Farewell to internal combustion?

ENVIRONMENTALISTS who are always full of gloom and doom are at the same time wild optimists about the capacity of government planning to transform the condition of the planet. One of their favorite ideas is to have government force car companies to produce more "earth-friendly" cars--to increase the average fuel economy of gasoline-powered automobiles from the present 28 miles per gallon to 40 mpg, and to produce a certain percentage of cars with electric propulsion by the end of the decade.

Our President-to-be took up this environmentalist theme with enthusiasm early in his campaign, saying such measures would simultaneously reduce pollution, create jobs, and save motorists money. Of course if such a universally happy outcome were likely, the dynamics of the marketplace would be making it happen already, and there would be no need for government plans and mandates. Fortunately, when his campaign reached Detroit, Mr. Clinton hedged his commitment to the "green" plans for the automotive industry.

Environmentalists always pitch their auto plans as if the challenge is to get recalcitrant manufacturers to do the right thing. But there are already models out there in the showrooms that get better than 40 mpg--Ford Fiesta, GM Geo Metro, as well as a Daihatsu and the Subaru Justy, for example. The problem is recalcitrant consumers. Only a small proportion-around 2 per cent--want to buy these cars, because they are inevitably cramped, lack power, and are more dangerous in crashes.

There is something of the same problem with environmentalist plans to force the industry to switch to electric cars. The industry has been trying to make and sell these for a hundred years--in fact, electric cars pre-date gasoline-powered cars. The basic problem is that gasoline in a tank is hard to beat as a simple and efficient way to store energy on board. Imagine a power source that costs a couple of thousand dollars to make, stores the equivalent of two gallons of gasoline, weighs half a ton, takes four or five hours to fill up, and wears out after a year's use. That is the battery system of an electric car.

Of course technology can be improved, but in this already heavily researched area the improvements are a matter of many small, difficult, and expensive steps. And contrary to environmentalist propaganda electric cars are not a risk-free technology. The latest Popular Science reports an electric-car test in Arizona which "came to a sudden and dramatic end when the zinc-bromide battery pack started billowing red-orange smoke." The driver staggered out of his test vehicle and collapsed, and 14 onlookers who inhaled the bromine fumes were also hospitalized.

Since the state government in California embraced the environmentalist plan for mandating electric cars by 1998, all the major car companies have been pouring money into their development. The real question again is whether consumers will buy the electric cars in anything near the quantity needed to pay for their production. GM estimates battery models will cost some $5,000 to $10,000 more than gas-tanked traditionals. Only a handful of well-heeled fanatics will pay that sort of premium. Even the normally green National Research Council of the Academy of Sciences reported that the early 40-mpg mandate could "place an untenable financial burden on the industry."

Mandates for radically increased gas mileage and for impractical electric cars are exactly the kind of government meddling that could finish off GM-- which has been suffering multi-billion annual losses of late--or Chrysler.

Could that be what some of the environmentalists really want?