Ann Marie Sastry, CEO and co-founder of Sakti3, at her company's booth at the Detroit auto show. (Photo by the writer.)

But Sastry and her company, Ann Arbor-based Sakti3, is far from “out in the cold.” They are in the auto business for the long haul and do not plan on being relegated to a basement booth forever. Eventually, if all goes well, her company’s battery technology will be powering the cars upstairs on the main show floor’s Electric Avenue.

What is it about the “Eureka moment” in her UM lab that prompted her to help found a company two years ago? What is it that turned the heads and opened the wallets of the Michigan Economic Development Corp. and cleantech venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who chipped in $2 million out the gate? What exactly is her company’s battery technology?

Here’s her answer: “We’re interested in both materials and manufacturing technologies at Sakti3. So, we’re sort of looking at the intersection of those things.”

She pauses. She grins slightly, then says somewhat apologetically: “Sorry, I know that’s not good enough.”

This is Sastry’s polite way of saying that any further information is proprietary. She will only add that, “We are working on a manufacturing technology, and we think that’s one of the bottlenecks.”

It’s not surprising that she is guarded. The future of the auto industry is electric – at least, so says Michigan’s governor – and the future of electric plug-in vehicles depends on some big technological leaps in battery technology. If you think you have the secret sauce, you’re not going to tell everybody. Eventually, Sastry says, “We’ll all duke it out in the marketplace.”

Technology Transfer: From Academia

That kind of unabashedly capitalistic tough talk would have been practically unheard-of coming from a university professor in eras gone by – when academics were supposed to be in research for purely academic reasons.

David Cole, who heads the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, remembers the ’70s, when it seemed like a dirty little secret for an academic to commercialize a technology he or she developed. In some cases, Cole says, it’s about academic purity. In other cases, it’s jealousy. “Some people work on technologies that can be commercialized, others do not.”

Sastry says the technology developed in her lab could have gone a number of ways, but in the end she chose automotive battery development rather than pure academics.

“When the founders looked at some results we had, some technology we were looking at, they thought, ‘OK we could absolutely write more papers on this subject and go down that road and try to really focus on this as an academic exercise or we could really go down another road, which is to take what we have and see if we can build it in the steps required for commercialization.’ Both things are difficult. They’re just different.”

Sastry is fortunate enough to work in an academic culture where commercialization is not only no longer frowned upon, but actively encouraged – especially by UM President Mary Sue Coleman.

“The culture has totally turned around,” Sastry says, and not just at UM but in academia broadly.

“There is this space between what we do in our laboratories and getting into commercialization that we have to address,” Sastry says, speaking of a disconnect between the basic research done at universities and their transitions into tangible benefits for consumers. “And we have to help address it. It can’t be all just (marketplace) pull. There has to be some (academic) push.”

Sastry credits Coleman for pushing this cultural turnaround at UM. “Our president has been very specific. She believes that we need to enable tech transfer, and has funded more offices and centers to do that.”

But, she says, no matter how much help a company gets, it’s tough out there.

“It’s a high degree of luck, there’s a high degree of naïveté, there’s a high degree of optimism,” Sastry says, of founding a company.

“In our case, we want to put batteries in cars, so we have a lot to learn about cars.”

The university did not push her in the direction of automotive, she says. The University of Michigan has to rely on the “passion and vision of researchers” to determine where things are going to go. The university, as a whole, starts up very diverse types of companies, from nanotech to biotech to energy and materials.

Cole says that most technologies emerging from blue-sky research can go in multiple directions.

Technology Transfer: What Direction?

“I don’t think Sakti3 would see themselves as … a battery manufacturer,” Cole says. For that to happen, it takes extra push – a combination of public and private funding, in Sakti3′s case – to transition from idea to an actual company that makes things. And Sakti3 is still early stage.

“You see, the one thing that is true with intellectual property is that it’s actually fairly inexpensive,” Cole says. “It’s when you go to commercialize it, put in manufacturing capabilities, that it becomes a different story.”

