who Killed (or at least delayed) The Hybrid Electric Car?” In the early 1970s, 25 years before Toyota started selling the Prius hybrid car in Japan, Dr. Victor Wouk, an independent American inventor, with encouragement from GM, developed a practical hybrid car that cut down on pollution and saved gasoline, but a conspiracy killed it.
Today’s Hollywood would never make that movie. Too many elements of Wouk’s story run counter to the preferred Hollywood narrative of evil businessmen or faceless corporations despoiling the environment. In this case, car companies aren’t the villains. To the contrary, corporations encouraged and helped Wouk in his research. The villain in this story was a government bureaucrat, working, ironically, at the Environmental Protection Agency, as part of a program designed to improve air quality.
Continue reading the complete post here.
When he’s not busy doing custom machine embroidery at Autothreads Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth and contributes to The Truth About Cars and Left Lane News
Never underestimate the power of stupid bureaucrats to kill innovation. Back in the 1980s, I met Molt Taylor. He was a renounded aeronautical engineer who spent decades developing the Aerocar flying car. He succeeded in getting his design certificated by the FAA and had a Big 3 production contract lined up in the early 1970s. Then the bureaucrats stepped in. The Aerocar was a car, so it had to meet all of the new requirements for a car including things that added weight and decreased performance like 5 MPH bumpers and early pollution controls. It was also an airplane so it had to meet the FAA’s requirements. To operate one, you needed a pilot’s license, a driver’s license, a radio permit, a license tag for the car portion and another for the wing/empanage trailor portion. In the end, the bureaucratic obstacles caused the production deal to collapse. I was a young man when I met Molt and he was a crusty old engineer. He didn’t have too many good things to say about bureaucrats.
The early Aerocars were pretty homely (a local man owns the only airworthy example) but the Model III was actually fairly good looking. The sole Model III is on display at Seattle’s excellent Museum of Flight. Here’s a link: http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/taylor-aerocar-iii
I researched this story some after reading the first PJMedia story on this, some time ago. My only quibble with it is that in the course of my research (don’t ask where, my memory is fuzzy, I wasn’t intending to compose a story, only researching for my own curiosity) I came across the factoid that Mr. Stork, the EPA bureaucrat who killed the project, was an advocate of the fully electric car, and insisted that the hybrid was inferior because it was merely a gasoline-burning alternative. While I have no way of knowing which story is true (either he’s an electric car advocatee, or a bureaucrat run mad with his own authority) I find the electric car advocate argument more persuasive. Within the alternative fuel community, there are a number of different types of propulsion to advocate: ethanol, electricity, hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cells, to name a few. Within the subgroup advocating each of these, there tends to be a small group of “true believers” who fantasize about how “Big Oil” is subsidizing the other alternatives, to draw attention and resources away from the only real solution: theirs. I’ve read, as a for instance, that the “Who Killed the Electric Car?” movie was financed by someone who also financed another project, devoted to exposing the “Hydrogen Fuel Cell Fraud”. It sounded to me like Mr. Stork is one of these, given his recent dismissal of hybrids, even after they’ve been so successful.
If your premise is correct, then he was a corrupt petty bureaucrat. It was not his job to advocate one technology over another. His job was lower emissions regardless of how it was achieved. If he decided the industry should go full electric to the detriment of other technologies then he was a corrupt, petty, vindictive, bureaucrat.
Once again I have this to say;
No regulation without representation.