Change of Fortune

Interview with AC Propulsion president, Tom Gage on the re-emergence of the battery electric car at the 2004 Michelin Challenge Bibendum

PHOTO CAPTION: The exotic Venturi Fetish debuted at the 2004 Paris Auto Show. The tiny, Monaco-based carmaker specializes in high-performance, luxury sports cars, a once-comfortable niche now increasingly being threatened by larger automakers. According to AC Propulsion's Tom Gage, Venturi is looking for a new edge and mating his company's unparalleled electric drive with Venturi's exciting engineering and styling may just give it to them. Interest in the car -- as well as media attention -- was apparently quite high in Paris.

AC Propulsion (ACP) has struggled for more than a decade as an R&D shop specializing in electric-drive system engineering. In addition to its own internal development, it's quietly worked with the likes of Volkswagen and Volvo, as well as various California state agencies. Yet the vicissitudes of state regulations and automaker caprice have both buoyed and dashed ACP's hopes and ambitions over the last decade.

But last year, at the 2003 Michelin Challenge Bibendum, the company's extremely agile tzero sports car -- powered by a 200 hp AC drive and some 6,000 lithium ion cells assembled from off-the-shelf, laptop computer batteries -- garnered a great deal of international media attention, including being featured in the PBS science series hosted by actor Alan Alda, Scientific American Frontiers.

That little yellow car -- which is capable of beating the best of the best with its tire-blistering 4.3 seconds, zero-to-sixty performance -- seems to have opened a few eyes, leading directly to three hush-hush projects over the past year, all three of which debuted within less than a month of each other. To learn more about those programs and what they mean to ACP, we got Tom Gage, the company president, on the telephone just a few days after his return from the 2004 Challenge Bibendum in Shanghai, China.

The 2004 Challenge was the third one Gage has attended, and the second one in which the company fielded their technology. He wanted to make sure that he let Michelin know how much he appreciated their organizing the annual event, which uniquely enables small firms like his to compete, side-by-side, with the world's biggest automakers.

While half of the more than 150 vehicles entered in the Bibendum were electric drive and many of these were battery electric, far fewer actually participated in the competition, itself. Many were there simply to show their wares, including eight huge, 40-passenger, battery electric intercity motor coaches and a swarm of two-wheeled electric bicycles and motor scooters.