To help move the “story” along in 2008, the MEDC designated Sakti3 as a Michigan Center of Energy Excellence and awarded the firm $3 million to accelerate its efforts to move to a prototype and to partner with the University of Michigan. This was added to an initial $2 million in financing from Khosla Ventures, led by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Khosla has his hands in many alternative energy and automotive enterprises, including Fisker Automotive.

“We were really lucky to engage with Khosla Ventures almost as soon as we decided to do a company,” Sastry says. “There’s a real similarity in approach there, which is great.

“Working with KV is incredible because they really know what they’re doing. They really know a lot about building businesses. We think we know something about building batteries, so that’s really good,” Sastry laughs.

It’s a marriage that works out because there is only so much a bunch of academics can do. You need expert venture capitalists to take it to the next level. “In terms of the mechanics of a business, how to raise funds, how you price real estate, these are things that venture capitalists know a lot about,” she says.

Technology Transfer: Timing

So, when will Sakti3′s materials, or manufacturing technology, or process, or combination of all of them – she is still vague on that “proprietary” stuff – actually see the marketplace?

“We’re a few years off yet,” she says.

Five years? 10 years?

“A few years off,” she repeats.

Then Sastry decides to be somewhat more charitable with her information.

“To be very honest, it depends on a lot of things,” Sastry says. “Depends on how fast we run, depends on the dollars that come in, it depends on how successful and, sometimes, how lucky you are in doing the technology. So, there are a lot of variables. You know, starting a business is very risky.”

It also helps that Sakti3 has a development agreement with GM and – with her university hat on – she runs a development center called ABCD (Advanced Battery Coalition for Drivetrains) to help the automaker develop next-generation batteries.

Sakti3 currently employs fewer than 20 people in Ann Arbor, but Sastry expects that number to grow. And it will grow in Ann Arbor.

But what if, say, a Boston-based company eventually wants to buy the business, she is asked.

“It’s a fair question,” Sastry replies. “I mean, what we decided to do is to start a company to advance our technology to get it into vehicles. And so, where we’re at as an entity five or 10 years from now, I hope that we’re kicking out a lot of batteries that are going into really good cars. There’s a lot of steps between now and then.”

So, at this stage of the company’s development, Sakti3′s goals match those of the University of Michigan to commercialize its basic technology and the goals of the state of Michigan to make the state a center for next-generation automotive battery technology and manufacturing.

“The thing that’s nice about our situation is that the government of the region that’s most important to us – where our customers live – is also strongly supportive of what we’re doing,” Sastry says. “How often does that happen?”

Veteran journalist Howard Lovy has focused his writing the last several years on science, technology and business. He was news editor at Small Times, a magazine focusing on nanotechnology and microsystems, when it first launched in Ann Arbor in 2001. His freelance work has appeared in Wired News, Salon.com, X-OLOGY Magazine and The Michigan Messenger. His current research focus includes the future of the auto industry.

Rob Cleveland

One thing is certain in the automobile business. When you start peeling back the onion on the performance claims and quality ratings made by and for all of the automobile manufacturers, you better have a bottle of ibuprofen at the ready. General Motors’ recent announcement that the Chevrolet Volt will get 230 miles per gallon (mpg) certainly is no exception.

First, some disclosure for your reference. I have been a big fan of GM’s efforts to create its hybrid electric vehicle and felt for some time that the car could be a positive step forward for transportation in general. I’ve been a strong supporter of GM’s many efforts in alternative transportation, from hydrogen to ethanol, as well. There are plenty of detractors around these programs – and some of the criticism is warranted. But for a company so maligned by the public as being out of date, I’ve always felt GM got a bad rap seeing how they are doing at least as much as any other car company to find solutions that take petroleum out of the transportation equation.

With that said, I found myself scratching my head trying to absorb this latest news out from GM. In principle at least, it seemed as if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had just given the Volt a 230 mpg fuel economy rating, more than 10 times the average fuel economy of other cars on the road. Fantastic or fantastical?

