The Next Great Race
B.C. team harnesses aerodynamics and fuel vapour to create car of the future
By Andre Voshart | September 10, 2007
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From Preston Tucker to John DeLorean, the history of the automobile is peppered with lone innovators racing to create the next evolution of the automobile. Keeping in the same vein as their predecessors, a small group of determined inventors at B.C.’s Fuel Vapor Technologies have engineered what could be one of the highest mileage cars in North America and revolutionized fuel economy through a residue-free fuel vapour engine.
After close to 30 years of dreaming, development and setbacks, president George Parker finally unveiled the Alé prototype in the fall of 2006 at the SEMA Autoshow in Las Vegas. This first prototype gets an amazing 92 miles per gallon (MPG) with a streamlined design and a modified, 160-horsepower Honda Civic engine. Comparatively, a normal Civic only hits around 25 to 35 MPG from city to highway driving, according to U.S. government figures. For all its fuel efficiency, the distinctive car doesn’t suffer in performance. The Alé accelerates from zero to 60 in five seconds and can hit 1.7-plus Gs when cornering on street tires.
Brad Zimmerman, head tech for the company, stated that during testing, “I drove it hard at the track for four solid hours, throwing it into corners and accelerating fast. … After all that hard driving, we only went through $10 in gas.”
To achieve these results, Parker had to reduce drag, removing everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary including one of the wheels. The car’s three-wheel configuration optimizes the car’s aerodynamics, as does it’s two-seat tandem arrangement
“If you go down to an airport and you look at the fastest airplanes,” he says, “they’re not two seats side-by-side; they’re tandems.”
Parker isn’t unfamiliar with planes. The genesis of the car’s shape took place 28 years ago while he worked for Larry Croom in the research and development department of Spectrum Aircraft in British Columbia, building and testing parts and analyzing aerodynamics. Cars had always been his first passion, so he drew an initial drawing of the Alé. Over the years that followed, he slowly ironed out the car’s details in his mind, going through every nut and bolt, refining the parts and sourcing the companies that could make his vision come to life.
Then, around 15 years ago, Parker began slowly piecing the car together, but it wasn’t until the price of gas hit the dollar-a-litre mark a couple years ago that the project moved into high gear. From then on, what had begun as a one-off project became the development of a high-mileage commuter car.
In November 2005, Parker founded Fuel Vapor Technologies, and built his team, which initially included his apprentice-slash-shop manager, Shane Brooker, and high-tech guru Zimmerman, who was not yet a staff member. Todd Pratt, head of business operations, came on board in April of 2006 after he knew the company was a sound investment.
Introducing Fuel Vapour
In addition to developing the Alé’s unique design, Parker is also in heavy development of the company’s breakout innovation, the patent-pending VLIFE (vapour lean injection fuel efficiency) system. This system allows a gasoline-burning engine to run on fuel vapours rather than liquid fuel.
“There’s been 930-some patents since 1920 for various forms of fuel vapour equipment,” Parker explains. “The biggest problem with fuel vapour is that you end up with the heavy molecules of fuel being left behind, which is kind of an orangey-yellow, oily substance that does not vaporize and that does not burn. And out of a gallon of gas, there’s at least two cups of this or more. … What we were able to do was vaporize all of the fuel.”
The VLIFE setup was something Parker thought up when he was 16, but it never went anywhere. “I had an idea that they didn’t make parts for,” he sighs. Still, he knew the potential existed if he could only get his hands on the right equipment. Enter Zimmerman in the fall of 2005. He was the sole Canadian distributor of Motec high-end engine management controllers (EMCs), and he had the technical savvy to bring the idea to life. “[Parker] asked me if I could make the theory work” Zimmerman recalls, “and I said, ‘Sure I’ll give it a shot,’ and I’m here a year-and-a-half later. And now we’ve got something.”
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| This Alé prototype runs on a modified, 160-HP Honda Civic engine and gets around 92 MPG, making it one of the most highest mileage cars in North America. |
EMCs are commonplace on most vehicles sold today, but Motec’s were designed for high-end motorsport use, a market Zimmerman claims is on the cutting edge. For the Alé, the company is applying the technology differently than its original intention, to maximize fuel efficiency as opposed to maximizing power.