One can be excused for having pitched one’s eyes in that too familiar arc with an element of pessimism upon hearing this. In the midst of a political, fiscal and public relations nightmare, GM manages to pull this arrow out of its R&D quiver, hitting a bulls-eye with the news media. Let the conspiracy theories begin: the EPA, the federal government agency charged with developing rules for fuel ratings, just created the rule that calculates the Volt fuel economy at 230 mpg – more than 10 times the average vehicle on the road today. And GM’s principle owner, at 60%, is … the federal government.

Or just maybe we’re witness to something genuinely revolutionary – an opportunity for those who have been railing about automobiles for years to climb off of their green dais built of cork and mud into – gulp – a Chevrolet. Perhaps after all of the chatter and hype, the American public is finally getting what it has been clamoring for, and GM is really capable of changing with the times after all.

Being in a university town, hopefully more than a few folks here will wonder what exactly is behind GM’s lofty number. Well, that is where it get’s fun. My breakdown is below but I’m hopeful that people with more alphabet soup after their last name will weigh in on the comment lines.

Get Out Your Calculators

Here is some background to provide the proper context for the subsequent calculations. The EPA is chartered with coming up with the formulas and testing procedures that dictate how car companies will calculate fuel ratings to their cars. This isn’t just an exercise. Automakers can incur heavy fines if they can’t demonstrate that their fleets meet the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) benchmarks mandated by the government.

For the Volt, and other electric vehicles, the EPA calculates the rating, in part, based on how many kilowatt hours (kWh) are used to go 100 miles. GM says the Volt will use about 25 kWh.

So with that, let’s do some math. To do this I offer you no less than four calculations and ratings.

For the first number we have my math, which I would call the “simple” formula, seeing that it took me 10 minutes to come up with it.

If it costs about 11 cents on the average for a kilowatt-hour (the national average), to go 100 miles using 25 kWh would cost approximately $2.75. Compare that to a car getting 20 mpg – about the average for cars and light-duty trucks on the road right now. Using a national average of $2.60 per gallon of gasoline (visit GasBuddy.com to see your region), the same mileage costs $13 on our benchmark “pretend” gasoline vehicle. So the straight math tells us that the gasoline equivalent is about 4.7 times as much, putting our “simple” calculation for the Volt at about 95 miles per gallon. Not bad, but not anywhere close to 230 mpg. Yes, this calculation is imperfect, as it does not take into account whether or not the car ran all-electric or in both electric then gasoline modes. And of course as the price of gasoline fluctuates and the benchmark vehicle changes, so does the answer. But it is a simple start.

Of course, the EPA doesn’t like things to be that simple, otherwise I could just run the whole place myself with a laptop and a Twitter feed. Instead, they have conducted studies on the driving patterns of about 80,000 people and, based on those driving patterns, concluded that the average Joe (or plumber or six-pack drinker) is driving in a particular way. These “driving cycles” are used in coming up with the mileage.

The EPA takes these driving cycles – there are different ones for different scenarios like city and highway, by the way – and calculates the fuel efficiency of the Volt over a cycle, assuming one starts out with a full charge on the battery pack.

A Little More Complicated

Now we explore the second number, 230 mpg. The cycle is roughly 50 miles, and the fully charged Volt goes 40 miles on its initial battery charge, and then consumes a fifth of a gallon of gasoline to go the remaining 10 miles.

The very simple math – no more complicated than the scenario above – says that if the car made it 50 miles on one-fifth of a gallon … guess what? The car will go 250 miles per one gallon (250 mpg). The test cycle itself isn’t quite 50 miles, and there are some inefficiencies one needs to build into any powertrain system versus the theoretical world, so in the end, 230 mpg was probably a safe bet and one GM was willing to stand by, assuming everyone is inclined to take this approach at face value.

But hang on – what about all of the “fuel” that goes into that first charge of the battery pack? Surely we can’t ignore that. Seeing that electricity isn’t free at the moment, and has its own inherent energy capacity, what is the mileage relative to gasoline (if you’re not a fan of math or making life more complex than it needs to be, skip ahead six or seven paragraphs.)

And so we have the third number.

Gasoline has an energy density of 114,000 BTU/gallon. A kilowatt hour has 3,400 BTUs/kWh, so it takes 33.59 kWh to equal one gallon of gasoline (which, by the way, is why gasoline has been so popular).

This puts the conversion factor at 33,590 from watt hours to gasoline. Unfortunately, the EPA gets 33,705 so I will use their number instead, since I am using the calculator on my Mac.

Now take the fuel economy in terms of watt hours to go 1 mile (remember GM says 25 kWh to go 100 miles, so 250 watt hours to go 1 mile) and divide that into the conversion factor: 33,705/250(wh/mile) = 134.8 mpg. So in electric mode, the Volt is getting 135 mpg – much closer to my “simple” calculation result.

Of course, now this completely ignores the gas mileage that ensues after 40 miles when the onboard gasoline-driven recharger kicks in to top off the batteries. It does this when the battery is at 30% capacity and tries to keep things above that line until you can recharge.

Here GM provides us with our fourth and final number. When the engine is on, the Chevy Volt is getting 62 mpg – about 12 mpg better than a Prius, but nowhere close to the jaw-dropping 230 mpg previously stated.

What to Believe?

Deciding which answer to believe is complicated in itself. After all, it is the EPA’s own rating formula that provided the 230 mpg and GM is unlikely to make such a dramatic claim without some way to use the EPA as a backstop for the media’s fastball pitches. On the other hand, it doesn’t stand to reason that the car can get 135 mpg in electric mode, 62 mpg in gasoline/electric mode and somehow walk away with 230 mpg.

My only thought is that the EPA’s complete model for fuel economy calculations is so complex and so outdated that trying to assign a fuel economy rating in miles per gallon to an electric vehicle is like trying to publish a web page with a Heidelberg four-color offset press.

This is likely to get even more complicated as the EPA considers rules that will provide ratings for electric-only modes and composite modes (sort of the city/highway equivalent). And the EPA already is running for cover, having issued this statement the day after GM’s 230-mpg revelation: ”EPA has not tested a Chevy Volt and therefore cannot confirm the fuel economy values claimed by GM.”

To make matters worse, Nissan just unveiled its Leaf all-electric vehicle – no onboard recharger fueled with gasoline. The company says it can go 100 miles on a single charge (of course, when you run out, you better be close to a wall socket).

Taking the EPA’s formula using the LA4 driving cycle, Nissan calculated that the Leaf – a four-door sedan much like the Volt – gets 367 mpg, trumping the Volt by a wide margin (apparently Americans can’t even make fuel efficient cars fuel efficient.) Note that the 367 miles per gallon rating is for a car without a drop of gasoline, never mind a gallon, on board.

Luckily for GM, Nissan and the EPA, the public isn’t likely to dive too deeply into the calculus. NBC’s Today Show swallowed the fuel economy rating whole, with no mention of how GM or the EPA arrived at the number. CNN ran the 230 mpg number in their endless news cycle without any reflection on the calculation. As far as the news media seems to be concerned, if the government says it’s true, it must be true. Great.

What the public is more likely to listen to will be the sticker price on these new EVs. GM has floated that the Volt will come out around $40,000. Just by comparison, a 2010 Mercedes Benz C-Class, roughly the same size as the Volt, comes in just over $35,000 nicely loaded.

And therein lies the rub – whether it is flying cars, high-speed rails, or electric vehicles. Worse than not getting what we want can be getting what we want. And now the bill for what we all asked for incessantly – incredibly high fuel economy in a four-door sedan – appears to be coming due.

In truth, I hope the calculation proves to be true through some far more complex equation that takes into account the vagaries of regenerative braking and the leftover 30% battery capacity after the driving cycle is finished. I wish I could explain the number just so I could be more preachy and tell GM’s critics  to kiss Rick Wagoner’s posterior (some folks in the Senate get first pucker), as the Volt was conceived under his watch. Having a vehicle that provided 10 times the fuel economy of today’s average car would solve an extraordinary set of seemingly intractable problems, from Middle East oil imports to climate change and the environment.

But for the public to buy into the hype, the car companies had better be sure they all are speaking from the same playbook. In principle, that’s the EPA’s job, but in fact we don’t buy cars from the EPA (well, sort of, if you think about it). It’s up to GM, Nissan and the half dozen other manufacturers planning all-electric or hybrid electric vehicle production in the next few years to give car buyers something solid that really justifies the added cost of owning an EV.