The details of the how the system works is a tightly guarded secret. What the company will say is that the system is able to control the air-fuel ratio throughout the entire process of driving. Many gas engines today run with a 14.7:1 ratio of air to gasoline. The Alé’s system runs at 27:1. Zimmerman claims the car doesn’t use anything special; they’ve simply put existing parts together in a new way. Not only does this unique configuration optimize the vehicle’s fuel efficiency, the company says, but it also cuts CO2 emissions by 30 percent without the aid of a catalytic converter.
“There have been a lot of people that have tried to make a vehicle run on just the vapours, and that’s kind of what we’re doing, but not entirely,” he teases. “We’ve just found all the right technologies, all being used for different purposes, and stuffed them together to be able to get the job done.”
Up in Smoke
With the body design and fuel vapour technology well on its way, the road ahead looked clear. The team would make their Las Vegas unveiling with time to spare. Then disaster struck. On Feb. 17, 2006, three months after the company got its start, Parker’s workshop and home were consumed in a fire. His designs, tools and even the car’s body plug were destroyed and unsalvageable. It was quite a blow to the project, but Parker pressed on. That evening, he went to a hotel room with some modeling clay and modeled the car from memory. He then took the model to 3D Custom Foam in Burnaby, B.C., to have it scanned into their computer and CNC-cut to full size.
Custom Foam worked around the clock, and within two weeks from the day of the fire, Parker had a new foam core sitting in the new shop, a move that was moved ahead because of the fire. “So we were back up and functioning considering the losses,” he recalls.
The fire was a blow to morale and a significant loss of both time and money, but the company was still scheduled to show off the Alé at the SEMA Autoshow.
Working in overdrive to complete a prototype, they hit design bumps along the way. For the “fighter jet” roof, Parker consulted with numerous aircraft canopy manufacturers but found no one able to build the shape he wanted due to limitations of free-blowing plastic. So he literally took matters into his own hands by building a big “oven” and using a self-made holder to fold an aircraft-grade acrylic over the plug to create a precise canopy shape.
On the morning the team loaded the car into the trailer to go to Las Vegas, they took the canopy off the plug, cut it, fit it, installed it. And just in time. “We didn’t even allow for the fact it may not work,” Parker says. “We just did it.”
The team arrived in Vegas by the skin of their teeth, unsure of the automotive community’s reception.
The reaction was immediate and dramatic. Speed Channel commentator Brian Till, a former high-performance driver, named the Alé the best of the show. Blown away by its ingenuity, he said: “When we see that innovation, that technology come into the mainstream over the next couple of years, we’ll realize it all started right here.”
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The mainstream is taking notice, too. Tonight Show host and car collector Jay Leno expressed interest in the vehicle, as did reps from Chrysler and other companies who took the time to talk and takes photos; six dealers wanted to buy vehicles on the spot.
Revving up for the Future
Buoyed by the favourable reception, the company plans to hire up to 20 employees gradually and start production of the Alé for mass consumption. However, Parker says, they’re content to keep production down around 500 to 800 a year rather than have to build a car every 45 seconds.
“If there’s a call for it, we’ll probably turn the whole project over to somebody who’s capable of doing that. We’re a research and development company, and what we want to do is continually be creating new ideas and improving those things and not burry ourselves with production issues.”
In the meantime, the company continues to perform racetrack tests of the still-in-development VLIFE system. Parker says they’ve hit 125 MPG but the goal is to push as far as possible. “As we refine it, we’re getting better and better and better … [and] our goal is 140 MPG with 160 HP.”
For their next challenge, they are entering their next generation Alé in the independent X PRIZE competition, created to inspire viable, super-efficient vehicles. The contest will provide a multimillion-dollar purse to the teams that can design, build and bring to market 100 MPG or equivalent fuel economy vehicles. The competition is expected to culminate in a Tour de France-style road race traveling through multiple cities while broadcast to a global audience in 2009 and 2010.
The Fuel Vapor team has also been invited to join the 65-day-long Great Race from New York to Paris in 2008, the centennial of the 1908 great race. If they can find a sponsor willing to share in the fame, they will make plans to enter.
And not to worry: they already have a head start on the competition, which
is composed mostly of immaterialized concepts. After all, Parker left the starting line nearly
30 years ago.
www.fuelvaporcar.com
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