About the author: Rob Cleveland is CEO of ICON Creative Technologies Group and a co-owner of Grange Kitchen and Bar in Ann Arbor.

Erik Kauppi rolls the red electric motorcycle around for a better view.

“We need more data, let’s go launch something!” George Albercook of Rocks and Robots was talking about a reconfigured trebuchet beam. He and his colleague Katie Tilton had reinforced a PVC pipe with Kevlar thread, after a failed first attempt at the A2 Mech Shop open house Saturday afternoon.

But Albercook’s enthusiasm for the empirical applies equally well to any number of the enterprises grouped under the umbrella of A2 Mech Shop, LLC, which is housed in around 3,500 square feet of space on Parkland Plaza, just south of Jackson Road. They’ve had the keys since November 2008, and set up in January.

One example of an A2 Mech Shop enterprise is REVolution Electric Vehicles, a subsidiary of Electric Vehicle Manufacturing, which expects to begin producing electric maxi-scooters as soon as July 2009 at a not-yet-finalized Scio Township location. That location will also serve as a retail storefront, explained EVM’s chief engineer, Erik Kauppi, while the A2 Mech Shop space will continue to serve as a research and development facility.

The A2 Mech Shop can be loosely described as a co-working space with shop tools. It encompasses more than just research and development on electric scooters, but that’s where we’ll start.

Electric Scooters

At the open house on Saturday, Kauppi, along with operations director Terry Richards, showed off a fully-assembled, working version of the production vehicle that’s expected to retail for around $6,500. He invited visitors with a motorcycle endorsement on their driver’s license to take the red machine for a spin. [The Chronicle lacks such an endorsement.]

The state of Michigan considers their vehicle to be a motorcycle because of its horsepower rating, which is around 8 hp. Top speed is 55 miles per hour, with a range of around 50-60 miles on a 4-hour charge. Kauppi stressed that it’s a real-world range, not the kind of idealized estimate he says is typical of the electric vehicle industry. Their goal, he said, was not to repeat the overpromise, underdeliver pattern the electric vehicle industry had seen to date.

George Albercook and Katie Tilton load the projectile for their trebuchet.

Another pattern they’ve not repeated is what Kauppi describes as the typical electric vehicle development scheme: Invest millions of dollars in research and development to design a perfect vehicle from scratch, then go over budget and miss deadlines, never bringing a vehicle to market. Kauppi says their strategy is actually to bring a vehicle to market, then expand and revise their products in response to market feedback.

Richards said they recognize that the scooter market is a niche – it doesn’t replace four-wheels and a roof – but that within that niche they’d like to be the leading manufacturer in the U.S. They’ll be hiring locally, and there was at least one open house attendee we overheard pitching his services as an assembler of these electric scooters. Response: Send us your resumé.  Assembly isn’t just bolting together a bunch of parts – some aspects involve welding and some knowledge of electronic assembly.

So how have three guys – John Harding serves as president of EVM – managed to produce their first electric vehicle with prospects of beginning assembly for the marketplace about three months from now?

A large part of that answer has to do with their strategy of using as many off-the-shelf components as possible. They’re sourcing the chassis from a motorcycle manufacturer, with the batteries plus chargers coming from a Chinese company, Thundersky. They’re also sourcing the motor and one of the two controllers that are a part of the machine. A second controller has been designed and will be assembled by EVM. Kauppi brings engineering experience from Corsa Instruments, which he co-founded in 1991.  Richards brings years as a technician for Chrysler’s electric vehicle projects.

Another part of the answer is that it’s not just three guys. A theme repeated over and over at the open house in talking with different tenants was that there’s a spirit of collaboration and cooperation among the members of A2 Mech Shop – most of whom don’t work for EVM – that makes the work not just fun, but more efficient. Having heard tell more than once of the collaborative nature of the work, The Chronicle asked Terry Richards for a concrete example.

In response, Richards picked up a jig that he had fabricated for ensuring that the rear suspension was installed at the exact same distance on both sides of the bike. One end of the jig had two wrench heads welded to the square steel stock. Why two? Because Dale Grover, who’s also a member of A2 Mech Shop, had pointed out that instead of making two different jigs – one per measurement – both measurements could be enforced with the same jig, if it were made double-ended. Kauppi allowed that this was not some kind of “breakthrough idea,” but that the accumulation of helpful suggestions like this made the work easier and more enjoyable. “We’re clearly doing it wrong,” he quipped, “you’re not supposed to have fun at work.”

Etching, Milling, and Timekeeping

In addition to handing out suggestions to the electric vehicle guys on their manufacturing jigs, Dale Grover spends part of his time etching metal. At Saturday’s open house, Grover was showing kids how a large pattern could be reduced to a much smaller version through a linkage. One of those kids was Steven Martin, great-nephew of Bob Stack.

Steven Martin watches Dale Grover trace an etching.

Stack has space in the rear of the building for a computer-driven milling machine, which he uses to create lithophanes (among other things). Stack explained that his mill was, while we were chatting, creating an image using a 1/32-inch bit doing .007-inch step-overs – a measure of the resolution of the milling. For this “raster pass,” the distance between horizontal passes across the material was .007 inches. An earlier step had involved the roughing out of the basic shape using a larger bit and a “vector pass” – where the bit traverses the material in a less grid-like fashion.

Stack starts the lithophane process with a high-quality photograph, converts it to a grayscale image, and from there it gets converted to a height map based on the intensity of the gray at any given point in the image. It’s the height map that the mill carves into the material – which in Stack’s case is Corian®, somewhat more durable than traditional porcelain.

Under ordinary light, the resulting image shown on a lithophane is recognizable as a basic shape. But when backlit, the fine detail in the image emerges. It’s a photographic challenge to capture the essence of a back-lit lithophane – one that The Chronicle did not meet. The Wikipedia article on lithophanes provides images showing the striking contrast.

Stack said that the lithophanes were more like a hobby at this point than a commercial enterprise. His thoughts are turning that direction, though. At the A2 Mech Shop open house he was wondering how much someone might be willing to spend for a lithophane of a favorite photograph. At the open house, Stack had his lithophanes displayed using “helping hands” (alligator clips mounted on a stand) – a display solution that would work for the owner of the image as well. Stack attributed the idea to Peter Jensen, another member of A2 Mech Shop, who builds clocks out of nixie tubes.

Stack was excited about the prospect that Jensen would acquire a larger, beefier mill and bring it to A2 Mech Shop’s space. Jensen moved into the building just last week – even though he’s been aboard in concept since the beginning. Jensen uses his current mill for fabricating enclosures for his clocks, either out of wood or metal. The bigger mill would allow him to set up and mill 10 enclosures at a time. For now, Jensen will be fabricating the enclosures at A2 Mech Shop, but continue to assemble the clock electronics at his home shop space.

William Wardrop, whom we met as a model-builder for REVolution Electric Vehicles. He's familiar enough with other A2 Mech Shop gadgetry to demo the track-following robots for open-house attendees.

Robots Etcetera

Among the displays set up for the A2 Mech Shop open house was a robot that managed to navigate on its own around a circular path marked out with black tape. We surmised it was likely set up by George Albercook of Rocks and Robots, another member of A2 Mech Shop – but based on the number of different folks we saw introducing it to visitors, it could have been anyone.  Among them was William Wardrop, who’s actually working with REVolution Electric Vehicles building models for them. Wardrop specializes in cardboard models, using a technique that involves soaking the cardboard in superglue.

At the open house, we first met Wardrop looking at an early prototype of an electric motorcycle that Terry Richards had built. The prototype featured a gas tank with a grid of holes drilled into it to help cool the battery chargers located inside. We remarked on how regular the grid was, given that it had been measured out by hand. That led Wardrop to reminisce about his grandfather, who did the pinstriping on Chrysler Imperials back in the 1930s – by hand.

Albercook and his colleague, Katie Tilton, were occupied for most of the open house undertaking design modifications to their trebuchet. The first attempt, which we missed, led quickly to an attempt to reinforce the small PVC pipe that served as the main beam in the catapult-like device. The attempt at reinforcement did not succeed, either. The third design iteration involved increasing the caliber of the PVC pipe.

The third design iteration achieved more success than the first two attempts, although success came only incrementally. After the second attempt, one onlooker declared, “It hit the ground nearby, but with much more force this time!”  There was one attempt that included a backwards trajectory, and a couple that sent the golf ball on a nearly vertical path. In the attempts we witnessed, one sent the pink ball about 40 yards in the intended direction.

The key to aiming the trebuchet is a hook that determines the release point of the projectile. If the angle is too acute, the release comes too late, slamming the ball into the ground in front of the machine. If the angle on that hook is too wide, the release comes too soon, sending the ball backwards. Because the hook was smashed into the ground with each attempt, thus altering its angle from its starting position, it was hard to make the tweaks necessary.

When The Chronicle departed the open house, Albercook and Tilton were preparing to make some modifications that would allow them to dial in the hook angles for future attempts that would be a bit more reproduceable. A couple of the nearly vertical launches had given them pause – there were lots of cars in the lot belonging to open house visitors, not to mention people’s noggins that they wanted to preserve.

Peter Jensen holding a circuit board for a nixie tube clock, examples of which are visible in the background.

Milling a lithophane at .007-inch stepover on a raster pass.

A chassis for a two-wheeled electric vehicle roughly in the same shape REVolution Electric vehicles receives them before modification.

Terry Richards holding a jig made from square stock steel and two wrenches.

REVolution Electric Vehicles scooter in its charging configuration.

A years-old prototype of an electric motorcycle constructed by Terry Richards required drilling a grid of holes in the gas tank to help cool the charging system.

The trebuchet just after launch.

This close-up diagnoses a problem: release of the projectile (here a pink golf ball) from the sling before it has opened properly. The ball achieved backwards trajectory on this trial.

Attachment points for trebuchet launch strings. By design, the string will at some point slip off the upper hook as the beam rotates, allowing the sling to discharge its contents. The angle of the hook is crucial, because it determines where in the arc the projectile is released.

Rob Cleveland

If you’re one of the many Prius owners in Ann Arbor and enjoy lording your environmental sensitivity over other drivers on the road, look in the rear-view mirror. The Big Three are unveiling new concepts and new plans to put some of the most environmentally sensitive vehicles out to market, meaning Prius owners may have to trade in for a Chevy, Ford or a Chrysler if they want to continue to hold the automotive moral high ground.

New model announcements made at this year’s Detroit Auto Show (also known as the North American International Auto Show in deference no doubt to the NAFTA agreement so loved by the UAW) were prolific, despite a pall created in the wake of December’s brutal and sometimes embarrassing executive testimony in Washington D.C. Most of the green news generated came out of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, who all tried their best to put on a positive face as U.S. auto sales continue their free-fall.

GM arguably is the furthest along in new tree-hugger-technologies with its Chevrolet Volt – an all-electric vehicle designed to run only on advanced lithium-ion batteries powering an electric motor. Hybrids, on the other hand, employ both electricity from batteries and an internal combustion engine coupled to the wheels, using different modes depending on the power demand. The Volt does burn gas, but only to gin up some electricity via an onboard generator if you exceed the vehicle’s 40-mile range and find your orange extension cord just won’t reach to the shoulder of M-14 from home. (Note that GM says 40 miles is the typical commute for Americans, so send a memo around at work asking where you can plug in your new EV and watch the executive team start wringing their hands about utility costs. It will be fun.)

GM has been talking about the Volt for a while now, insisting it will be available next year in showrooms – if the company can make it through 2009, of course. At this year’s auto show, GM had a spate of related announcements, from partnerships with Korean-owned LG Chemical for battery cell technology to a new facility for battery pack manufacture in southeast Michigan. GM also announced a cooperative agreement with local star battery expert Ann Marie Sastry from the University of Michigan to train engineers to enhance their automotive lithium-ion battery knowledge. And GM unveiled a new Cadillac concept based on the all-electric Volt, the Converj. Despite the underwhelming name choice, the vehicle itself was a hit at the show.

If GM manages to get through the next 12 months and can actually bring these vehicles to market, only the most hypocritical senators and hybrid owners will shun what is an evolutionary change in automotive technology, after years of berating GM for only producing gas guzzlers. Costwise, GM says the Volt’s gasoline equivalent is about eight cents a gallon, provided you don’t dip into that onboard generator. But wait, there’s more: zero emissions. If you have a problem with air quality standards after the Volt hits showrooms, you’ll have to take it up with DTE Energy and anyone else producing electricity from coal or natural gas, not Detroit.

Of course, batteries are the new flavor of the month in the auto business, after brief courtships with hydrogen and then ethanol before the economy went off the rails. Plans for a hydrogen infrastructure or an ethanol economy will have to be put on hold as few people are looking to put money into even their 401(k), let alone trying to ramp up a new ethanol distillery. Luckily, not all of the eco-tech unveiled this year represents such a radical and expensive departure.

Ford’s new Lincoln C concept vehicle, a confusing attempt to luxury-up an entry for the box-truck-crossover market made hip by Toyota’s popular Xion XB, isn’t likely to win best in show for design. Underneath the hood, however, lies Ford’s true inspiration – a gasoline-burning 1.6-liter turbo-driven “EcoBoost” engine with a dual-clutch six-speed transmission and stop/start technology that cuts the engine when you are idling, waiting for that intolerable light to change. All of that boosts the engine performance to 43 mpg. If just 20 percent of American cars and trucks hit this fuel economy standard, President Obama could send a note to both Iran and Venezuela saying “Thanks, but we’re good on oil just now.” With that out of the way, let’s talk foreign policy.

Ford also says it is working on an all-electric vehicle, although they haven’t announced which vehicle specifically they might use and even in the best of circumstances, that car probably won’t materialize until at least 2012.

Even the diminutive Chrysler still is barking about its electric vehicles, insisting – however unconvincingly – that it will be first to market with an EV. Sadly, as Chrysler leans against the ropes and suffers the twin body blows of a cash crisis and consumers who “just say no” to spending, the company’s new 200C concept electric is not only battery driven with a generator on board like the Volt, but also one of the design highlights of the show with the potential to make a great midsize sedan regardless of what is under the hood. It would be grand indeed to see this perennial underdog rally in its darkest hour to bring this electric to market, if for no other reason then to let Bob Nardelli, Chrysler’s CEO, drive it to Washington D.C. and double park in front of the Capitol Building. Let the Capitol Police service tow it away and they’ll have enough PR to sell 50,000 units in the first year. America loves a comeback. Just ask Kurt Warner.

Dyed in the wool importophiles still want to insist that the Big Three are lagging in quality, a perception built up over decades, with the production of each scrappy car shedding parts like dandruff over its brief life to 70,000 miles. But the latest JD Powers surveys have many domestic models at the top of the quality scale now, and even the hardliners at Consumer Reports, who for years have trounced the Big Three in their reviews, have a domestic vehicle in their 2008 Top 10 for the first time since 2005. Big Three executives have been talking for some time about “closing the quality gap.” According to the data, that might just have happened.

Sadly, the drop in gasoline prices, coupled with the incredibly short memory demonstrated by most American consumers, could take some of the zing out of the all-electric car market. The good news: oil companies and oil-producing countries are greedy and thus gasoline isn’t likely to stay cheap. How ironic that GM now may be hoping gas prices actually go up.

So while “Buy American” is a fairly hollow rallying cry these days, with GM’s recent investments back into Michigan, and the possibility of an all-electric in showrooms next year, tomorrow’s Prius may look like today’s domestic sport-ute. We the people already own some of GM and Chrysler anyway and people are talking about the importance of buying local these days. So if things go to plan, look for me in my new Chevy Volt next year…pulled along by my high horse when I can’t even afford to pay the electricity bill.

About the author: Rob Cleveland is CEO of ICON Creative Technologies Group and a co-owner of Vinology Restaurant in Ann Arbor.